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The skull was a gift from Mike Stamford.
“He was a soldier,” he said, standing too close to Sherlock. “An army doctor. Knew him at school, as a matter of fact. Donated his body to medicine. Strictly speaking, I don’t think this is what he had in mind, but who’s to know, right?” He winked.
Sherlock gave him a stiff, insincere smile and swept out of the morgue.
Back at his flat, he took the skull from its box and hefted it in one hand. He turned it back and forth carefully, examining it from all angles. Caucasian male, died early or mid-thirties. Well-defined nose and brow. He couldn’t have been a large man; probably no taller than five-ten at the most. Good teeth, evidence of orthodontic work: middle-class at least, with health-conscious parents. Probably doctors or dentists. It would do nicely.
Sherlock set it on the mantelpiece and went to bed.
When Sherlock woke the next morning, he discovered that the windows had blown open during the night. He shut them with a frown and thought nothing more of it.
---
It started mildly enough: doors shutting on the other end of the house, microscope slides tipping off tables, taps that turned on and off. Sherlock, with his dearth of pop culture knowledge, credited it to stray drafts and leaky pipes and harassed his landlord accordingly.
It was for the best in the end. Anyone who’d so much as read the back of a Stephen King novel would’ve put a stop to it all before it began.
---
Sherlock’s concerns were first provoked by the disappearance of his cigarettes.
He knew very well it couldn’t have been his landlord--he’d be able to tell if someone had come in. They had simply disappeared. He blamed his landlord anyways, and in revenge took to flicking his cigarette butts out the window into the landlord’s rosebed.
---
And there was the sleep. Namely, that Sherlock got any. He could go days without sleep, even when he didn’t have a case. He liked having the extra time to work. But lately, he’d be working diligently on an experiment when a sort of--mood came over him, persistent and irresistible. He’d put his things away, crawl into bed and go to sleep.
Once or twice he didn’t make it to his room and slept on the sofa. He didn’t recall having brought his duvet in with him, and it certainly didn’t make much sense. If he’d gotten as far as his bedroom, he wouldn’t have bothered going back into the parlor to go to sleep.
---
And there were the strange smells. The strong aroma of Irish breakfast tea in the kitchen (the landlord drank coffee; Sherlock drank as little of anything as possible), cheap aftershave in the toilet, unfamiliar detergent in the closet.
And the telly got into a habit of switching on and tuning to football matches, often at inconvenient times. Sherlock concluded it must be the wiring, and harassed his landlord to the point of tears.
---
Sherlock had always had a habit of talking to himself and lately, to his skull. But he’d never before felt as if someone was talking back.
“You’re idiots, the lot of you,” he’d grumble, and almost hear a snort and a sarcastic “Thanks.”
And then he’d catch himself replying.
“Oh, don’t be like that. Everyone is.”
---
Lestrade had a murder for him. It was good, a classic locked-room murder. An unfathomably spiteful millionaire oil tycoon riddled with cancer had informed his wife and three children that he would be leaving his entire fortune to his cats upon his death, gone upstairs to his office, and locked the door. An hour later, his wife heard a scream and a thump. She enlisted her son’s help to break the door down and found Mr. Hull slumped over his desk, gun in hand and bullet in head.
“Alibis all around,” Sherlock grumbled, snatching the skull off the mantelpiece and throwing himself onto the sofa. “Mobile records indicate the older daughter--the achondroplasiac--was driving to the family solicitor’s office when Hull died. The younger daughter was in the kitchen with her mother and the son was in his exercise room; the staff confirms. Doors and windows locked. Police would’ve called it suicide if he hadn’t screamed, and no note.” Sherlock scowled. “Cats everywhere. I loathe cats.”
To be honest, Sherlock was allergic to cats. After ten minutes in the house he had been ready to jump out of his skin. He tossed the skull from one hand to another.
“I’ve missed something,” he muttered. “There’s something I’ve missed. What have I missed?”
A light breeze stirred through the flat. Sherlock caught a quick, surprised breath, let it out, and inhaled deeply. The breeze had brought a lovely smell with it, like sand and wool and very good ale with fresh-baked bread and woodsmoke and electricity. It was refreshing, but also a little warm. He shut his eyes and just breathed. The hand holding the skull slowly dropped to his knee. It was lovely. He felt tired, which was strange. He had a case. He was never tired when he had a case. But suddenly all he wanted was to curl up inside the smell and take a nap in it like a spoiled little housecat.
The breeze picked up for a moment, then died altogether. Sherlock frowned and opened his eyes.
All of a sudden, there was a rush of air past his face, like a wave crashing over him, an overwhelming amount of noise and sensation, and in the middle of it all there were words, six little words that sent Sherlock bounding to his feet and out the door. He was on the phone to Lestrade before he got to the street.
“How did the cats get in?”
---
The cats had gotten in through the clever little door Hull’s older daughter had constructed in the bookshelf behind him. After their father’s revelation, she had crept up the stairs and hidden in wait, aided by her diminutive stature. The younger daughter, an accomplished computer programmer, had hacked the mobile records for her sister while the son put Mr. Hull in his chair and posed him. It was all brilliant, though Lestrade did not seem to agree. Mr. Hull had been quite abusive to his wife and children, and they had stayed with hopes of inheriting some of the money that, frankly, was rightfully theirs if one was to judge by the quantity of work performed. The Met had been quite reluctant to pursue charges, but that was outside Sherlock’s jurisdiction, so to speak.
He had a bigger mystery on his hands.
The skull sat on the coffee table, Sherlock on the sofa with his legs crossed under him and his fingers tented under his chin.
“When one has ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” he murmured. “I am quite confident in my sanity and perfectly sober; I know what a hallucination is and that was decidedly not.”
Sherlock looked around, uncrossed his legs, and leaned forward.
“Are you here?” he asked, voice hushed. “Are you able to...show yourself?”
There was utter silence, wide and echoing. Sherlock could hear his heart beating in his ears.
Perhaps a simpler request, he thought. But direct.
His lips formed the question before his mind did.
“Tell me your name.”
For the first time, Sherlock made a real effort to listen.
You can try to listen the way he did, if you like. It’s a bit like trying to hear a very quiet lecture in a noisy room, or a television with volume turned just too low for comfort. Take that sense of strain, of effort, and apply it to your whole body. You’ll probably need to shut your eyes. Your brow will tighten and you’ll screw your mouth up and ball your hands into fists, and even then you’ll only hear a fraction of what Sherlock Holmes could hear on that December night after his skull solved his case.
“John Watson.”
Sherlock opened his eyes.
There was a man sitting on his table.
He was small, with close-cropped blonde hair and dark blue eyes. He was dressed like a schoolteacher: jeans, brown loafers, oatmeal-colored jumper and a black jacket with a leather patch on the shoulder. His smile was charming and well-worn.
“Sherlock Holmes,” said Sherlock, unsure of what else to say. “Erm...sorry I took your skull.”
John’s face split into a grin.
---
Now that Sherlock was paying attention, he could see John nearly all the time.
“Were you always here constantly?” he asked. “Or was it intermittent?”
John shrugged. “Not quite sure. It’s sort of...weird. Hazy-like.”
They were sitting at the table. Sherlock had made them both tea. John couldn’t drink it, but he said he liked having it nearby.
“I was confused for a while,” he said. “Couldn’t always remember what had happened. So I just went about my day like I always had.”
Sherlock nodded. “The smells.”
“Yeah. Things got clearer when you started talking to me.”
“Curious,” Sherlock mused. “Must be tied to attention. Or perhaps interest?”
John shrugged. “Dunno. Anyways, you ought to go to the shops. We’re out of milk.”
---
John’s ghost seemed to be tethered to the skull. He was weaker outside of the flat, more so in places he had never been during his life. At Bart’s he was almost as strong as at home. They didn’t leave often, though. It made John uncomfortable, and the skull attracted attention. When they walked through crowds, people parted to make room for the second person, but unless attention was directly called to him they never acknowledged John’s presence.
John appeared solid, but was incorporeal. He could move inanimate objects and manage some minimal physical interaction with people, like the wind trick, but if Sherlock tried to touch him, his hand passed through like smoke. John didn’t like it; said it felt tickly.
John had one living family member, an alcoholic sister he felt entirely indifferent about. Sherlock wondered briefly if he was morally obliged to inform her that her brother was still alive, in a way. When he asked John, he snorted.
“Yeah, I don’t fancy having that conversation, do you? Anyways, it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in a lot of advice columns.”
Though he enjoyed talking through cases, John wouldn’t let Sherlock take him to crime scenes.
“Always the chance I could run into somebody...like me.”
Sherlock kept an extra eye out when he was working homicide cases. Just in case.
---
A month after John materialized, Sherlock set part of the kitchen on fire. This turned out to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
“We’re moving,” he told John grimly. “Help me pack.”
“I’m a ghost, you twat.”
“If you can pick up my duvet and chuck my cigarettes out the window, you can help me pack.”
John scowled. A stack of books piled neatly into a box.
“Ass.”
---
Mrs Hudson saw John right away.
“My goodness, you gave me such a start!” she said, leading them upstairs. “Sherlock, dear, you should’ve mentioned you had a shadow!”
John gaped. Sherlock’s eyes lit up. He spent ten minutes ruthlessly drilling Mrs Hudson for everything she knew on the topic of the undead, but then Lestrade arrived and surrendered his serial suicides case to the authority of the world’s only consulting detective.
“Will you come?” he asked, looking directly through John.
Sherlock raised his eyebrows at John. John nodded.
On the way out the door, Sherlock dropped his skull into the pocket of his coat. John followed him down the stairs and into the cab.
---
John did not materialize at the crime scene, but he did make himself known. When Sally Donovan called Sherlock “freak,” the impractically high heel of her right shoe snapped and she tumbled backwards into a shrub. Sherlock smirked.
“Petty,” he muttered.
A voice in his ear whispered, “But satisfying.”
Upstairs, Sherlock got to impress Lestrade with a very long string of deductions, and his stomach leapt when John’s voice said, “Amazing,” and “Fantastic.” He found the pink lady’s missing case two blocks away and carted it back to Baker Street.
John peered into its contents. “What am I supposed to be noticing?”
Sherlock grinned. “Her phone.”
He texted the serial killer and left to glare out the window of an Italian restaurant down the road.
He did not bring John’s skull.
---
Something was wrong.
If John still had a heart, it would be racing. If he had a stomach, it would be churning. He shut his eyes, but of course he couldn’t sleep.
I’ll sleep when I’m dead, he thought, and scowled. Stupid phrase.
There was a sort of quiet buzzing in the back of his head, a feeling like he should be doing something, that there was something important that he had to--
---
“You’d do anything, anything at all, to stop being bored.”
Sherlock held the pill up to the light.
“Not bored now, are you?”
The window shattered. A strong gust of wind rushed into the room, desert-hot despite the cold December night, and smelling of metal and mineral oil and gunfire.
Sherlock jumped out of his chair and dropped the pill. The cabbie slumped forward over the table.
---
Back at Baker Street, John was waiting, arms crossed over his chest.
“You’re an idiot,” he said as soon as the door shut behind Sherlock.
“It’s not the skull,” Sherlock breathed. “Not anymore.”
John smiled.
Sherlock reached out for John’s shoulder. John did not move away.
When Sherlock’s hand connected with solid flesh, John’s came up to meet it, as warm as any living skin had ever felt.