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He had been in control of his usage long before Watson had come to share quarters with him and he continued to do so to his own eminent satisfaction. He had successfully used the cocaine to cure himself of his morphine addiction, and it now served to stimulate his brain when the criminal underclass of London disappointed him.
Why could Watson not see that? For a medical man, he could be astoundingly unperceptive – or perhaps it was his very medical background that made Watson so nervous about his habit. There were all sorts of alarmist articles in medical journals about this or that drug these days. Of course he was aware of cocaine's properties, and this was precisely why he measured and monitored his own usage as carefully and conscientiously as any other chemical reaction he created.
Just as he controlled his dosage precisely (surely the Doctor knew that most people injected a 10% solution, how could he not see how the man ruled the drug and not the other way round?), so too did he face the withdrawal reactions head-on. Irritability, shaky hands, restlessness and the others could be dealt with, swallowed up when a new case presented itself. If anything, he became more productive, more alert, more aware of everything around him; he'd created some of his most esoteric violin pieces during those long, long sleepless nights when his heart would not stop racing long enough for him to lie down and rest. He sternly and coldly reminded himself that the insects he sometimes saw crawling on his arms were his mind's work – Mrs Hudson wouldn't allow vermin in the lodgings – and with the same self-control that ruled the rest of his life he rarely scratched at them (and never when Watson was in the room). Was the man incapable of observing him properly, after all this time?
Watson was shouting at him now, holding a copy of the Lancet and exhorting him once again for God's sake Holmes lay down that accursed needle, turn your back on this loathsome habit. Bah! Another article written by some specialist, no doubt from that school of Jewish and German physicians that dealt with illnesses of the brain. There was nothing wrong with his brain; it was as cool and controlled and in control of his life as ever. Watson looked downright ridiculous, waving that article around – as if a mere general practitioner could fathom a specialist's depths!
He dismissed the irritating man with a flap of his hands and reached for his violin, grimly determined to drive him out of the room with all the Wagner he knew. His bow flew across the strings, flinging up a wall of sound in seconds – faster and keener than when he was free of cocaine.
With one last exclamation of dismay Watson left the room in a huff.
Alone in the room once more, he smiled in triumph and trod on one of the scurrying insects trying to swarm up his leg.
***
It was easier to ignore the voices when he was ensconced at 221b, where they could be dismissed as phantoms or drowned out with violin music or conversation. It was like whispers from across a room, unintelligible sounds; they told him nothing of importance. They silenced and fled when Watson was in the same room with him; his talking, or the rustle of his paper or the scratch of his pen, kept them away. It was clear that they didn't like Watson, and for that alone they were suspect.
The voices became clearer as time passed. They became wiser. They knew things about him, and about the people all around him. That fellow down the street, for example – the bricklayer who had his lodgings in Cheapside and whose wife had been ill for a month – the voices whispered that he'd glanced at him because he suspected his habit and now planned to tell his mates at the pub all about it; the governess over there, the one who drank and was currently sleeping with the children's father, knew of his usage and would cackle to her paramour when her charges were abed; Lestrade was only waiting for an excuse to toss 221b from top to toe and take his cache, it was obvious in the tilt of his head and the creases near his left eye.
The voices muttered about the less-than-admiring looks Watson gave him even as they fled from the doctor's presence.
He continued to play the violin to the swarms of admiring insects crowded at his feet, not even looking at his fellow lodger; but he was acutely aware of the man's presence over his left shoulder. He played more, faster, turning every piece allegro, which kept the bugs at bay; the drugs slowed them and the music entranced them. He planned to make them and their taming the subject of his next monograph; he wondered what the Lancet specialist would have to say about that.
***
They helped him track his quarry, drew his eyes to every sign left by the missing man whom he was charged to find, through the most well-traveled thoroughfares in the City, mingled though the spoor was with the hoofprints and wheel-tracks of cabs, and the thousands of other feet that had trod this ground. Little to differentiate between so many footprints on the pavement, of course; Scotland Yard would find little of value here, of course, and Lestrade would throw up his hands and arrest the nearest bystander on suspicion of being the missing Sidney Hamilton, of course. But look there, the voices whispered in his ear, look! There! A paving-stone displaced, a particular scratch near a splash of mud just so, the detritus of horses thrown up in predictable clots in a particular pattern, precisely where he'd have expected Hamilton to bolt across the street. And there, look again! A tuft of lint from a wool suit snagged in the rough splinters of a wooden sign-post, and the walking-stick scratch just a stride beyond, for a man of Hamilton's size and build.
He brushed the swarming beetles away from the sign-post and uttered an exclamation as they swarmed up his forearm instead. Shaking his arm to dislodge them, he bent forward to see. Yes, the man had run so fast and so wildly here that he'd stumbled against the post. If these wretched creatures would only leave it alone long enough to let him track down the fugitive and the secret that was worth his life –
The beetles on his arms found the needle-marks at his inner elbows and wriggled into them, climbing under his skin.
Shouting once in his disgust, he slapped his arms, once each, and clenched his fists, looking down to avoid the curious stares of passers-by. He knew to not touch them when Watson was near, but Watson was in Baker Street reading all the daily newspapers and agony columns for clues. He reached out to collect the evidence again, and again the insects swarmed him, keeping him from his work; he snatched his hands away again.
Of course he could not bring his violin along during field work, which was one of the two things to make them behave.
The other…
He truly did not want to do this, not in the middle of a case, but he had to quiet the voices so he could think in peace. He was on a case and the needle was for the times between cases, he knew this and lived by it, but the insects would not behave and the voices were getting angrier, impatient with his laggardly behaviour, shouting at him for not collecting the clue. Not a full injection, of course, he was the one who ruled this needle and not the other way round, but perhaps a dram would slow them enough.
He left the clue untouched and hailed a cab.
***
Watson was not at home when he returned, one part of his mind noted even as the rest of him was feverishly aimed at his room, the morocco case that held his relief, the needle and the bottle. The case in his desk drawer.
The case that should be in his desk drawer. Gone. His bottle of cocaine powder, normally on his shaving stand, gone. Needle, syringe, drug – gone.
Watson – gone.
He'd been charged with staying in and reading the papers, why had he left? Why had he disobeyed?
Taken it, the voices snarled, he's taken it all! He went in your room and took your things! Your word wasn't good enough for him and now he's playing Nanny with your privacy!
He started his search in Watson's room.
He'd turned half of 221b upside-down when Watson's angry words cut through the shrieking voices and the swarming insects scurrying amid the scattered papers, broken and overturned beakers, torn bedclothes. He swept his walking-stick under the couch one last time and leaped to his feet, stick still in hand, to confront the white-faced man. He wished to demand answers coolly and rationally – where had he gone, what had he done with his syringe, had he learned anything about Hamilton's background – but had to scream to hear himself over the voices (so enraged they did not flee when Watson appeared).
Watson shouted back – asking why he wanted his syringe in the middle of a case. Again with his tiresome accusations of addiction! He rattled off other distracting nonsense – how he, Holmes, looked terrible and ill, how sick with worry Watson was, how this all had to end whether he liked it or not.
The voices hissed at him to look, look at Watson, observe! The time, the placement of his watch, the furtiveness of his behaviour –
He told Watson (shrieked) that he'd come back from sending a wire. To whom, might he enquire? To Lestrade, asking to keep him under observation or lockdown? To Mycroft? To his damned Austrian specialist?
The look on Watson's face answered him.
Outsiders, the hysterical voices buzzed, strangers, his own brother, all behind his back– spying, tattling, betrayal! Betrayal!
Silence. Silence in his head for a long moment. He was standing, still holding his stick.
Watson lay on the floor before him. His head was bleeding.
Blood on his stick. The stick he'd raised in John Watson's defence a dozen times, stained now with John Watson's blood. He'd –
He told he told he talked about you told your secrets the voices whispered, embracing him. The beetles scratching at his arms clung to him.
He looked at Watson, groaning on the floor. He had done this, he himself.
What would he do – what had he done in the past – to any assailant who'd hurt John Watson? What had he threatened to do to that American gangster who'd barely scratched him?
And here, and now – all he wanted was his needle. If it was available right now he would sit on the floor beside this wounded man and inject himself.
No wonder the insects embraced him. He was more loathsome than the most horrific cockroach swarm in the vilest gutters of Lime Street.
He could not save himself. But he would save Watson from a repeat of his actions.
He headed upstairs to Watson's destroyed room for the item he'd flung on the bed.
***
The voices howled for the needle. The beetles bit and clawed his arms, begging for the sting and the sweet rush. He would silence them both. He'd turned on his friend like a hydrophobic dog and there was only one cure for such unhappy curs.
He'd picked the perfect place for this denouement – a foul, abandoned little house that had once contained a corpse and a message on the wall written in blood.
There was not a stick of furniture in the place; he sat on the floor, his back against the wall. His hands shook – shook for the drug and not out of fear – as he pulled out the Adams.
A lightning-bolt of pain hit his hand and he shouted as the gun flew wide. A cane – supple, well-used.
The voices howled and fled; the beetles shrieked and scurried away. Only two things could keep them at bay; one was the drug.
The other was the man glaring down at him – the piercing blue-eyed gaze all the more unsettling for the livid bruise and blood down one side of his face. He did know his methods, had deduced where he would go.
Rage and terror contorted that face even more than did the wound, loaded the words he spat – coward, pathetic, lost better and braver men than you and I won't let you join them, this ends, the case is suspended, you're coming if I have to tie your goddamned hands behind your back and have Lestrade keep you in a cell until I finish making the arrangements, do you understand me?
He wanted to tell Watson (plead, beg with him) that it was hopeless, he was lost to the monster in his blood, to save himself, walk away and let him finish this. But it was like looking up into a lion's face. There would be no capitulation.
The voices shrieked. He shook, and scratched at the beetles on his arms with his hurt hand. His heart hammered.
Eyes like blue steel. Voice as steely, telling him what would happen in the following days and how they were to prepare for their journey to the Continent – and promising a speedy trip to the hospital if he ever, ever tried to strike him again, or to attempt to take his own life.
The specialist it was, then. No drug. No case. Days of preparation, days of hell. Travel, and more hell in the hands of whatever bizarre treatment would be inflicted on him, only to fail and leave him worse than before.
He looked at the blood he had drawn. He deserved nothing less than hell.
He nodded.
He took the hand (the shaking hand) held out to him – and one glare stopped the swarming beetles from touching Watson as he rose to his feet.