[fic] A Devil in Despair 4/7
Jan. 29th, 2011 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keTitle: A Devil in Despair
Rating: 14
Genre: drama
Wordcount: 28k
Warnings: slight gore.
Summary: There is a solution to every problem, even if sometimes one needs to step outside the realms of logic, common sense, or even human domain. Sherlock knows this and acts accordingly, while John is left picking up the pieces.
Author's note: the story is finished, will be posted whole over the next couple of days.
Credits: Strongly influenced by Supernatural, oddly enough the Mentalist and Neil Gaiman's Lucifer (to the point of borrowing characters from the latter).
Betaed byyami_tai. <3 Thank you so much, hun, for all the hard work!
PART TWO
Sherlock was outdoors
-- his hair was rustled by a faint breeze, unlikely to be the product of indoor air-conditioning as it lacked the recycled feel and the faint mechanical overtones, each breeze brought forth a wave of a different hue, not only of smell but of texture; airborne particles blew into his eyes --
on a sandy surface. Unfamiliar ground, unfamiliar texture. The ground was hard, suffocating and he lost his footing, knocking the wind out of him. Sherlock felt cracks in its surface at the tips of his fingers, devoid of shoots or any kind of vegetation, not surprising for a dry, featureless plane, empty, save for the layer of dust. It wasn’t something he was likely to find anywhere in London at this time of year, least of all on the bottom, somewhere, of the Thames, whose bed was naught, but dirt and mud.
Sherlock opened his eyes. The noise in his head relegated to the back, quietly whirring its constant song in the background, ready to spring forth at a moment’s notice. It’d been a long while since the act of waking up hadn’t required a fight for the control of his senses; Sherlock had almost forgotten what it was like to wake and not wonder if this was the day he would be unable to fight his way from the bed of the ocean up to the surface, that he supposed this must be sanity, as it allowed interaction with the outside world on more-or-less even footing.
Somewhere to the left someone groaned and Sherlock sat up quickly. “John?”
“Tell me this is the bottom of the Thames,” John said. He was slowly hoisting himself up, though doing so in a highly inefficient manner. “Or better yet, tell me you’ve been adding LSD to my tea. I’m not picky, either would make me happy.”
“Neither,” Sherlock said. John sounded fine -- possibility of bruising was at about thirty-seven percent, going by the tone of his voice, stiff joints, words suggested persistent, if half-hearted, denial -- but otherwise fine.
Something inside Sherlock loosened, until at long last his lungs could expand in a manner congruent with relaxed breathing patterns.
Excellent.
They were standing before a mountain unlike anything Sherlock had ever seen before. This wasn’t much of a surprise -- he wasn’t one for travelling, and geology only interested him as far as various kinds of soil were concerned -- but the more he looked at it, the more he was convinced that this structure shouldn’t be upright at all. He was discovering he had a sense of gravity and this mountain violated it to the core. The complicated edifice of rock, sand and metal sprung up from the russet plain, balancing precariously over narrow passages into the darkened land beyond.
“I’m in Hell,” John said, resigned.
“Yes, we are.” Sherlock rubbed his hands with glee. “This is outstanding. Amazing. It shouldn’t be possible, of course, but apparently when the conditions are just right -- moon phases are of utmost importance, isn’t this shocking, astronomy is finally of some practical use -- there is the slightest possibility of creating a rift between dimensions!”
John was giving him the long look that Sherlock had long since associated with complete and utter bewilderment. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“The door to Hell, John, can be opened, at irregular intervals, depending on the circumstances.”
“So we are in Hell,” John repeated, stupidly, as that fact was evident in their surroundings. Why did he insist on stating the obvious?
“You seem surprised.”
“Yes, actually. Why aren’t you?”
“Why should I be?”
“This isn’t exactly a logical place to be. By all accounts you should be writhing on the ground moaning in existential pain.”
This was why John was worthy of keeping. Most often he was just another drone, nearly blind and uninteresting, but every now and then he would spout something so intensely incomprehensible, something that -- though he couldn’t understand the precise meaning of it -- touched Sherlock to the core. He couldn’t help but be drawn towards the source of such inexplicable sensations. “Why?” he asked, fascinated.
“Doesn’t that happen to people like you? When logic suddenly goes out the window? Far as I understand it, it should be tantamount to gravity going the other way.”
Sherlock looked towards the yellowish sky, back at the mountain, which, though disturbing, failed to upturn his world view, then back at John. “Should it?”
“You tell me.”
“Things are,” Sherlock said, inching closer to test yet another theory. “There’s no point in pretending otherwise. The best one can do is look at the facts and find a theory that encompasses them all.”
“That was deep. How are we going to get out of here?”
“I expect there is some sort of trans-dimensional transportation.”
“You expect?” John asked. Sherlock was standing no more than a foot away now. “What?”
“We are in Hell, John. I brought us to Hell, though admittedly your being here wasn’t a part of the plan.”
John gave him a long, pointed look, entirely empty of murderous intent. “Yes, and?”
Sherlock smiled smugly. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Curious, how broad John’s limits seemed to be, if he was willing to suffer Hell and not lash out. Perhaps Sherlock ought to conduct some experiments in the field of oral hygiene and its emotional impact on cohabitants.
“What do we do?”
“I need to find my contract.” Sherlock bent to examine the sand. It slipped between his fingers like flour, too fine to glitter in the sun that wasn’t there. The rusty colour brought blood to mind, dried and washed out, and mixed with some unknown substance, to give it this utterly dull texture.
Sherlock was in his own personal chemical heaven.
“You are insane, did you know that?”
“It has been mentioned.”
“How do you plan on finding this contract? Better still, what do you plan on doing with it?”
“Destruction by fire is recommended by most sources.”
“I’m not even going to ask.”
“Does your ignorance please you?”
“My sanity pleases me. I intend to hold on to it with both hands.”
Sanity, as practised by most of the human race, was overrated, Sherlock told John, who responded by sticking the middle finger of his right hand up in his direction. It took Sherlock twenty-seven seconds to place the gesture in context. “That’s rather rude.”
“I’m not feeling too indulgent at the moment.”
Fair enough, Sherlock thought.
“How big is Hell, anyway?”
“Sources disagree,” Sherlock said, hoping for the line of thought to be dropped. Judging by the glare he was receiving, John wasn’t falling for it.
“So your plan was to go to Hell, spend however long it takes to find a piece of paper and then burn it. Is that all?”
“Exactly.”
“It didn’t once cross your mind that Hell might be huge? By huge I, of course, mean mind-boggling, enormous, or even limitless?”
“Everything has limits. I found a tracking spell that ought to point the way.”
“Thank God Sergeant Donovan isn’t here. If she saw you using magic she might have shot you on the spot.”
“Why?”
“Typically that is the first sign of insanity and in your case, insanity would culminate in a dead body in a back alley.”
“Please, do you think I, even at the height of madness, would get myself killed?”
“I never said the body would be yours.”
Sherlock didn’t know what to say. It ought to be yet another jibe, caused by malice and the boring every day people not understanding, one that he could shrug off like the rain. It wasn’t, somehow, and it had nothing to do with the comment itself, he’d heard far worse. It wasn’t even that John had said it, because John had always been vocal on the subject of Sherlock being insane. He said it often, sometimes as a jibe, sometimes as a jibe aimed at himself, for playing along.
The problem here was the way John said it, as though this was natural progression, as though he expected such an outcome.
“Do you really think so?” he asked, cautiously.
John stopped. “You are capable of killing,” he said, as astute as Sherlock was when making his observations. “I imagine that given the circumstances you might start re-evaluating the sanctity of life.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Afterlife, Sherlock. If there’s life after death, there’s less to fear about dying, wouldn’t you say?”
Sherlock considered. It hadn’t occurred to him, no. Afterlife? He looked around the barren plain of Hell, on which nothing grew, and shuddered. “I imagine I’d kill not to come here,” he said at last.
“I see. What did you envision happening, after your deal came due?”
Sherlock had to admit he envisioned nothing, an absence of being.
“Brilliant.” John looked around, tapped his foot against the dirt, relaxed a fraction -- hands perfectly steady, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, indicating no psychosomatic pain in the leg, excellent -- and sighed. “Can we get a move on?”
“Pardon?”
“Can you do your magic trick and get us out of here?”
“I need to find the contract, first,” Sherlock said.
“That’s what I meant, obviously,” John retorted, sounding peeved. “Can you do it now, or are we waiting for Hell to freeze over?”
Sherlock, in a state of minor panic, went through his mental copy of the book that outlined the terms and circumstances of the spell. John displayed surprise and even shock when confronted with the fact of Hell’s physical existence, and yet he seemed to be more aware of its conditions than Sherlock was. It was troubling. “That doesn’t seem to be necessary,” he said eventually.
From the way John rolled his eyes, he inferred his earlier remark was supposed to be sarcastic.
Sherlock reached into his pockets, triumphant again, as it turned out the pockets and their contents had survived the journey unscathed. He withdrew a small silver bowl, a part of the set he’d borrowed from Mummy’s cupboard all those years ago, and set it on the ground. With the tip of his knife he marked the four points to symbolise the four cardinal directions, though which those would be, in this place, he had no idea. Finally, he rolled up his sleeve and cut a shallow line across his forearm, so that the blood would drip into the bowl.
“Why’s there a bandage on the inside of your elbow?” John asked. The hard edges to the words suggested wariness, building anger and irritation, with just a hint of worry.
“I needed blood,” Sherlock explained, watching the little bowl intently. “For the summoning. The inside of the elbow is by far the easiest spot to draw large quantities of blood from, barring the neck, naturally, or the inside of the thigh. Factoring in haste, the elbow seemed like the obvious choice.”
“Of course it would.”
On the ground the etchings in the not-quite-sand moved onto the surface of the blood. Sherlock waited another couple of seconds and then picked the bowl up. He tilted it experimentally, but the etchings remained. More importantly, they swivelled around, to come to a stop pointing very definitely towards the mountain.
“Excellent.” Sherlock swivelled around one more time, but the etchings stayed fixedly pointing at the mountain. “We have a working compass.”
“Good,” John said. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
“Lighten up, John. This is an adventure, isn’t it?”
“It feels wrong.” The doctor shivered, as though a gust of cold wind had wormed its way down his back. It had to be psychosomatic, though, because the air did not move.
“Feels wrong?”
“I can’t really explain it. I don’t want to be here. We shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“There’re a great many places you shouldn’t have been, and yet…” Sherlock started, but didn’t get to finish, because John interrupted.
“It’s different… wrong. The shapes are all wrong.”
Perhaps he was wrong, too. Sherlock had hoped the excursion would cause John no great harm, that despite the horrendous mistake it was to even bring him along (through no fault of his own -- John should have known better), he’d never assumed something like this might happen. John was losing his mind.
Sherlock found he was shivering, though it was, of course, illogical. There was no wind, and therefore, there could be no sudden changes in temperature.
“Let’s go,” he said curtly. John would have to survive.
*****
The great mountain was smooth as glass, opaque and luminescent. Sherlock wondered if it could be organic in origin, as the glow seemed not unlike that of the amoebas found in bodies left to putrefy in southern waters. He had no time to spare for to study it, as John was at his worst, nipping all attempts to gain further knowledge in the bud.
“No time, Sherlock,” he would say each and every time Sherlock would bend to collect a sample. His pockets grew heavy, all the same, as he would pinch little portions of dirt and deposit them in small plastic bags, as he brushed past the rocks.
It took them an hour and twenty-seven minutes to walk around the mountain. The soil beyond the mountain was reddish and dry, smooth to the touch and hard as concrete when hit. Sherlock felt like his neck didn’t have enough muscles in it, as though he couldn’t turn his head enough to take it all in. Still, he tried, until finally he stopped and laughed, throwing his hands in the air triumphantly.
“Why are you so happy?”
“Do you realise the implications, John?”
“I wonder if you do.”
“There’s twice as much to consider now. A sufficiently intelligent criminal could hop between worlds, though of course it’s impossible without leaving traces behind -- oh, how the work will flourish! Portals, or doors, according to my research have such ambience, if we’re lucky, something interesting will turn up every day!”
“You know, Sherlock, please stop talking.”
“What? Why?”
“Because one more word and I will punch you in the face.”
“You really are upset by this,” Sherlock said with a touch of wonder.
“Of course I’m bloody upset! You are casually hopping the train to Hell, like it’s fun, like it’s one of your experiments, and this is Hell! This is the beyond, this is where people come to suffer!”
“Ah,” Sherlock said. That was a whole new angle to consider. How was it that it had escaped him in the first place? “This is the place people go when they die?”
“Hell is one of the places, yes.”
“What happens here?”
John rolled his eyes. “I’d recommend Sunday School, but I expect all you’d do is make the children cry.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You made that little boy in the shop cry.”
“He was being irrational.”
“He was being five years old.”
“He was five years old.”
“I know what I said.”
“You said it wrongly.”
“No, you just didn’t understand it. He was behaving like a five year old, something, may I add, that happens to you all too often.”
“That’s ridiculous. I never cry.”
“No, but you tend to be petulant and grumpy.”
“I am not grumpy!”
“Tell that to Mrs Hudson’s wall.”
“What is so special about Sunday School?”
“You’ve never had any religious education?”
Sherlock dimly recalled a tall, stern woman, clad in black, who regaled them with a tale of a man convicted to a gruesome death after a preposterous trial with hardly any evidence material and no apparent crime. He said as much to John, who merely sighed and elaborated on the story.
“What did that accomplish?” Sherlock asked when John finished the tale with a vision not unlike what might be seen under the influence of strong hallucinogenic substances.
“Christianity, for one.”
“That’s Christianity?”
“There’s more. I’m not certain about denominations and exact practices.”
“That is astonishing. How does Hell factor into the story?”
“As far as I know, everybody who sins, or doesn’t believe, comes here after death to be eternally tormented.”
“I see.” Sherlock paused in his steps. “Is there a point in going any further, then?”
“What?”
“I certainly don’t believe. I don’t see any point in wasting time retrieving the contract, if I still have to come back soon.”
“After you die, Sherlock, hopefully in the distant future. And yes, there is a point.”
“How?”
“You may not come back here.”
“So there are loopholes, then?”
“I’m a doctor, not a priest.”
“A priest would know, then?”
John laughed under his breath, clearly imagining something humorous, and just as Sherlock was about to ask what, he heard a distant cry. “Did you hear that?” He held up his hand, willing John to hold his breath.
There it was again.
“Ignore it,” John said. He was stiff and his hand pressed against the small of his back, where he carried his gun. “Let’s just go.”
“It sounds like a child,” Sherlock said.
“I don’t care if it sounds like a nursery.”
Sherlock didn’t waste time arguing. He strode towards the source of the cries, already rubbing his hands in anticipation. A crying child reaching notes of this range indicated a particular level of distress, one well above physical discomfiture.
Somewhere behind him John was uttering curses, but the timbre and volume of his voice was consistent, meaning he was following.
They rounded a corner when a man-sized shape tore from it and galloped across the plain, kicking up a cloud of dust wherever it stepped. The cry sounded again, louder now. In Sherlock’s mind a picture was forming -- a girl, four to six years old, brought up to be posh, as this was a hiccuping kind of cry, more like a series of disjointed sobs, rather than an unrestrained wail.
It took them a couple more minutes to reach the source of the sound and it was a girl, indeed. She was clad in an expensive blue summer dress, stark against Hell’s russet sand. “What happened?” Sherlock started to ask, even as John grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back forcefully.
“Help me,” she said, mournfully, holding out her hand. Her legs started to unfold and John stepped between her and Sherlock.
-- Sherlock saw blood, dripping down his hands and he knew that the blood was John’s, and that the flesh he tasted was his heart, still beating --
Sherlock shook his head.
“Stay back,” John warned, and Sherlock realised with some surprise that he was talking to the girl, not him, and wondered if that wasn’t a mistake.
“Are you insane?”
“Are you?”
“It’s a crying child, since when do you not care?”
“Since when do you care, I wonder?”
“Really, John,” Sherlock started saying, but then something behind him shifted and John pushed him to the side. Sherlock hit the rock with his shoulder, which was statistically very likely to result in bruising and stiffness for the following ten to sixteen hours.
He braced himself against the rock, but when he turned to berate John for his paranoia, he saw the girl look up and grin at them, and her mouth kept on curving upwards until the top of her head fell back, revealing a maw full of razor sharp needle-like teeth. Her pudgy fingers lengthened, digging into the sand. Beneath the summer dress her body was deathly pale, as though there was no blood in its veins.
Sherlock stood there, stupefied, as the creature tore itself from the rock, brandishing something akin to a spear. It was still small, taller than a five-year-old girl, but shorter than John. Through its skin Sherlock could see ribs, a ribcage the shape of a cone, one fit for a bird rather than a human being. There were ridges along her spine, their tips poking through the material of her dress.
It lunged at John and Sherlock found himself -- against all expectations -- crying out.
It didn’t make any sense!
John fell under the creature’s weight -- how odd, Sherlock thought, surely it couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, how could it, when its form was so slight -- and both of them stilled. The smell of blood was in the air, thick and nauseating, the tang of iron clogging up the air as though it was a fog, hiding all that was there to see, hiding the world, hiding everything from Sherlock, calling to him in voices he didn’t want to hear, and this, too, was new -- Sherlock had never before felt nauseated by the smell of blood.
Something on the ground moved and Sherlock, still stupefied, heard a muffled curse, then a slightly more coherent, “How long are you going to sit there?”
It turned out to be another few seconds. He couldn’t draw a breath, it seemed, certainly not enough to do anything constructive. “Sherlock!” John yelled and finally the great genius detective obliged, all but leaping across the few feet separating them and helping John to roll the carcass off.
“I want to know what the hell they eat, if they get so heavy,” John said between breaths.
He looked horrible. A thick, dark substance stained his midsection and his hands, there was a tear in his jumper at the side and another where the creature’s teeth had snagged as they rolled it off.
“Are you alright?” John asked, turning to Sherlock.
“What?”
“Are you alright?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You look like you’re about to faint.”
“Well. It’s-- it was a bit of a shock.”
John opened his mouth, but whatever he had to say paled in comparison to what Sherlock’s eyes and ears and nose and skin were telling him. The texture of the sand was all wrong. There were no pebbles and no rocks and yet something dug into his knees where he knelt, and it didn’t disappear even when he stood. He choked on the air when he drew a deeper breath to steady his nerves, why, why would he choke, when the smell wasn’t so much foul as it was weird. It smelt dead. Dead blood, decomposition rate of between one or two days, mixed with swamp water and the common Escherichia coli bacteria after a twenty-hour cycle, feeding on the tissues. The sky, to which he had not paid attention, except he must have, because he looked now and he knew that it was all wrong, wrongwrongwrongwrong. The shade was wrong, the shape was wrong, the sound of its silence, the wind that didn’t stir the dust, everything was wrong!
High above there was a screech and a thing let go of the rock and sailed on the dead winds. It was shaped like a man, possibly, thought its bones were short and stocky, too heavy set to make flying possible, certainly in relation to the minuscule wings it had. They kept hearing its screeches until it was a dark spot on the horizon -- the horizon curved the wrong way, brighter at the edges than it was in the centre, how could the world curve in such a way -- too far to tell a wing apart from foot.
“Sherlock?” John asked, and Sherlock felt a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“It’s wrong,” he said, quietly. “It’s all wrong.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“I know.” Then, as an afterthought, “I’m sorry,” he said. The words felt strange on his tongue.
“I know,” John said. He tightened his hand reassuringly and then bent to pick up the spear that the creature dropped. “Let’s hurry.”
On to Chapter 5
Rating: 14
Genre: drama
Wordcount: 28k
Warnings: slight gore.
Summary: There is a solution to every problem, even if sometimes one needs to step outside the realms of logic, common sense, or even human domain. Sherlock knows this and acts accordingly, while John is left picking up the pieces.
Author's note: the story is finished, will be posted whole over the next couple of days.
Credits: Strongly influenced by Supernatural, oddly enough the Mentalist and Neil Gaiman's Lucifer (to the point of borrowing characters from the latter).
Betaed by
yami_tai. <3 Thank you so much, hun, for all the hard work!PART TWO
Sherlock was outdoors
-- his hair was rustled by a faint breeze, unlikely to be the product of indoor air-conditioning as it lacked the recycled feel and the faint mechanical overtones, each breeze brought forth a wave of a different hue, not only of smell but of texture; airborne particles blew into his eyes --
on a sandy surface. Unfamiliar ground, unfamiliar texture. The ground was hard, suffocating and he lost his footing, knocking the wind out of him. Sherlock felt cracks in its surface at the tips of his fingers, devoid of shoots or any kind of vegetation, not surprising for a dry, featureless plane, empty, save for the layer of dust. It wasn’t something he was likely to find anywhere in London at this time of year, least of all on the bottom, somewhere, of the Thames, whose bed was naught, but dirt and mud.
Sherlock opened his eyes. The noise in his head relegated to the back, quietly whirring its constant song in the background, ready to spring forth at a moment’s notice. It’d been a long while since the act of waking up hadn’t required a fight for the control of his senses; Sherlock had almost forgotten what it was like to wake and not wonder if this was the day he would be unable to fight his way from the bed of the ocean up to the surface, that he supposed this must be sanity, as it allowed interaction with the outside world on more-or-less even footing.
Somewhere to the left someone groaned and Sherlock sat up quickly. “John?”
“Tell me this is the bottom of the Thames,” John said. He was slowly hoisting himself up, though doing so in a highly inefficient manner. “Or better yet, tell me you’ve been adding LSD to my tea. I’m not picky, either would make me happy.”
“Neither,” Sherlock said. John sounded fine -- possibility of bruising was at about thirty-seven percent, going by the tone of his voice, stiff joints, words suggested persistent, if half-hearted, denial -- but otherwise fine.
Something inside Sherlock loosened, until at long last his lungs could expand in a manner congruent with relaxed breathing patterns.
Excellent.
They were standing before a mountain unlike anything Sherlock had ever seen before. This wasn’t much of a surprise -- he wasn’t one for travelling, and geology only interested him as far as various kinds of soil were concerned -- but the more he looked at it, the more he was convinced that this structure shouldn’t be upright at all. He was discovering he had a sense of gravity and this mountain violated it to the core. The complicated edifice of rock, sand and metal sprung up from the russet plain, balancing precariously over narrow passages into the darkened land beyond.
“I’m in Hell,” John said, resigned.
“Yes, we are.” Sherlock rubbed his hands with glee. “This is outstanding. Amazing. It shouldn’t be possible, of course, but apparently when the conditions are just right -- moon phases are of utmost importance, isn’t this shocking, astronomy is finally of some practical use -- there is the slightest possibility of creating a rift between dimensions!”
John was giving him the long look that Sherlock had long since associated with complete and utter bewilderment. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“The door to Hell, John, can be opened, at irregular intervals, depending on the circumstances.”
“So we are in Hell,” John repeated, stupidly, as that fact was evident in their surroundings. Why did he insist on stating the obvious?
“You seem surprised.”
“Yes, actually. Why aren’t you?”
“Why should I be?”
“This isn’t exactly a logical place to be. By all accounts you should be writhing on the ground moaning in existential pain.”
This was why John was worthy of keeping. Most often he was just another drone, nearly blind and uninteresting, but every now and then he would spout something so intensely incomprehensible, something that -- though he couldn’t understand the precise meaning of it -- touched Sherlock to the core. He couldn’t help but be drawn towards the source of such inexplicable sensations. “Why?” he asked, fascinated.
“Doesn’t that happen to people like you? When logic suddenly goes out the window? Far as I understand it, it should be tantamount to gravity going the other way.”
Sherlock looked towards the yellowish sky, back at the mountain, which, though disturbing, failed to upturn his world view, then back at John. “Should it?”
“You tell me.”
“Things are,” Sherlock said, inching closer to test yet another theory. “There’s no point in pretending otherwise. The best one can do is look at the facts and find a theory that encompasses them all.”
“That was deep. How are we going to get out of here?”
“I expect there is some sort of trans-dimensional transportation.”
“You expect?” John asked. Sherlock was standing no more than a foot away now. “What?”
“We are in Hell, John. I brought us to Hell, though admittedly your being here wasn’t a part of the plan.”
John gave him a long, pointed look, entirely empty of murderous intent. “Yes, and?”
Sherlock smiled smugly. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Curious, how broad John’s limits seemed to be, if he was willing to suffer Hell and not lash out. Perhaps Sherlock ought to conduct some experiments in the field of oral hygiene and its emotional impact on cohabitants.
“What do we do?”
“I need to find my contract.” Sherlock bent to examine the sand. It slipped between his fingers like flour, too fine to glitter in the sun that wasn’t there. The rusty colour brought blood to mind, dried and washed out, and mixed with some unknown substance, to give it this utterly dull texture.
Sherlock was in his own personal chemical heaven.
“You are insane, did you know that?”
“It has been mentioned.”
“How do you plan on finding this contract? Better still, what do you plan on doing with it?”
“Destruction by fire is recommended by most sources.”
“I’m not even going to ask.”
“Does your ignorance please you?”
“My sanity pleases me. I intend to hold on to it with both hands.”
Sanity, as practised by most of the human race, was overrated, Sherlock told John, who responded by sticking the middle finger of his right hand up in his direction. It took Sherlock twenty-seven seconds to place the gesture in context. “That’s rather rude.”
“I’m not feeling too indulgent at the moment.”
Fair enough, Sherlock thought.
“How big is Hell, anyway?”
“Sources disagree,” Sherlock said, hoping for the line of thought to be dropped. Judging by the glare he was receiving, John wasn’t falling for it.
“So your plan was to go to Hell, spend however long it takes to find a piece of paper and then burn it. Is that all?”
“Exactly.”
“It didn’t once cross your mind that Hell might be huge? By huge I, of course, mean mind-boggling, enormous, or even limitless?”
“Everything has limits. I found a tracking spell that ought to point the way.”
“Thank God Sergeant Donovan isn’t here. If she saw you using magic she might have shot you on the spot.”
“Why?”
“Typically that is the first sign of insanity and in your case, insanity would culminate in a dead body in a back alley.”
“Please, do you think I, even at the height of madness, would get myself killed?”
“I never said the body would be yours.”
Sherlock didn’t know what to say. It ought to be yet another jibe, caused by malice and the boring every day people not understanding, one that he could shrug off like the rain. It wasn’t, somehow, and it had nothing to do with the comment itself, he’d heard far worse. It wasn’t even that John had said it, because John had always been vocal on the subject of Sherlock being insane. He said it often, sometimes as a jibe, sometimes as a jibe aimed at himself, for playing along.
The problem here was the way John said it, as though this was natural progression, as though he expected such an outcome.
“Do you really think so?” he asked, cautiously.
John stopped. “You are capable of killing,” he said, as astute as Sherlock was when making his observations. “I imagine that given the circumstances you might start re-evaluating the sanctity of life.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Afterlife, Sherlock. If there’s life after death, there’s less to fear about dying, wouldn’t you say?”
Sherlock considered. It hadn’t occurred to him, no. Afterlife? He looked around the barren plain of Hell, on which nothing grew, and shuddered. “I imagine I’d kill not to come here,” he said at last.
“I see. What did you envision happening, after your deal came due?”
Sherlock had to admit he envisioned nothing, an absence of being.
“Brilliant.” John looked around, tapped his foot against the dirt, relaxed a fraction -- hands perfectly steady, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, indicating no psychosomatic pain in the leg, excellent -- and sighed. “Can we get a move on?”
“Pardon?”
“Can you do your magic trick and get us out of here?”
“I need to find the contract, first,” Sherlock said.
“That’s what I meant, obviously,” John retorted, sounding peeved. “Can you do it now, or are we waiting for Hell to freeze over?”
Sherlock, in a state of minor panic, went through his mental copy of the book that outlined the terms and circumstances of the spell. John displayed surprise and even shock when confronted with the fact of Hell’s physical existence, and yet he seemed to be more aware of its conditions than Sherlock was. It was troubling. “That doesn’t seem to be necessary,” he said eventually.
From the way John rolled his eyes, he inferred his earlier remark was supposed to be sarcastic.
Sherlock reached into his pockets, triumphant again, as it turned out the pockets and their contents had survived the journey unscathed. He withdrew a small silver bowl, a part of the set he’d borrowed from Mummy’s cupboard all those years ago, and set it on the ground. With the tip of his knife he marked the four points to symbolise the four cardinal directions, though which those would be, in this place, he had no idea. Finally, he rolled up his sleeve and cut a shallow line across his forearm, so that the blood would drip into the bowl.
“Why’s there a bandage on the inside of your elbow?” John asked. The hard edges to the words suggested wariness, building anger and irritation, with just a hint of worry.
“I needed blood,” Sherlock explained, watching the little bowl intently. “For the summoning. The inside of the elbow is by far the easiest spot to draw large quantities of blood from, barring the neck, naturally, or the inside of the thigh. Factoring in haste, the elbow seemed like the obvious choice.”
“Of course it would.”
On the ground the etchings in the not-quite-sand moved onto the surface of the blood. Sherlock waited another couple of seconds and then picked the bowl up. He tilted it experimentally, but the etchings remained. More importantly, they swivelled around, to come to a stop pointing very definitely towards the mountain.
“Excellent.” Sherlock swivelled around one more time, but the etchings stayed fixedly pointing at the mountain. “We have a working compass.”
“Good,” John said. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
“Lighten up, John. This is an adventure, isn’t it?”
“It feels wrong.” The doctor shivered, as though a gust of cold wind had wormed its way down his back. It had to be psychosomatic, though, because the air did not move.
“Feels wrong?”
“I can’t really explain it. I don’t want to be here. We shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“There’re a great many places you shouldn’t have been, and yet…” Sherlock started, but didn’t get to finish, because John interrupted.
“It’s different… wrong. The shapes are all wrong.”
Perhaps he was wrong, too. Sherlock had hoped the excursion would cause John no great harm, that despite the horrendous mistake it was to even bring him along (through no fault of his own -- John should have known better), he’d never assumed something like this might happen. John was losing his mind.
Sherlock found he was shivering, though it was, of course, illogical. There was no wind, and therefore, there could be no sudden changes in temperature.
“Let’s go,” he said curtly. John would have to survive.
*****
The great mountain was smooth as glass, opaque and luminescent. Sherlock wondered if it could be organic in origin, as the glow seemed not unlike that of the amoebas found in bodies left to putrefy in southern waters. He had no time to spare for to study it, as John was at his worst, nipping all attempts to gain further knowledge in the bud.
“No time, Sherlock,” he would say each and every time Sherlock would bend to collect a sample. His pockets grew heavy, all the same, as he would pinch little portions of dirt and deposit them in small plastic bags, as he brushed past the rocks.
It took them an hour and twenty-seven minutes to walk around the mountain. The soil beyond the mountain was reddish and dry, smooth to the touch and hard as concrete when hit. Sherlock felt like his neck didn’t have enough muscles in it, as though he couldn’t turn his head enough to take it all in. Still, he tried, until finally he stopped and laughed, throwing his hands in the air triumphantly.
“Why are you so happy?”
“Do you realise the implications, John?”
“I wonder if you do.”
“There’s twice as much to consider now. A sufficiently intelligent criminal could hop between worlds, though of course it’s impossible without leaving traces behind -- oh, how the work will flourish! Portals, or doors, according to my research have such ambience, if we’re lucky, something interesting will turn up every day!”
“You know, Sherlock, please stop talking.”
“What? Why?”
“Because one more word and I will punch you in the face.”
“You really are upset by this,” Sherlock said with a touch of wonder.
“Of course I’m bloody upset! You are casually hopping the train to Hell, like it’s fun, like it’s one of your experiments, and this is Hell! This is the beyond, this is where people come to suffer!”
“Ah,” Sherlock said. That was a whole new angle to consider. How was it that it had escaped him in the first place? “This is the place people go when they die?”
“Hell is one of the places, yes.”
“What happens here?”
John rolled his eyes. “I’d recommend Sunday School, but I expect all you’d do is make the children cry.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You made that little boy in the shop cry.”
“He was being irrational.”
“He was being five years old.”
“He was five years old.”
“I know what I said.”
“You said it wrongly.”
“No, you just didn’t understand it. He was behaving like a five year old, something, may I add, that happens to you all too often.”
“That’s ridiculous. I never cry.”
“No, but you tend to be petulant and grumpy.”
“I am not grumpy!”
“Tell that to Mrs Hudson’s wall.”
“What is so special about Sunday School?”
“You’ve never had any religious education?”
Sherlock dimly recalled a tall, stern woman, clad in black, who regaled them with a tale of a man convicted to a gruesome death after a preposterous trial with hardly any evidence material and no apparent crime. He said as much to John, who merely sighed and elaborated on the story.
“What did that accomplish?” Sherlock asked when John finished the tale with a vision not unlike what might be seen under the influence of strong hallucinogenic substances.
“Christianity, for one.”
“That’s Christianity?”
“There’s more. I’m not certain about denominations and exact practices.”
“That is astonishing. How does Hell factor into the story?”
“As far as I know, everybody who sins, or doesn’t believe, comes here after death to be eternally tormented.”
“I see.” Sherlock paused in his steps. “Is there a point in going any further, then?”
“What?”
“I certainly don’t believe. I don’t see any point in wasting time retrieving the contract, if I still have to come back soon.”
“After you die, Sherlock, hopefully in the distant future. And yes, there is a point.”
“How?”
“You may not come back here.”
“So there are loopholes, then?”
“I’m a doctor, not a priest.”
“A priest would know, then?”
John laughed under his breath, clearly imagining something humorous, and just as Sherlock was about to ask what, he heard a distant cry. “Did you hear that?” He held up his hand, willing John to hold his breath.
There it was again.
“Ignore it,” John said. He was stiff and his hand pressed against the small of his back, where he carried his gun. “Let’s just go.”
“It sounds like a child,” Sherlock said.
“I don’t care if it sounds like a nursery.”
Sherlock didn’t waste time arguing. He strode towards the source of the cries, already rubbing his hands in anticipation. A crying child reaching notes of this range indicated a particular level of distress, one well above physical discomfiture.
Somewhere behind him John was uttering curses, but the timbre and volume of his voice was consistent, meaning he was following.
They rounded a corner when a man-sized shape tore from it and galloped across the plain, kicking up a cloud of dust wherever it stepped. The cry sounded again, louder now. In Sherlock’s mind a picture was forming -- a girl, four to six years old, brought up to be posh, as this was a hiccuping kind of cry, more like a series of disjointed sobs, rather than an unrestrained wail.
It took them a couple more minutes to reach the source of the sound and it was a girl, indeed. She was clad in an expensive blue summer dress, stark against Hell’s russet sand. “What happened?” Sherlock started to ask, even as John grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back forcefully.
“Help me,” she said, mournfully, holding out her hand. Her legs started to unfold and John stepped between her and Sherlock.
-- Sherlock saw blood, dripping down his hands and he knew that the blood was John’s, and that the flesh he tasted was his heart, still beating --
Sherlock shook his head.
“Stay back,” John warned, and Sherlock realised with some surprise that he was talking to the girl, not him, and wondered if that wasn’t a mistake.
“Are you insane?”
“Are you?”
“It’s a crying child, since when do you not care?”
“Since when do you care, I wonder?”
“Really, John,” Sherlock started saying, but then something behind him shifted and John pushed him to the side. Sherlock hit the rock with his shoulder, which was statistically very likely to result in bruising and stiffness for the following ten to sixteen hours.
He braced himself against the rock, but when he turned to berate John for his paranoia, he saw the girl look up and grin at them, and her mouth kept on curving upwards until the top of her head fell back, revealing a maw full of razor sharp needle-like teeth. Her pudgy fingers lengthened, digging into the sand. Beneath the summer dress her body was deathly pale, as though there was no blood in its veins.
Sherlock stood there, stupefied, as the creature tore itself from the rock, brandishing something akin to a spear. It was still small, taller than a five-year-old girl, but shorter than John. Through its skin Sherlock could see ribs, a ribcage the shape of a cone, one fit for a bird rather than a human being. There were ridges along her spine, their tips poking through the material of her dress.
It lunged at John and Sherlock found himself -- against all expectations -- crying out.
It didn’t make any sense!
John fell under the creature’s weight -- how odd, Sherlock thought, surely it couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, how could it, when its form was so slight -- and both of them stilled. The smell of blood was in the air, thick and nauseating, the tang of iron clogging up the air as though it was a fog, hiding all that was there to see, hiding the world, hiding everything from Sherlock, calling to him in voices he didn’t want to hear, and this, too, was new -- Sherlock had never before felt nauseated by the smell of blood.
Something on the ground moved and Sherlock, still stupefied, heard a muffled curse, then a slightly more coherent, “How long are you going to sit there?”
It turned out to be another few seconds. He couldn’t draw a breath, it seemed, certainly not enough to do anything constructive. “Sherlock!” John yelled and finally the great genius detective obliged, all but leaping across the few feet separating them and helping John to roll the carcass off.
“I want to know what the hell they eat, if they get so heavy,” John said between breaths.
He looked horrible. A thick, dark substance stained his midsection and his hands, there was a tear in his jumper at the side and another where the creature’s teeth had snagged as they rolled it off.
“Are you alright?” John asked, turning to Sherlock.
“What?”
“Are you alright?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You look like you’re about to faint.”
“Well. It’s-- it was a bit of a shock.”
John opened his mouth, but whatever he had to say paled in comparison to what Sherlock’s eyes and ears and nose and skin were telling him. The texture of the sand was all wrong. There were no pebbles and no rocks and yet something dug into his knees where he knelt, and it didn’t disappear even when he stood. He choked on the air when he drew a deeper breath to steady his nerves, why, why would he choke, when the smell wasn’t so much foul as it was weird. It smelt dead. Dead blood, decomposition rate of between one or two days, mixed with swamp water and the common Escherichia coli bacteria after a twenty-hour cycle, feeding on the tissues. The sky, to which he had not paid attention, except he must have, because he looked now and he knew that it was all wrong, wrongwrongwrongwrong. The shade was wrong, the shape was wrong, the sound of its silence, the wind that didn’t stir the dust, everything was wrong!
High above there was a screech and a thing let go of the rock and sailed on the dead winds. It was shaped like a man, possibly, thought its bones were short and stocky, too heavy set to make flying possible, certainly in relation to the minuscule wings it had. They kept hearing its screeches until it was a dark spot on the horizon -- the horizon curved the wrong way, brighter at the edges than it was in the centre, how could the world curve in such a way -- too far to tell a wing apart from foot.
“Sherlock?” John asked, and Sherlock felt a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“It’s wrong,” he said, quietly. “It’s all wrong.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“I know.” Then, as an afterthought, “I’m sorry,” he said. The words felt strange on his tongue.
“I know,” John said. He tightened his hand reassuringly and then bent to pick up the spear that the creature dropped. “Let’s hurry.”
On to Chapter 5
