A Game Most Foul, page 23
“Wait, Percy!”
I broke away from Suruthi and had to jog to catch up to Percy and Holmes, already halfway down the street. I could actually hear Holmes’s impatient sigh over the hubbub of the street, and I would’ve laughed if I wasn’t suddenly so nervous.
“What is it?” Percy asked, his face drawn in concern as I approached.
“You know how in every epic action movie when the good guys have to go separate ways to help save the day and it’s really dangerous and they know they might not make it out alive?” I said all in one breath.
“I suppose,” Percy answered slowly, now looking confused. “Why? Are you worried we won’t make it out alive? Because I don’t think this is going to be that—”
“C’mon, catch up!” Suruthi chimed in from behind me. “She’s saying she wants to snog you for good luck!”
“What she said,” I confirmed at Percy’s questioning look. At least, I was pretty sure I knew what snog meant by now. “I’m not sure if I believe in luck, but it can’t hurt, right?”
I could tell Percy’s face had become very hot and he looked just the slightest bit nauseated, but he was sort of smiling and sounded plenty confident when he said, “Best not to risk it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
Whatever else Holmes started complaining about faded into the background when Percy slipped an arm around my waist to pull me in close, leaning down to press his lips against mine.
It probably wasn’t the most pure and passionate kiss of all time or whatever, but the kiss still made my toes curl in my shoes and my heart skip a funny little beat.
“Thanks,” I said breathlessly once we’d had to break apart for air. “You know, for, um, all the luck.”
“Anytime,” Percy said, just as breathless.
“And this is why I find romantic sentiment abhorrent.”
“Thanks, Holmes,” Suruthi said cheerily. “And on that note, we’d best be off.”
Suruthi looped her arm through mine and began leading me away in the opposite direction, giggling the entire way.
“Took you long enough, didn’t it?” she said conversationally as we walked.
My heart rate was mostly under control at this point, but I still sounded winded when I said, “What did?”
“Oh, never mind then.” Suruthi huffed as she gave me another playful nudge. “But I’m serious, Jules. Make sure you invite me to your wedding, yeah?”
“Dude. Shut up!”
Suruthi laughed even louder.
***
As expected, Adele was very confused but also very pleased with Holmes’s payment for the typewriter. It took a lame excuse about him being Percy’s uncle and how we were going to deliver it after the typewriter was repaired, but it worked. Soon enough Suruthi and I were lugging the typewriter off toward the Underground, carefully packed in a cardboard box with a bunch of packing peanuts per Adele’s instruction.
“Well, we got the thing, didn’t we?” Suruthi said, patting the typewriter on the seat between us. “That’s one hurdle down.”
“Partially, I guess,” I said. “Do you think Percy and Holmes will have had the same luck though?”
“Who’s to say?” Suruthi shrugged. “If any of Watson’s journals aren’t in their flat, we know we can at least try his office next.”
“Suppose we don’t find any journals in their flat or Watson’s office,” I said. “Then what? We keep running around London for however long until we do find something?”
My question had Suruthi pulling a grimace. “No idea. I’d prefer it if we don’t have to find out.”
We spent the rest the journey in silence, both of us lost in our own thoughts. Once we were above ground again, I pulled out my phone to plug in the address Holmes had given me into the map app.
“Why are you all frowning at your phone like that?”
“Holmes gave me the address of a pub,” I told Suruthi, offering her my phone. “Some place called The Bronze Archer.”
“Well, good to know in case we need a pint after all this,” Suruthi said.
“I’ll pass.”
It was a long enough walk from the Tube to The Bronze Archer pub that Suruthi and I were both huffing and puffing by the time we reached it, taking turns carrying the stupidly heavy typewriter.
The pub seemed decently packed with a lot of chatter and laughter spilling out the open door, and I felt another wave of nerves.
“How’re we supposed to find them here?” I asked Suruthi. “Better yet, what do we say when we get stopped by someone wanting to know what we’re up to with this box full of packing peanuts here?”
There was a loud shout of, “UP HERE!” from somewhere above us before Suruthi could answer. We both looked up to find Percy leaning out a window on the second floor, waving down at us.
“There’s another entrance around the corner!” he called down to us. “I’ll meet you there.”
Around the corner we found a narrow door that was almost hidden from view next to the back door of the pub. The door swung open as soon as we approached, and Percy stepped out to immediately take the typewriter from Suruthi.
“Inside and up the stairs,” he instructed. “First door to the right.”
“How’s it going?” I asked, taking the lead.
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the disappointment in Percy’s voice when he answered. “It’s only a two-bedroom flat, but they’ve lived here since they bought it just after the First World War, according to Holmes, and there is an overwhelming amount of rubbish to go through.”
“Great,” Suruthi said flatly. “Probably a million sweet wrappers everywhere too.”
“Maybe seeing the typewriter now that we have that photograph will jog more of Holmes’s memory,” I suggested, trying to sound positive.
I went to the first door on the right and opened it, moving to the side to let Percy in first, then Suruthi.
I’d barely shut the door behind me before I sneezed—loudly.
“Yeah, it’s a tad dusty in here,” Percy said apologetically.
“You don’t say.”
The place was so dimly lit that it was difficult to make out what I was looking at until my eyes adjusted.
We were standing in a small, tiled entryway. To our left was a walkway into the kitchen, and directly in front of us was what looked like a sitting room. The furniture was an odd assortment of dated pieces that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Adele’s shop.
It was unsettling to realize that Holmes must have spent a lot of time shut up in this dusty, poorly lit place, where it probably wasn’t the easiest to tell whether he was currently in the nineteenth or the twenty-first century.
“This way,” Percy said, nodding toward a hallway directly to our right. “We started in Watson’s room.”
I’d only taken a few steps when there was a sudden, loud crash, followed by the sound of breaking glass, ending with a very loud curse.
“I see it’s been going well then,” Suruthi commented.
“Tremendously,” Percy grumbled. “All we’ve managed to do so far is turn the room upside down and break a bunch of stuff. The professor is not going to be happy, I’ll tell you that.”
The room Percy led us to was the very last at the end of the hallway. The door was thrown open and there were books littering the floor, a pile of clothes, and shoes.
There came another colorful curse when I peeked into the room and narrowly avoided getting hit in the head with a flying book. Holmes was on the floor, digging through a trunk at the base of a four-poster bed, and it was evident he’d been at this for some time.
Percy had been right about the room being turned upside down, and I could only imagine what Watson’s fury would be like when he caught sight of this.
How Holmes managed to notice our arrival with the way he was digging through the trunk was impressive. “Put it over there, on the desk.”
Percy set the box on the desk pushed up against the wall by the lone window in the room.
“Well, don’t just stand there!” Holmes barked. “Start searching!”
“A little hard to tell where you’ve already looked in this mess, Sherlock,” Suruthi said disapprovingly.
Holmes’s reply was a short, “Deal with it.”
Yikes.
Suruthi went to the closet across from the bed while Percy joined Holmes on the floor.
I knew I needed to join in the search as well, but I was finding it difficult to move. It was noisy in this room, Holmes’s shouting and the loud thumping of the occasional book or picture frame hitting the wall causing an awful lot of feedback in my hearing aids.
The second time I jumped when Holmes gave up on the trunk and went to the dresser, yanking out the top drawer and letting it fall to the floor, I gave up and just turned my hearing aids off, quickly returning them to their case in my bag.
It was significantly quieter without the hearing aids; I could still hear most of the racket Holmes was making, notice more of the vibration of the objects hitting the floor that Holmes kept throwing around, but it helped me feel more anchored in the moment.
I wasn’t thrilled to be ransacking Watson’s bedroom, but I could do my part and try to help find his journals.
Even though the desk had clearly been searched, I went over it again, checking in the drawers, underneath it, and came up with nothing. I spent some time searching in the closet with Suruthi, which was surprisingly barren.
It wasn’t that big of a room, and the more of a mess Holmes made, the more cramped it became. Soon I was stepping around more articles of clothing, shoes, a few pictures here and there. How much longer were we going to spend in here?
I closed my eyes as I leaned against the edge of the desk and rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. I didn’t think I was starting to get a migraine, but there was a definite headache blooming.
If I had a stack of private journals, where would I hide them?
I tried to pick through the one-on-one encounters I’d had with Watson so far, but I wasn’t coming up with much. Watson was polite and a bit soft-spoken while still maintaining a stern disposition. He obviously enjoyed what he did, and he obviously wanted to see his students succeed in their endeavors.
And then, like the world’s biggest cliché, the answer fell into my brain like in one of those silly cartoons where some unfortunate soul gets a piano dropped on their head.
I almost tripped over my feet in my haste to get to the bed and dropped to the floor beside the end table. There wasn’t a lot of clearance between the floor and the bed, but there was enough room for me to pull out the flashlight on my phone and start looking around.
It was even dustier under the bed, but mostly free from debris. Nothing that I was able to see seemed suspicious or stood out to me as strange.
I pulled myself upright with a groan and sat back on my heels, brushing some hair out of my face. At some point Percy had joined me on the floor, close enough for me to hear him without my hearing aids on. “We’ve already looked under there.”
“Well, I’m looking again,” I said. “Watson told me that it’s like visiting an old friend whenever he reads his earlier stuff. I’m willing to bet he keeps at least one or two journals close by so he can do just that.”
“Possibly,” Percy said after a moment of thought. “We’ve already gone through that nightstand too, but maybe . . .”
He motioned for me to move aside and together we went through the contents of the nightstand (a bunch of pens, stopwatch, handkerchief, one very old Bible).
“Here, let’s move this,” Percy said, gripping the bottom of the nightstand. “Something might be underneath it.”
The nightstand was deceptively heavy, and it took the two of us pushing it to the side for the thing to budge. We managed a few inches before the nightstand seemed to hit a snag and refused to move.
It was impossible to squash the zip of excitement that shot up my spine. “There’s gotta be something under there.”
“A divot in the flooring, most likely,” Percy said, ever the realist.
“Maybe,” I said.
But maybe not.
I was pretty sure we had both broken out into a sweat by the time we got the nightstand out of the way.
The space where the table had been was empty, save for more dust, and Percy had been right; there was a divot in the flooring, a small hole that couldn’t have been any larger than a quarter.
But large enough for someone to slip their finger inside, and that’s exactly what I did.
“Wait, Jules, what’re you—”
The piece of flooring came up with no trouble at all, and I let out an excited, “Aha!” at what lay underneath—several small, leather-bound journals stacked neatly together.
I’d managed to snatch one of the journals before I was quite literally being dragged away so Holmes could see the discovery for himself. His resulting shouts were definitely loud enough for me to hear without the hearing aids.
Percy seemed to be attempting to console Holmes as he started piling the journals in his arms, something about it being okay he’d missed this one, everyone was off their game every now and then.
It was easy as breathing to tune everything else out as I sat down at the desk and began to read.
Chapter 26
Luckily My Pens Are New
March 18, 1896
I can scarcely believe it to be true. If it were not for the fact that I have witnessed it with my own two eyes, Holmes moving about our old rooms as if he never once left, the blasted chemistry experiments in the drawing room, the violin at ungodly hours of the morning, I would think him still deceased.
But Holmes is alive. Holmes is alive, having suddenly appeared in my practice not a fortnight ago, and of course in disguise. I confess my response to his reveal was rather humiliating, losing consciousness the way I did, but he did not hold it against me. I was then, however, overcome with the urge to give my old friend a good walloping, regardless of how pleased I was to see him again.
I was filled with a rage unlike ever before at his notion that I would not have been so affected by his death. I, unaffected? After all that Holmes and I had gone through together—every case, every perilous situation we happened across, the injuries, and bloodshed—and I would not have been affected? What a ludicrous and unequivocally false sentiment.
Having accused me of wearing my heart on my sleeve more than once, I am sure Holmes was perfectly aware of those thoughts that crossed my mind during our reunion. And yet he did not offer anything beyond a mere, “I must owe you an apology, Watson.” Holmes’s apology—if one could even describe it as such—was not without merit, but one I was not entirely sure that he sincerely felt. When had the great Sherlock Holmes ever truly cared for a single living soul beyond that of his own intellect?
If I had not been so eager to return to our old rooms in Baker Street, desperate to have even the smallest semblance of adventure in my life again, I would have taken the time to ponder our next move. I will not deny that I am thrilled to be in the same presence as my old friend again, but it would be foolish of me to overlook the fact that Holmes is not the same man he was before his plunge over the falls in Switzerland. What do I know of this man now?
But perhaps I am simply getting ahead of myself. It surely would not be the first time. What with the influx of patients at my practice and Holmes’s unceasing desire for the game, I have had little time for much rest these days.
Perhaps all I need is a short holiday. I do not believe I can even recall the last time I went on holiday. Holmes would be welcome to join me, I suppose. He has mentioned more than once a desire to visit the Sussex Downs. Perhaps that is where we will go. Holmes has not divulged much from his time away, but I suspect that wherever he went, there was little time for a holiday.
I have not yet decided whether I will broach the subject with Holmes. That will be determined over time.
John Hamish Watson is no fool. One day I will learn the secrets Holmes still wishes to keep from me. He will not make a fool of me ever again.
April 29, 1896
Today marks the conclusion of our first case solved in over three years. It was not one of the most difficult cases we had ever experienced in our years together, yet nonetheless delicate in nature—a series of children gone missing over the course of several weeks. I am thankful the culprit’s reasoning was not any more nefarious than simply desiring more work hands. The children were returned to their families in near perfect condition, if not a little shaken. This will unfortunately be an experience they no doubt will never forget, and I wish them all well.
I had little doubt we would be able to solve it with Holmes at the helm, and rest assured we did, in under seventy-two hours no less. Holmes has proven himself to be the same cold and calculating machine capable of the most extreme deductions, but my suspicions of his changed countenance continue to be proven correct.
Even more short-tempered and reckless beyond a reasonable doubt than before, though he will refuse to acknowledge as much. Something has happened to the man, but he will not say what. I know I must respect Holmes’s wishes, but how can I, when that blasted seven percent solution continues to make an almost daily appearance? To prevent his mind from stagnating he has said, I know, but at what cost? It leaves him in the blackest of moods, however stimulating he claims it to be, and increasingly on edge. Mrs. Hudson has begun to complain of the bullet holes riddling the walls of the sitting room, though Holmes continues to insist that he is not responsible (on this he blamed the dog).
Does he truly desire to rid the world of his genius so prematurely yet again—perhaps permanently? The mere notion of losing Holmes to his inner demons is one that has caused several sleepless nights as of late. I fear these sleepless nights shall continue.
June 8, 1896
Today was not the first time I had ever been struck by a bullet, but it was the first time—and very likely the only time—I witnessed Holmes showing any sign of the sense of humanity or love that I have long since suspected he may lack. I am fortunate it was a superficial wound, one that will surely be healed in a short matter of time, but that seemed to provide Holmes with little reassurance in the end. Holmes confessed to it himself: the man responsible for wounding me would not have left that cellar alive should he have succeeded in taking my life.
