Over My Dead Body

by Dave Warner

  8

  The biggest challenge playing in a musical with schoolboys, Simone had decided, was getting up in the morning. The boys all had sporting commitments right after school, and were basically on a nine p.m. curfew anyway, which for rehearsal left only lunch hour or the mornings before classes started. Lunch hour was out because it clashed with her pilates. That left early morning but she’d got too used to the night-owl lifestyle to give that up so had taken to coming straight from clubbing to the school. So here she was at nine in the morning removing her make-up after the rehearsal and feeling not even close to alive.

  The whole cast of the show except for Frank N. Furter, a very precious and bitchy gay kid, no doubt from some ultra-rich family, was gathered round picking up her pearls of wisdom. Somebody had asked her what her favorite role had been.

  ‘I luvvvved the Spark-Fix commercial. I had to play this hot cheerleader who was stuck in traffic because I hadn’t used Spark-Fix.’

  ‘You get any lines?’

  It was Ambrose the director, the kind of nerdy kid who was just so sweet you wanted to mix him with vodka.

  ‘No, Ambrose, I did not but the catering was amazing: mini-hot dogs, mini-burgers, even donuts. Once on Most Wanted I played a dead prostitute.’

  ‘That shouldn’t have been much of a stretch.’

  It was Frank N. Furter taking off his lipstick.

  She narrowed her eyes, was about to use a barrage of four-letter words but remembered she’d signed an agreement with the school and needed the money, so restrained herself.

  ‘Actually it was very challenging. My body was found crammed into a laundromat’s dryer.’

  Frank quipped, ‘Don’t tell me, your clothes shrank and you were nauseous for days.’

  A number of the boys laughed. The little shit was undermining her. Fortunately, Ambrose came to her rescue. He proffered a red rose.

  ‘Thank you for allowing me to share the stage with you, Simone.’

  Ambrose also played Brad to her Janet.

  ‘That’s so sweet, Ambrose. Okay guys, I have to fly. See you tomorrow.’

  She sashayed out of there showing Frank N. Furter how to strut. She could grab three hours shut-eye and still make pilates. As she approached her car – the school let her park in the bursar’s spot – she was blown away to see Georgette standing there. She looked upset.

  ‘He’s escaped.’

  Georgette’s brain had been scrambled. She’d spent hours wandering the streets of the Upper West Side near the lab, looking for Holmes the way you might look for an escaped red setter. Now she was scanning the area around Central Park while Simone drove and talked infuriating nonsense.

  ‘This is dumb crazy. You revived Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Yes. It all makes sense now. There were waterfalls upstream of the cemetery in Switzerland. The legend was that Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunged to their death after wrestling above the Reichenbach Falls. Readers were distraught and demanded Holmes be brought back.’

  ‘Sherlock-fucking-’Olmes.’ That horrible cockney accent of hers again. ‘And we’re related to his sidekick?’

  ‘Yes, John Watson’s our great-great-grandfather.’

  It was hopeless around here, so many people, dense traffic. In a crowd on the sidewalk, she saw a tweed jacket and her heart reared until she caught a better look of the man wearing it. Younger with dark curly hair. She was still trying to come to grips with it all herself.

  ‘I mean, apparently Holmes and Watson were real people.’

  ‘Of course they were. That guy Conan …’ Simone rummaged through the dumpster that was her brain for the name that Georgette guessed her sister had seen somewhere on a film credit, ‘… the Barbarian … he wrote books about them.’

  ‘Conan Doyle. Yes, but everyone thought they were fictional.’

  Simone turned towards her, sceptical. ‘Really?’

  ‘Simone!!!’ she screamed.

  Simone turned back to the road, jammed on the brakes, stopped an inch in front of a man with a white cane.

  ‘They shouldn’t be on the streets.’

  ‘He had the light.’

  Simone rolled her shoulders, like that didn’t count, returned to where she had left off. ‘I always thought they were real.’ She let out the clutch, started up again.

  ‘They are real.’

  ‘You just said they …’

  ‘Nobody, apart from you apparently, believed them to be real.’

  ‘And now you’ve lost him,’ said Simone sounding affronted. ‘How could you do that?’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting him to threaten me and then escape.’

  ‘Exactly. I always said you should do improv. Makes you think on your feet. We have to find him. You could win the Nobel Prize. And I could win an Oscar playing you winning the Nobel Prize.’

  Georgette was despairing. By now he could be anywhere.

  Simone said suddenly with authority, ‘We’re wasting our time. We don’t need to find him. He’s the world’s most famous detective. He’ll find you.’

  She did a U-turn to a crescendo of angry horns and not for the first time Georgette found herself stunned by the genius of her insouciant sister.

  When Georgette and Simone entered the foyer of the Rasmussen Biotech Medical Regeneration Department where her lab was housed, the daytime security guard hailed them before they had made it to the security gate.

  ‘Doctor Watson.’

  ‘Yes, Steven.’

  The guard walked forward, a small folded note in his hand. ‘Doctor Cherry said some homeless guy stopped her on her way in and asked this be delivered to you. He said a gentleman had engaged him to deliver it.’

  ‘Thank you, Steven.’

  Her fingers were trembling as she flipped it open and read.

  ‘Two blocks north, the small park. H.’

  Simone squeezed her head in for a look, whispered, ‘Is it him?’

  ‘Has to be.’

  It took them under ten minutes to reach the park. The day was fine but only grudgingly, the wind razor sharp. She realized she’d been cooped up in the lab long enough to miss all but autumn’s tail. A mother with one child in a stroller and another young child bravely feeding pigeons were the only occupants apart from a bum huddled in the far corner, an empty bottle by his side. Georgette couldn’t stifle a cry of frustration. He must have been and gone.

  Simone tried to reassure her. ‘He’ll be back. We can wait.’

  ‘What if he has some episode? Fits, collapses … his muscles haven’t been used in over one hundred years. As for his brain …’

  ‘Evening, ladies.’

  The bum was advancing towards them. Georgette was in no mood for him and was ready to tongue-lash him when his hunched shoulders and dragging gait vanished before her eyes. Standing before them was Holmes, looking match fit.

  Thrilled and relieved she said, ‘This is my …’

  ‘Sister,’ said Holmes, bowing.

  ‘Simone,’ said Simone. ‘I’m a huge fan. I was the first person you saw when you regained consciousness.’

  ‘I am appalled the memory is not burned into my brain. Delighted to meet you, Simone. As for your sister,’ his eyes drilled into Georgette, ‘I believe an apology is in order. Please accept mine. I was quite discombobulated. You really are, as you say, Doctor Watson.’

  Georgette felt herself flush. ‘And what would be my profession?’ asked Simone, twirling.

  ‘Your skin is white, I smell a faint trace of vodka consumed several hours ago, and that attire … yes, I would say without doubt, a lady of the night …,’ he offered the hint of a smile before adding, ‘… an actress.’

  Simone put her hands together and brought the fingers to her mouth in a show of astonishment and gasped, ‘How -’

  ‘There is a trace of theatrical makeup by the right-side of your temple, you project your voice seemingly without effort and you clearly love attention.’

  Simone beamed and said, ‘He
’s amazing!’

  Georgette could have brained her. She began, ‘Do you understand –’

  ‘It is November seventeenth in the year two thousand and twenty? Yes. Within minutes of my decamping from your laboratory it was apparent that either I was in the afterlife or in some world future to the one I remembered. The ubiquitous screens, some giant ones on top of buildings, others miniature, have not escaped me. I take it they can somehow show events happening at this exact moment in other parts of the world. New York has changed more than a little from when I was last here. I deduce that, apart from in Central Park, horses have been replaced by motor vehicles and people travel vast distances through vehicles of the air, called airplanes, that telephony has become an everyday facet of life through devices that can fit in the palm of a hand and, most impressive of all, milk is now sold in a paper carton. So, that leaves the most obvious question. Where might I find Wells?’

  ‘Wells Fargo?’ asked Simone. ‘I think there’s a branch about two blocks south.’

  ‘H.G. Wells. It is evident that he has managed to get his time machine to work. That is how I arrived here, is it not?’

  Georgette looked to Simone who looked back to Georgette.

  She said, ‘I think we should go to my apartment.’

  For the last forty odd minutes, Holmes had been reading Watson’s old diary while he sat on Georgette’s sofa. The world of instant electricity and gas heating appeared to have no strangeness to him. Like an adopted pet he had readily accepted his new reality, though to Georgette’s surprise he had barely nibbled at the blueberry muffins, the only food she’d had at the ready. He finished reading with a sigh, slapping the book together with the finality of a full stop.

  ‘Bless his soul. My dear, dear friend.’ He sipped his tea, grimaced. Simone had insisted on making it, saying she was an expert on the basis of having spent a week playing Miss Marple in an amateur production.

  Holmes recovered, said to Georgette, ‘So you went into cryogenics as a result of finding this diary?’

  Simone jumped in. ‘No, she went into it on account of falling into a frozen lake when she was a kid. She was dead for twenty minutes.’

  ‘A little over thirteen,’ said Georgette. ‘And, more correctly, cryonics.’

  Holmes said, ‘Remarkable. It is not unreasonable that three or four generations on, one finds the same kind of trade or profession: cobblers, solicitors, sea-captains … but that your interest came from plunging through ice, well, your predecessor, my dear colleague, would certainly ascribe it to divine intervention and for once I may find that a difficult argument to parry. It is as if you were meant to be the one who completed his work.’

  Georgette, who was more atheist than agnostic but who detested the idea of coincidence, could not escape the fact that he had parroted her own thoughts. ‘It is quite remarkable,’ she said.

  ‘Like you two are soul mates,’ added Simone, for whom everything could be reduced to a social media grabline.

  Georgette squirmed, said, ‘You must be starving.’ She indicated the muffins, was sure her anxiety would be obvious. ‘I’m sorry, they were all I had in the fridge but I could order something in?’

  ‘I have already eaten.’

  She wondered if he had found money in her lab. Not that she would have minded.

  ‘You conjecture how I was able to pay for it? There was a chap playing the violin, not badly but not well either, with the case open for gratuities. We came to an arrangement whereby I would play and we would each take half of any proceeds. It was soon apparent that the key to pecuniary success was playing to the most sympathetic audience so we relocated to an Italian area where my recital included a number of tunes that I recalled from my travels there. We were handsomely rewarded and I furnished myself with a delightful meal. The napkin I retained as I was using it to make notes with one of those marvellous nib-less pens my companion loaned me. I highly recommend the place.’

  With a flourish he produced a McDonald’s napkin with his scrawl across it. Simone turned on her smugly.

  ‘Told you there was nothing wrong with a little fast food.’

  Holmes swung back to Georgette. ‘You do not approve?’

  ‘The meals are high in sodium and fat.’

  ‘Just what the cold weather calls for, and believe me substantially tastier than boiled yak. Watson and I once found ourselves trekking across …’ He suddenly stopped and pointed to a print on the wall, van Gogh’s Irises.

  ‘You have one of the Dutchman’s paintings!’

  ‘Vincent van Gogh.’

  ‘I only knew him as the Dutchman. I liked his way with colors. I’m pleased to see he finally sold something. I always told Watson he would succeed. Your great-great-grandfather would have none of it: “Don’t look like any flowers I’ve ever seen.”’

  Holmes employed what to Georgette’s ear sounded like a Scottish accent but not as broad as her cousin Ian’s.

  Predictably, Simone gushed. ‘You’re amazing. Please, you have to help me with my Brit accents.’

  ‘He may have more urgent priorities,’ said Georgette with an edge even Simone couldn’t miss. She explained that van Gogh died impoverished but was now considered one of the world’s greatest artists.

  This seemed to prick Holmes’ high spirits. ‘Ah, time can be cruel,’ he said, and instantly turned inward seemingly overwhelmed by some deep reflection.

  Georgette gave him a moment before probing gently. ‘So, you have no memory of the events in Switzerland?’

  ‘None at all. My last clear memory is about two months before – February, eighteen ninety-one. It was bitterly cold. Most days I was disguised, walking the streets of East London trying to pick up clues on Jack the Ripper. Did they ever apprehend him?’

  ‘No, his identity remains a mystery.’

  ‘I had my suspicions.’

  This time it was her turn to jump in before Simone sidetracked him by asking what those were.

  ‘Forgive me if I seem impertinent,’ she was getting the hang of his speech now, ‘but you have always been considered a work of fiction, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.’

  Holmes stretched, then folded his arms. ‘Conan Doyle was a close friend of your great-great-grandfather. When he saw Watson’s notes on our case that he ultimately titled A Study In Scarlet, he convinced Watson that they should be made public and offered to write them, assuring us that nobody would believe them real. Amazingly, by publishing the story in a Christmas annual, he achieved that.’

  ‘But you kept your real names?’

  ‘Conan Doyle said that Watson was a common enough name that nobody except people from his club might recognize him. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said, and I quote, “is such a lurid name that nobody of sound mind will believe it belongs to a real person.” The police detectives, who were, I am afraid, as dim as he made out, did have their names altered, as too did the various protagonists and antagonists.’

  ‘Except for Moriarty?’

  Holmes looked shocked. ‘He wrote about Moriarty?’

  ‘Yes. In a story about … your demise.’

  Holmes stood, began pacing. ‘He must have felt that as I was dead, it mattered not. I had forbidden him to write about that evil fellow, lest it inspire more followers. The diary makes no mention of how I came to be on that ledge above the falls. I suppose that shall remain another mystery until my memory returns.’

  Simone was about to open her mouth but Georgette’s look stayed her.

  Georgette felt she should tread carefully here. ‘Actually, according to the books, you wrestled Moriarty and tumbled from the ledge together. Neither of you survived. Well, not originally.’

  His look told her to proceed.

  ‘There was such an outcry from your legions of fans that Conan Doyle … brought you back.’

  ‘Brought me back?’

  ‘Yes, you turned up alive after all.’

  Holmes made a small dismissive kind of grunt.

  Georgette said,
‘Perhaps John Watson needed the money to fund his mission to revive you.’

  Holmes nodded thoughtfully. ‘He would not have taken the money for himself and Conan Doyle could not have continued without his support.’

  Georgette said she would pick up a copy of the newer stories. Holmes thanked her.

  ‘And of Moriarty?’

  ‘You were the only body stored in that mausoleum.’

  Holmes was deadly serious. ‘We must thank the heavens for that.’

  Simone, who had begun sneaking pieces of muffin at an ever-increasing rate said, ‘So even back then, people didn’t think you were real?’

  ‘It is a strange quality of human beings that many who have no reason to imagine you real, still do, while those who have evidence in front of their eyes that you are flesh and blood refute it. One sensible thing Conan Doyle did was to provide an incorrect address. I never had rooms at Baker Street but around the corner in York Street. The Baker Street address was deluged with letters and these provided one or two interesting cases. The police and those who had used my services continued to recommend cases to me but the location was York street.

  ‘Now, I don’t wish to seem ungrateful but I would like to acquaint myself with something of the last one-hundred and twenty-nine years, so if you might point me in the direction of a public library …’

  Georgette scooped up her laptop. ‘I think you will find everything you need right here.’

  She demonstrated the capacity of a computer and the Internet, leaving Holmes thunderstruck. ‘You can google most anything,’ she explained, leaving empty the search box the way an angler dangles a lure. Holmes’ finger started diffidently on the keyboard. Georgette realized even typewriters had probably been quite new to him. But like a bird pecking on some foreign seed who discovers a pleasant taste, once Holmes had typed a few characters he increased his pace. She wondered what he had decided to google and craned her head to see the words ‘Sherlock Holmes’. Talk about vanity!

  ‘Now hit enter.’ She pointed and he did as commanded. His eyes lit up as an array of movie titles and books filled the screen. Simone materialized at his shoulder.