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“Your friend is not here.”
The glory that lay beyond shimmered around the gaunt old man and beckoned from the dazzling veil behind the speaker, promising peace and comfort and rest. It might as well be an ash-pit.
“John. Hamish. Watson.” Sherlock Holmes spoke as if to a stubborn and petty customs officer.
“Yes. Physician, soldier, man of letters.” The golden scroll vanished in the gateman’s hands, to be replaced by a scroll of what looked like lead. “Departed earthly existence Monday, 17 October, Common Era 1938, 2:37 am local time. Age 84. Judged and found wanting.”
Judged and found wanting. He pictured the man standing before Anubis, his heart on a scale. A feather in the other pan. A chimera part crocodile part leopard part hippopotamus – Amut, the Devourer – crouched, waiting. The man who’d shared his life and ended his addiction and had been the other half of his soul. Found wanting.
“May I ask why he was damned?” His voice was quiet; but the gold-diamond curtain before him trembled.
“For the same reason you risk that fate now.” The beautiful man before him was just as quiet, but a faint chill eddied toward the old man. “Only your lifetime of service in the cause of justice and mercy, the many lives you have saved or bettered, the wrongs you have stopped, save you by a hairsbreadth from expulsion due to–“
“To my nature.” His anger was pure licking fire. “My love for another.”
“For another man.” The lovely face hardened and became every stonehearted and log-stupid policeman, barrister, judge, Parliamentarian, Queen as he stressed the last word.
So lying, reviling his father, avoiding Sunday service, killing Moriarty, and stealing Milverton’s letters – all Biblical sins he’d committed – were to be handwaved away. Only this one, it seemed, would find little forgiveness. How could a just Providence…
The habits of a long and only recently ended lifetime did not desert the old man. As if the gatekeeper were anyone else he’d see on London streets, he swept the other top to toe. Ah. “Does God know of your petty and personal feelings affecting your judgement in this position?”
Direct hit. Pure ice sheeted out from the gatekeeper. “I hold divine authority here, and you will submit. Be grateful you are let in at all. Your fate rests solely with me. All it would take for you to be as justly damned as—”
Sherlock Holmes spat in the angel’s face.
Heat exploded from the lead scroll as letters appeared that glowed like forge-iron, spelling his full name.
“You will never see your brother again,” the gateman snarled.
“His work, inadvertently, caused the Great War.” Holmes’ own ice rippled out in response. “Yet he is in here, while the kindest and bravest man I have ever known is damned solely for whom he chose to love.”
Rage in ice and fire. “You are forever banned from glory, William Sherlock Scott Holmes.”
“Excellent. Give my harp to someone else. Only show me the exit.”
To his left a doorway materialized out of nowhere, its interior roiling and dark. Cold air wafted out of the maw.
“Is this the way John Watson went?” Again his voice was low and quiet, his words like thunder at the beautiful gate. The condemned man looked straight into the living furnace of the gatekeeper’s eyes. Angel or mortal man, if the being lied he would know at once.
“It is. The place for fornicators, adulterers, and homosexuals. Here all salvation is lost for eter–“
The old man stepped through the portal.
#
Darkness like a moonless night. No stars. Just enough twilight glow to make out how the land stretched out, featureless and bleak, as far as could be seen. The ground beneath smelled of soil and tufts of some unremarkable stiff grasses and reeds. And over everything, the bone-deep chill of late autumn. No wind blew across this landscape, but another sound surrounded him; low steady moans of despair and cries of anguish.
He hadn’t expected Hell to look quite so much like Devonshire. (He was quite certain that any gigantic hound found on this barren landscape would not be a phosphor-painted dog.) He seemed to be completely alone.
The first thing he did was to sink down to the cold, dark earth and weep in exhaustion and fear. Over everything else was the shock of realising that death was not mere extinguishment but a gateway to afterlife, only to discover it to be as cruel and capricious as the description that had driven him away from the church of his childhood. And that one brief flicker of hope he’d had at the gate that he would reunite with lost loved ones had been snuffed out.
He was still alone in the barren landscape when he dried his face. He needed to think of what to do, and take stock. He remained seated on the ground so he wouldn’t start running in a panic.
An inspection of his person revealed nothing but the shroud in which he had appeared before the glorious curtain. He was barefoot as a corpse in a morgue. He also seemed to be the age at which he died – the spots and wrinkles that had marked his lifetime had remained, as did the old acid-blotches on his hands and the aged track-marks on his arms.
He was cold and tired and frightened, but he was not hungry nor in pain. That last was a blessing; cancer had taken its ugly time with him. At the end, a nurse in the hospital had held his hand; that little bit of human contact had been a comfort while he had been occupied with the business of dying. He had squeezed her hand in gratitude (you were born in Sussex, your brother and father died in the War, you do a lot of knitting) as his last communication in the world. Everyone he had ever loved – Mycroft, John, Martha Hudson, Gregory Lestrade, ah God Paul Wiggins at Ypres – had pre-deceased him; he’d been alone at the end save for an overworked nursing sister.
The cries and sobs around him drew his mind away from his own thoughts. He parsed them, the habits of eighty-seven years remaining as much as his burial garment. Many different voices, and the sounds were not pain nor torment, but grief and despair. (He wondered if he had sounded that way just now, his own cries added to the infernal chorus.) One voice he strained to hear, but did not.
He hadn’t expected an exalted Paradise where he would reunite with his loved ones, nor an Inferno in which sinners suffered in eternal hellfire; he had thought he would simply stop existing as anything but his component molecules transformed into soil and bones. But now that he knew that afterlife was real – and was brutally unfair – resting in peace was the last thing he planned to do.
He glared around at the barren land even as another horror filled him with realisation. In life he had had no doubt that if Hell existed his father would have taken up residence immediately following his heart attack. With the revelation that glory cared only for sexual sin and didn’t give twopence for wrath nor rapine, he realised that Siger Holmes could have entered the halls of the holy but that the old bastard’s murder victim – his mother Emily – could very well be here for her marital infidelity. That first crime had begun the work he spent his entire life perfecting, trying to bring justice to an indifferent world. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right –
The philosophy of a child, Sherlock. Life is what it is. The world is what it is. That we perceive fairness and unfairness is irrelevant.
He felt his whole face close in an expression of rage, not unlike his teen self at his pompous older brother. Then I shall goddamn make fairness and justice happen!
He pulled himself to his feet and looked around for any kind of landmark. Nothing beckoned. But as he turned in a full circle, he noted that the sounds of anguish changed, quieter here, louder there, fewer here, more there.
He started walking in the direction of the greater number of weeping souls.
#
It began with the crying woman.
Before, the old man had been stumbling along lost in his own shock, moaning to himself. Others had bumped and jostled him as they too stumbled like the dead they were. Heaven was real, and he was forever barred from the gates for his sin. And he would never see the man he loved again. This was worse than heartbreak, it was like having the world settle atop him to flatten him into shale, to weep oil.
His thoughts only stopped when he literally stumbled over the woman collapsed in a ball on the ground. He lay in the soft ground stunned out of his stumbling shock. When he pulled himself to sit upright, he stared at the white-shrouded woman, her face contorted in grief and madness, her black hair lank and wet as if she’d just come out of a bathtub. Tears ran down her face like rain; her shroud clung and dripped.
A lifetime of dealing with crying women in his parlour opened his mouth for the first words he’d spoken since coming here.
“What is your name, madame?”
Her wailing stopped. She stared at him, eyes dark and wet, face twisted. Then she fell forward and he caught her. She was wet through, and shook with more sobs. The damned continued their cries and curses around them.
“Me llamo Maria, señor.”
That is what Watson heard but he understood it, though in life he’d never learned more than a few words of Spanish. “My name is Maria, sir.”
Maria. Mary.
He squeezed down the grief trying to burst out of him or he’d join her in tears. “Maria. I am John.”
They remained on the ground. She told him everything, how she deserved this for what she’d done to her children, her grief at her husband leaving her driving her to madness and murder.
He nodded. “I am here because I killed also. I was a soldier in a war.”
Gradually he noticed a cessation in the cries around them, a lessening of the sound. Maria, still weeping and drenched, lifted her head and looked around as did he.
Many of the damned stood around them like London gawkers at a cab accident. They were listening too, instead of crying out from their own internal pain. Everyone was wrapped in the same plain white cloth for garment, and barefoot. Every shape and size and skin-colour of humanity were represented, men and women and – oh God, no –
One of the onlookers, a scrawny pale man who’d stopped wailing, spoke up. “I was in a war, too.” He lifted his robe to show the lance wound over his heart. “I don’t know why I’m here. We were blessed. God rejoices when we die for Him. We were fighting to free the Holy Land.”
“I thought of other men when I lay with my husband,” a haggard-looking older woman said, and snorted. “That made me guilty of adultery, and here I am. But Hell is a step up from my married life!”
Watson burst out in a startled laugh – and so did others. For just a second, the crushing boulder on his heart lifted.
“I whored to feed myself when my parents threw me away.” A teenaged person with a garrotte-mark around their neck – could have been male or female, but either way bearing the unmistakeable hard-eyed smirk of a prostitute. “I’m sure they’re both in Heaven, that fucking judge is just like them.”
“I stoled a sweet.” A little curly-haired and dark-skinned boy had stopped crying. “I was bad.”
The last remnant of the old man’s self-pity tore to tatters and blew away in a desert-wind rage. Children. In Hell. The injustice, the utter obscenity of it –
Maria stared, wide-eyed, her face and hair and shroud wet with her tears. She held her arms out to the child. “What is your name, niño?”
And as she hugged the boy, and others began to speak, the silence in the sky above them began to grow and spread outward.
#
With no day and no night, he measured his walking by steps and sleeps as he followed the sound of human anguish overhead. A thousand steps, and change the pebble from one hand to the other. Another thousand steps, and back to the original hand. When he was very tired, he lay down in the soft cold earth, head facing his direction, and slept without dreams. He awoke with no desire to eat or drink (nor eliminate in any way) and began counting his steps again. He wondered how many steps and sleeps would cover the Sahara or Gobi, or to traverse the Atlantic Ocean.
So much of this was familiar to him. He’d spent three years in movement not unlike this. But that had been to run away from John Watson to keep him safe. His objective had reversed now.
He had no precise measure of how far nor how long he had walked. But it was long enough so that when he finally came upon another shrouded man walking in the wilderness, he shouted in joy and ran to throw his arms around the stranger.
The man cast him down and cursed him in a Central African language that he nevertheless understood perfectly. “English swine. Rot in Iblis as you deserve!”
Again, his deductive abilities did not desert him. He spoke in English and it was clear the other man understood. “I can’t blame you for hating English after what British soldiers did to your town. You were denied Paradise as well.”
“For killing the unbeliever English dogs.” The man’s expression showed what he thought of the judgement. “Paradise is overrun with unbelievers and one of their own holds the door.”
Not a sin of Lust but of Wrath. Did the gatekeeper change his criteria? Was it another gateman? Another experience of the afterlife for other faiths?
Quick, before the other man left. “Are there others here?”
“Too many to count.” The man turned away. “I want silence and solitude now. Maybe I will remember how to pray again.”
“Thank you. And peace with you.”
The man didn’t look behind but automatically responded “Aleikum salaam” as he headed into the wilderness the old man had just traversed.
That was a data point. He now knew it wasn’t just sexual sins that damned people. And there were people here. He would find them.
But he waited until the other man had disappeared over the horizon first, watching him all the way, before continuing.
#
He stayed at the spot where he had fallen over Maria.
The humans who had been here longer than others – the copper-users and brick-makers - had found which mud here made good building material when gathered and formed, and their simple square buildings were the chief architecture of the place. (The Sumerians were almost blasé about their locale; Watson had to agree, as this place was far less horrific than their own concept of the afterlife, nor was it the fiery torture chamber threatened to Christians.) Grasses strengthened the bricks and the kilns fed with the short scrub baked them hard for building. With the aid of others who began to join them, he built a place to stay amid the stumbling dead in this perpetual twilight light.
Maria helped him build the shelter. When she found fine-silted earth that was too dry for mud, the water that streamed from her hair and shroud and fingers turned it into clay; but others had to bake the bricks due to her constant water-drenched state. Watson was quietly pleased that his leg and shoulder were no longer a constant source of pain (even if the damage done to his femur had given him a permanent limp), and that he had no trouble lifting and carrying bricks even in his octogenarian form.
The child Aba stayed with them – more accurately, stayed with Maria. One very good thing about this place was no language barriers; whatever you said was understood by the other person. She asked about his life and his family, and told him stories that made him laugh. Others had gone silent at that laugh, and they spoke, creating more silence over the area.
They asked the other passing damned if they’d seen the boy’s mother or father, a sibling, a member of his North African city or even his Bronze Age timeline. But most of the dead that passed by were from the far greater population numbers of later millennia; it would be harder to find his family.
Watson found that he could resume another of his professions. The coarse grasses that were used for roofing also made a form of papyrus when pounded and flattened together. Charcoal from the brick-makers and galls from the low scrubby bushes made ink.
His method was simple. Ask people their names; awake them from the catatonia and self-loathing that trapped the vast majority of the damned. Hold them, or say a word of sympathy. Listen as they spoke. And record their names, their lives, their judgements, the reason they died and the reason they were given for being sent here.
The more he recorded, the angrier he got. So many simply didn’t deserve to be here, certainly not by any Deity that would be described as merciful or compassionate.
As those before him had done, he began to mark his time here in sleeps. He kept a record of those, too, as he continued to write The Book of the Damned.
One set of sheets were letters to his two lost loves. He wept as he wrote them, almost as much as did Maria. But he kept writing. The heartache made him feel alive again.
#
On his seventy-first sleep since coming to Hell, he saw a few scattered buildings; they were low square forms of raw brick scattered over the rough grassy plain and little more than sleep-rooms – tombs save that the dead rose again every day. But after the barren wilderness they seemed like palaces. He could read these people – from every country, every culture, people who died in every century. Some of the rough-built structures even had pictures on the walls, drawn in bush-gall and grass-stain.
Life is full of coincidences. So, apparently, does the afterlife. A mottled woman sat in tears by one of the houses. Forty-seven but a hard forty-seven, from the days when that was old age. She too wore a shroud; her bald head and wherever else her skin could be seen was blistered and burned.
He stepped forward. “Madame, you were unjustly accused of witchcraft and executed. You do not belong here.”
“I know that already, old man,” Goodwife Miller snapped. “What can be done?”
It was so good to talk to another person again. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No. Because you can’t take me to my sister.” Goody Miller wiped her eyes with a fist. “They burned her too. She was a godly soul and a good mother. They accused her for no other reason than being my relation. She’s in Heaven and I’ll never see her again. Sometimes it just overwhelms me and I come out here.”
“I doubt she is in Heaven.” Over a year’s worth of wandering accompanied only by one’s self leaves much room for thought. “I was condemned for love. Another I met was condemned for violence. He followed his religious precepts and I defied mine, but we both were sent here. You were shunned by your village and your sister was welcomed; you rejected your faith and she embraced hers. People who are here have not earned this as punishment; they are simply here. She may be here too.”
Goody Miller jumped to her feet. That look on her face was something he’d wanted for himself but it was almost as good to see it on her. “Do you mean it? Can it be true?”
“It very well may be.”
The old woman embraced the old man, and he happily returned the gesture. Her body was warm but had no heartbeat, breath nor pulse any more than he did. “Sir, will you help me find her?”
He had a purpose. And all of eternity, apparently. “I will do my best.” Perhaps he could find a way of mapping this land also; it would make searching more scientific. “I am looking for someone also. Where have you been already?”
“Here and there. No use in the traveling if you’re damned.” The moans and wails eddied overhead, and Katherine nodded at it. “It’s like a river, that sound. Where it’s quieter, that’s where folks have found a way.”
“A way?”
“To make peace with Hell.”
He thought of the painted houses. He remembered the Ghana man he’d met in the wilderness, looking for a way to forgive God.
What would John do, the moment he was here?
His answer came immediately.
He would do something – something that would lessen the pain, keep him busy, and provide service to others.
As a doctor? No. The dead do not need doctors. But wherever he is, he will write. Writing was how he dealt with all his pain. Writing my cases down comforted him when I was presumed dead. And his kindness was a beacon to all the lost souls that came to our shore.
Kindness is how I will find John here.
His heart lifted till he thought he could fly. And now he felt what he’d seen on Goody Miller’s face. Hope. It had been so long.
Find the quiet and he would find John Watson.
“Let us find your sister, Goody Miller.”
#
The reawakened damned did not need food, and their only use for water was making mud-bricks (and washing the mud off), but an enclosed shelter for sleep was more comfortable than being out in the perpetual dusk. A cluster of the simple shelters grew and became a necropolis. Several reawakened who’d been architects or builders in life ensured a method to the madness.
Watson kept all the names of the reawakened on a post at the outskirts, in the hopes that other shuffling, walking damned might recognize some of the names and stir from somnambulance.
Others kept records, and several central buildings became repositories of records and remembered lives. (Watson was pleased to find that the lack of language barriers here extended to writing as well, when he was handed a clay slab covered in cuneiform and was halfway through reading the account of Ner-tabi’s life before he realised that he was doing it.)
Both the Book of the Damned and his personal diary grew. His letters he kept in a roll in his shelter instead of the library.
#
Hell was full of these pockets of humanity, defiantly making something out of their damnation. Wherever they succeeded, the wailing and moaning grew quieter in those spots. When people were reawakened, most stayed in the one place after eons of aimless walking. But some still travelled from site to site, looking for loved ones or family members.
Many of the walking damned would not reawaken. They were still deducible, however, and that was how Holmes learned that these were the true citizens of this bleak land. Every one of them shouted Death, Destruction, Famine, Rapine, War in one form or another. And it explained why he had not seen any major violence here, no marauding packs of men bringing more destruction, no cowed and abused women and children. And among those stumbling damned were no children. The reawakened gave them as wide a berth as they could and went on with their own afterlives.
Holmes and Katherine Miller passed through these sites and read the lists, feeling a pang every time as no familiar names appeared. But at the eighty-first settlement, a burned and bald woman there gave a cry and ran toward Katherine, who cried back and ran toward her. And at that joyous reunion, the whole sky became still and quiet. All the damned looked up at the phenomenon. Their own soft sounds of hope were drowned out by the return of the wails and cries of Hell once again. But it had all stopped for one pure moment of joy. And when the sisters separated, their burns were gone and their mouse-brown hair hung down their backs and they looked as they must have in their twenties.
Holmes stayed in that settlement for five sleeps, a guest of the reunited sisters (and the small flock of children Grace Crawford had taken under her wing – the sight of which almost made the old man apoplectic with rage). During his stay others in the city approached him, asking if he had word or news of such and such a person; in reply he produced the growing sheaf of papyrus he carried that listed the populations of the necropolises they had visited. Three people gave a cry of recognition and ran off that very moment. But no one here had seen any of his people.
Katherine and Grace made their farewells before he left. “God has not abandoned us,” Grace smiled. “A thousand lifetimes are a blink of Heaven’s eye. When we are worthy, we will see glory again.”
Katherine looked away, face set and angry. She clearly agreed with Holmes that a deity that damned children as well as her saintly sister was not worthy of them.
He met her eyes. “I believe you are worthy now, Goody Crawford. If God is truly a just judge, we may approach him with a petition of grievances.” With a nod, he turned away from the settlement. Several people came with him, reinvigorated by his success in helping the sisters.
The silence. Follow the silence.
#
Who can say how much time passed, when time means nothing? No sun nor moon to mark the hours, no mortality to set a limit.
But good deeds and kind hearts shine like beacons in a dark and dismal land. And human beings have loved telling stories from the very dawn of sentience.
So people spoke of those who helped others, whether by moving or by staying still.
So Sherlock Holmes heard people on the road speak of an old Englishman with a limp who wrote down everyone’s histories and kept the library at one small necropolis. He cried out at the description and kissed the man who told him.
In the same fashion, John Watson learned from visitors about a tall old Englishman who went from city to city and could tell someone’s past with one look and who helped the reawakened find their lost people.
Only his Army survival training kept Watson from dashing out of the library and running, running mad to find Holmes. He was so giddy at the news that he had to sit on the ground so he wouldn’t tear down the road. If they both traveled, they’d never meet. But if he continued to stay in one place while the other kept walking, odds were better that Holmes would come upon him at last.
He forced himself to resume his transcription. But his fellow scribes stared at the happily-humming man he’d become.
#
It’s a wonder what hope can do. With the sure and certain knowledge for one that the man he loved was locatable, and the realisation for the other that he was not utterly alone in this place and that one he held dear was looking for him, they both took to their chosen defiance with renewed heart.
Sherlock Holmes continued to map out the cities of the dead and to record their populations, with the aid of those who joined him in the work while looking for their own loved ones. But now he travelled in a direction a little better than a wild guess or an arbitrary selection.
John Watson made paper and ground bushgalls into ink; his fellow scribes made clay tablets and sharpened reeds into wedges, or carved stout square clay pegs with Chinese characters at the ends and set them together to make moveable type once more. All of them taught the children to read and write, in between making records. Maria headed out on trips of several sleeps to bring in more wandering children; Aba accompanied her when he was not at the library practicing his alephs and betas. Now the pang in Watson’s breast was caused by the little boy calling him “Grandfather.” His other pain was a low steady thing inside him, and threaded with a whisper of anticipation.
#
One day the sky above went quiet once again, a silence big enough to cover the settlement. But a faint glow also encircled the horizon that made everyone cry in wonder at even this small bit of extra light. Watson hurried out of the reading room with Aba and the other children to see this phenomenon, to look up at the hushed firmament. Not just quiet but light? This place could change for the better. What had happened…?
Then he saw them. A shrouded woman with two shrouded children in her arms, running toward the settlement. It was Maria – laughing, laughing, laughing, her face and shroud as dry as everyone else’s here. The two children clasped in her arms cried Mamá, Mamá!
The people cheered.
He laughed and shouted for joy, and Aba squealed to see Maria so happy. Watson scooped up Aba and ran toward her, and all five of them embraced. The two dark-haired and dark-eyed children were still crying in their mother’s arms, now that they were safe with her again, and shrank back from the pale white-haired man. Aba reached out to the two new playmates, still squealing.
“An angel, an angel found them,” Maria said. Not even for joy did she shed another tear; her face was like looking into the Sun as she kissed them over and over. “I am forgiven. They were with him. They were looking for me.”
“I’m so happy.” Watson’s face hurt from smiling so broadly. He looked over to thank the man who’d found her children.
Aba fell from his nerveless arms and hit the ground with a bump and a yell until Maria shushed him, staring at the old man.
,
The entire vault of Hell became utterly silent from horizon to horizon.
It was as if the tall thin old white man had chosen to trade places with Maria, for his own face was streaming with tears though he was smiling. And that was all the librarian saw before his own eyes were too full of water to see.
But it was his voice, his ridiculous humour, that chose the method of their reunion.
“Dr. Watson, I presume?”
#
In every necropolis as far as three sleeps’ travel away in every direction, the inhabitants cried out in wonder at both the increased glow and the silence that followed, hushing the cries of pain and anguish, filling the void with peace. But they broke out into screams of surprise and joy (and terror) as the sky grew brighter still, until the whole of the land was lit as if by sunrise and remained that way, shining in the profundity.
#
When you no longer need to breathe, you can sustain a single kiss for hours. And when your love is powerful enough to silence the cries of the damned and bring light to Hell itself, it can burn away the years and leave two hale and hearty men in their prime looking into each other’s streaming eyes once more.
#
“These are meticulous, dear man.” Sherlock Holmes read through the massive scrolls of the book. Outside they could hear the shouts of the settlement’s children playing tag and hopscotch, Tiata and Juancho having joined them. “You all have filled fifty-three store-rooms with records?”
“Soon to be fifty-four.” John Watson puffed out a little. “People come here from other towns to study what we’ve written, to look for other people through our records. Scholars come to add their own accounts. We’ll make copies of your rosters for the records here.”
Copies, rather than the rosters themselves.
The two men looked at each other, an exercise they had not tired of though nearly fifty sleeps had come and gone since their reunion.
Watson smiled. “You’ll need the originals to keep mapping out the cities. When you go back to the road.”
Holmes nodded. “And you’ll need the copies while you stay here and add to your records.”
The work they did echoed in their bones, and they could not ignore it any more than they would have brushed aside an injustice or an injury during their lives. Now they dwelt in a land full of injustice and injury, and they had seen what they could do.
Watson looked out at the brighter horizon. “Sherlock. Was this caused by our reunion alone, or by both ours and Maria’s with her children so close together? If these moments of bliss add light and bring peace to the damned–“
“–Then more happy reunions that occur may bring full daylight, and true peace,” Holmes concluded.
“What other changes can we make happen?” John Watson’s expression was like Holmes’ own over a scientific problem. “We may yet find that doorway again.”
“Or make one ourselves.” Holmes’ face twisted. “John, I don’t give a good goddamn about being welcomed into Paradise. But I can recognize misuse of one’s office in the way the gatekeeper operates.”
“I agree completely. Sending queers to Hell is one thing.” Watson indicated them both with a mocking smile before his own angry expression turned toward the window again, and the shouts and laughter of the children who’d been damned by that same gateman.
“For them, if for no other reason.”
The pain at the thought of parting again was sweet now, the pure pain of love. But they had been separated for so long.
As of old, he didn’t need to say a thing.
Holmes caressed Watson’s cheek with one hand, eyes tender. “Not for a good long time, my darling. I need a rest. I wish to read everything your team has collected – it’s splendid to have no trouble understanding hieroglyphics and all the other languages. We need to sleep in each other’s arms for at least as long as we were parted. A century or two of aiding your work will provide a rest-cure before I move along.”
Watson nodded and smiled, but his shoulders dropped in relief. “I’ll hate the day you leave. But we now know what mountains we can move here.”
“The more happy reunions, the brighter it becomes, and the horrors recede.”
“And when we can help bring about full daylight to this land…”
The look the two men shared would have been recognized, and feared, by the worst criminals in London.
#
Others have noted that bad times drag on forever, while good times seem to fly by – and while good times are preferable, they make for dull records. One need only say, then, that the two men reveled in each other’s company for at least as long as they had been parted, not only by Hell but by life (Holmes laughing at his lover’s pettiness in factoring in not only the years between their deaths but the three years of his disappearance and the two years of his espionage work; Watson’s prim response over dancing eyes: “I said every day we were parted and I meant ‘every day,’ dear.”)
They did finally part company to continue their work as before. But their tears were few, and the poignance was underlaid with hope and purpose now and not despair and grief. Sherlock Holmes went out on the road to reunite scattered kith and kin, and John Watson stayed to tend to the children and the records and give directions to wanderers.
This time was not eternity, but purpose now. It was long, but an ending was in sight.
The silences in the sky, and the brightening of the horizon one grade at a time, became less and less exceptional as Holmes and others like him, Watson and others like him, brought loved ones together and manufactured joy.
An eon may have passed, or two.
#
There came a day when the gateman felt the sky split and a doorway tore open from one end of the firmament to the other, to reveal full glorious daylight and warmth from within instead of cold and darkness. Masses of human souls flooded out and into the golden light; their sheer volume overwhelmed the keeper and flew past him through the shimmering curtain. Heaven resounded with a thunder of joyous noise as long-parted loved ones instantly found each other.
Shouting in anger, the gatekeeper called up his leaden scroll. It was blank, millions of names sponged off.
He was seized on either side by a man.
One was tall and thin. “Human beings sin and may need to atone for misdeeds. But to send children to Gehenna is a special level of evil.”
The other man produced a reed stylus. “The only names that remain are the only ones that belong on this, the truly evil who still wander the halls of Hell unawakened and unknowing.” He smiled at the faithless servant of God. “But there’s room for one more. Your services here are no longer required.” He swiftly carved a new name into the lead as if it was wet clay.
The letters glowed like lava. Chains like ship’s cables sprang out of nowhere and wrapped the prisoner.
And Sherlock Holmes and John Watson pitched the shrieking angel into the emptied vault of Hell just as the great tear in the sky closed again. The lead scroll winked out of sight.
They faced the curtain, still hearing the joyful noise of reunion as millions flew through the curtain past them. They looked at each other.
Holmes shrugged. “Would we even be permitted entry, John?”
“Even if we are not punished for our love, we did just assault one of God’s messengers.” Watson rubbed his chin. “That normally doesn’t turn out well.”
“Is there a third option?”
John frowned. “Wandering the earth as ghosts, I suppose. Or we stay here and help others cross the threshold until they find out what we did and–”
A swirl of glowing happy people flew out of the curtain to encircle the two.
“Come in, Grandfather!” Aba called, now accompanied by his beaming parents reaching out to him as well. “Come in!”
“Come in, Goodman Holmes!” Katherine Miller and her sister pulled at the other man.
They fell through the blinding curtain, and as they did so every last trace of grief and fear blew away like smoke from a brick-burner’s oven. John spun a laughing Mary Morstan in his arms even as a restrained but no less happy Mycroft Holmes embraced his younger brother – all while engulfed in a golden glow like the sun made out of pure peace.
They’d both been idiots to be afraid, really. For what did you think saving millions of souls would do for their karma?