Haunted

By

Nana

Author's Notes: This is an entry for the FYJFF fic challenge for October. I swear these ladies have the most irresistible challenges. For this month, they are asking for something spooky. Hope this works!

The story is set immediately before "The Adventure of the Empty House". This is my version of Sherlock and John's next, big meeting. With just a little hint of Johnlock at the end. Do tell me what you think!

And so, it is said, you are haunted!
My friend, we are haunted all;
And every homestead holds a ghost
That ever has held a pall.

- "Haunted" (1898) by Isabella Banks

London was haunted.

When one considered how long the city had been in existence, the knowledge was hardly surprising. It had been there since Roman times, had seen cycle after cycle of prosperity and devastation— the rise and fall of a great metropolis that always rose again, like a phoenix from its own ashes.

It had been razed to the ground by fires, its population almost decimated by the Black Death during the Middle Ages, had seen the ravages of war and the worst excesses of human nature in the form of murder, violence, terrorism. Monsters had walked in the crowded streets of London, with Jack the Ripper being the most notorious. Over the span of a few, terrifying weeks, the gruesome murders at Whitechapel had captured the attention and imagination of the public that would last to this day. And then, quite as suddenly, the Ripper had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared. Vanished seemingly without a trace, as though London itself had swallowed him up, folded him back behind its teeming, turbulent curtains of fog and struggling humanity.

Considering its great, convoluted history, the memories of a bloody past, the scores and scores of people over time who had lived and died here, one would almost come to expect that one was sharing the city with a more sizeable, invisible population of ghostly inhabitants.

And one Saturday afternoon, John thought he saw one of them.

John Watson was not a superstitious man. Bloody far from it. He had survived Afghanistan, for God's sake. That experience alone was quite enough to put one's life and thoughts into harsh, clear-as-day perspective.

And yet he had recently undergone a loss so profound that he thought he would never be the same again. Even now, almost a year after the incident, he was still grieving.

It was, he decided grimly, the perfect state for one's mind to start playing tricks on oneself.

Because there was simply no way he could have seen Sherlock Holmes walking down Regent Street while he whizzed by in a taxi.

The last time he had seen him, Sherlock was lying dead on the pavement outside Bart's, after he had leaped from the rooftop of the hospital in an apparent suicide attempt. There had been so much blood. Blood matted Sherlock's hair and streamed down his face, past the open, vacant eyes— so horrible in their blankness. As he tried to hold on to Sherlock's wrist, desperately feeling for a pulse that was not there, John had felt his world go grey with shock.

The grey haze never lifted. One year on, John felt that he was still seeing everything in monochrome.

Until that Saturday afternoon when he was on his way to a meeting and his cab drove past busy Regent Street and, in the midst of the grey crowd, his eyes had alighted on a tall, slender figure wrapped in a familiar dark coat. A figure with dark curls and a pale face blurred by the taxi's speed and his own slow reaction, so unprepared was his mind to accept what his eyes were telling him.

By the time his hand and face were pressed to the window of his taxi, the figure was gone.

John sat back in his seat, swallowing hard, feeling his heart still leaping in his throat.

You're seeing things, he thought. You're seeing something you've desperately wanted to see all these months. Something impossible. He's not coming back, yet deep down inside you're still hoping for a miracle. One last miracle, just for you. So you go and see somebody who can afford a coat like that walking around London and think that it's him…

But that wasn't the only incident to unsettle John.

Shortly after Sherlock was buried, he had moved out of 221B. He could not stand living in the flat and be haunted by Sherlock's presence at every nook and cranny, at every little turn of that small, enclosed space.

So he had moved out, but it seemed something had moved along with him.

One early morning at dawn, John had awakened to find himself curled into a ball on his cold, crumpled bed. He had not been sure what had awakened him. Still floating in that strange, twilight realm between sleeping and waking, he had felt a presence sitting on the bed just behind him.

Even if there had been absolute silence, the feeling that he was there had been so real. And instead of scaring him out of his wits, John had felt strangely comforted by it.

Without thinking, he had said drowsily, "You know you really suck at this skulking bit. Why don't you just show yourself and be done with it?"

In the midst of his half-dreaming state had come the familiar sorrow, so sharp that John had to bite down and clench his jaw to stop himself from letting out a sob. All the while, he had refused to turn over in his bed. Refused to let reason in for a little while longer.

Impossibly enough, he had drifted off to sleep again soon after that. When he had reawakened a few hours later and turned over, there was nobody there, of course.

John knew that his situation had become a little ridiculous when he started memorizing the layout of things around his little rented room.

He was being haunted.

It had all started when he had come home late one night to find his RAMC mug on the table, when he had been sure he had rinsed it out that morning after taking some tea and set it to dry beside the sink. Or had he?

Nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. He had sat there at his table and thought for nearly an hour, trying to remember his morning routine in an agony of anguish and wild hope.

In the end, he had decided that he was not a hundred percent sure of the mug's exact location when he left his room. So he had started laying certain things out around the room and memorizing their arrangement before leaving for work at the surgery in the mornings. He wasn't sure how else he could ascertain the presence of a poltergeist.

One week into this activity and with no further disturbance, John had decided he needed to start seeing his therapist again.

Not long after the sighting at Regent Street, John bumped into Greg Lestrade. The DI was off-duty for once, and the chance meeting extended to dinner at a pub. Halfway through their third round of Lager, Lestrade got a call. His presence was needed. A possible homicide at Park Lane, in the fashionable district of Mayfair.

"Come on, John," he said as he put his phone away. "What do you say? For old times' sake."

John had no plans for the rest of the evening (his nights were quiet now, and long), and if he were to be completely honest with himself, he had missed this— the surge of adrenaline that accompanied the game.

And with that thought came a thousand others, all centering around the man whose absence tonight made him all the more felt in the small confines of Lestrade's car, making breathing difficult for John. Lestrade must have noticed too, and his determined avoidance of mentioning anything concerning Sherlock Holmes only added to the awkwardness.

The crime scene was a riddle from the very start.

The Honourable Ronald Adair was a society darling, with no known enemies, found dead inside his locked room, in his mother's townhouse with said mother and his sister just a few feet away in their rooms. No one had heard a thing. He was found slumped over his desk with some bank bills scattered around him, killed by a single bullet to the head.

John examined the body as best he could, and in the end he had to agree with Andersen's initial assessment. That single bullet had been the cause of death, but with no gun lying nearby, nothing else seemingly disturbed in the room and nobody hearing a thing, they would have to look elsewhere for the killer. Even now, John was quite sure forensics would not be able to find anything amiss in the young man's room.

Beyond the open windows were other buildings, places where a sniper could get in to fire the fatal shot. But who he was and why he targeted young Adair may have to remain a mystery.

As he left the premises, John had a single, disturbing thought: Could the murderer be a poltergeist such as the one haunting him?

The investigation was still ongoing when John departed, and he left Lestrade behind to continue his work.

It was already very late, but this was Central London, for goodness' sake. It was just absurd that he couldn't find a cab here.

He rounded the corner, walked several blocks more and all the while he couldn't find a taxi to take him home.

It was only when he was nearing Regent's Park that he realized he was being followed. There were people still on the streets, and there was really nothing to worry about, but one figure had persistently tailed him all the way for two blocks, turning the same corners, keeping a sedate distance behind him.

A fellow in a dark coat. He couldn't possibly be a mugger. Muggers didn't wear coats costing well over a thousand pounds. Of course, he could very well be an impostor, but John had a horrible feeling that he was not. He could not see his face from this distance, but there was something in the man's figure that made the hairs on John's nape stand on end. Something sinister and dark and just impossible.

Wasn't this what he wanted? Wasn't this just what he had prayed for every single night for the first six months since Sherlock died? But now that it was here, John realized he was not up to it. Not at all.

Halfway down the street, John felt the last, flimsy bit of reason and logic give way inside him and he broke into a run, quickly covering ground that was painfully familiar. He turned the corner and found himself in Baker Street. His Baker Street, and at the same time not his. Not anymore. A Baker Street that was quiet at this time of night, devoid of all people. And cabs.

But then a thought broke into John's half-panicked mind. Mrs. Hudson!

Mrs. Hudson was still there. She'd let him in.

He reached the familiar door and started pounding on the knocker.

No Mrs. Hudson.

Another minute of pounding, loud enough to wake the neighbors.

God! Where was she? Had she left 221 as well? Perhaps she had gone to visit her sister? He did not know. It had been ages since they last spoke to each other.

Heart drumming frantically in his chest, John turned to look down the street where he had come.

Oh God! The faceless, black figure was there at the end of the street!

He ought to run, yelling, to attract some attention.

Oh, wait, he still had his old keys!

He got them out of his pockets after a moment of fumbling.

Please, please Mrs. Hudson, tell me you didn't change the sodding lock—!

The key slid into the lock like a hot knife through butter, and John heard the blessed sound of the door unlocking. He was through the door in an instant, slamming and locking it behind him as fast as he could. In the dim, quiet hall, he leaned against the wall and tried to catch his breath.

God, this was just bloody absurd. He was seeing things that weren't there. Of course, there really was a man behind him, but perhaps it was just some bloke who, by sheer coincidence, was coming around to these parts. It couldn't possibly be him, because that would mean John was really seeing a ghost.

And ghosts simply weren't real.

He called out one more time for Mrs. Hudson. Definitely not there.

John's attention suddenly snapped back toward the door, to the furtive sound of the door knob being turned.

Being slowly opened.

He did not know if he let out a strangled cry, or maybe even a small scream. All he knew was that he was tearing up the stairs toward the flat he had shared with his best friend.

His best friend who was dead.

He slammed this door closed behind him too, but he knew now that it wouldn't keep the being from entering the flat if it chose to enter. Not when it could get through the door downstairs. He looked around the dusty furniture- everything was still there- reached for a nearby lamp and snapped it on.

Nothing.

Mrs. Hudson must have disconnected the electrical appliances from all the sockets.

In the dim light cast by the street lamp outside the window, he watched in horror as the door knob slowly turned.

There was nowhere else to run.

Oh God, he couldn't see him. Not after how he had looked that last time outside Bart's, with his head bloodied and broken on the cold, impersonal pavement; those pale eyes open and staring and entirely devoid of the brilliance they had in life.

What would he look like now after being dead an entire year?

John felt the silent rush of cool air as the door opened and instinctively turned himself away toward the wall, reaching out with two hands to hold onto it, hold onto something solid lest his shaking legs suddenly failed him.

"Please," he said, his voice harsh and unsteady as he stared hard at the wall in front of him. "Just go away and leave me alone. I don't believe in this. I don't believe in you…!"

His voice abruptly died in his throat and John had to swallow hard. "There are no such things as ghosts," he said at last, his voice much calmer this time. "You're not real."

"No, they're not," agreed the deep, achingly familiar voice behind him. "But I can assure you, John, that I am real enough."

John shook his head vehemently. "No," he said. "No. You're dead, Sherlock. I saw you. You jumped. And the sight of you, on that pavement outside Bart's. You can't—! No. You're dead."

"Turn around, John, and see for yourself. Look at me."

"No."

"You're being absurd. Remember what I always used to say: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth."

Oh God, the hope flaring inside him was something vicious and alive. It would kill him if he were to be proven wrong now. To be granted a miracle only to see it snatched from him at the last minute. Like Orpheus.

His breathing harsh, John said, "My room. My mug. You, sitting on my bed early that morning."

"Yes, John. Yes to all of them. It was me. Not a ghost. Just...me. I couldn't stay away. I wanted, somehow, to let you know."

John squeezed his eyes shut. There was no way this could be possible, and yet...

When you have eliminated the impossible...

Sherlock here, standing just behind him. Not a ghost. Not dead.

...Whatever remains...

He never died in the first place.

...However improbable, must be...

No. No, it couldn't be. The bastard could not be this cold-hearted, to allow him to suffer an entire year, thinking he was dead!

Almost as if on cue, John heard the voice behind him say in a low murmur, "Forgive me, John."

The truth.

More terrible than any apparition.

John sagged forward, felt his head touch the cool wall before him. He suddenly felt dizzy. For a moment, he wondered whether he would pass out.

"I can explain. Everything. Please."

Stunned.

Like those first few seconds after a blow when the body had barely registered its impact, John could feel nothing.

Not pain. Not fury. Those will come later, as soon as the shock wore off.

But now, nothing but a strange clear-headedness before the madness rushed in. And in that moment, all he could think about was being strong.

He would have to be strong. Strong enough to turn around and face Sherlock Holmes. Face the truth about his death and what it meant for Sherlock to stage it. Face the terrible realization that John had been deceived most deliberately and unkindly all this time.

A truly frightening prospect.

And yet, he did.

In the end, John turned around.

More author's notes: BTW, I've also started posting things at my Tumblr account ( nana-41175 . tumblr . com). Please remove spaces between the dots. Not much there yet, just some Sherlock doujinshi reviews, but I will fill it up gradually with more posts. Please do drop by and take a look around! Enjoy!