Over My Dead Body

by Dave Warner

  She went to speak but he started in.

  ‘Last night I felt a malaise, which I had never experienced before. Jealousy,’ he said. ‘There, I have admitted it. I was jealous.’

  She was so stunned her thoughts ran aground. ‘Of me?’

  ‘Of Benson, because he was with you. Oh dear, this is damnably awkward but I fear another opportunity may never present itself. From the way I feel when you are around me, and worse, when you are not, from the fact that just the faintest whiff of the perfume you wear explodes my being into a million colorful atoms, I deduce I must be in love with you.’

  Did he just say …?

  ‘Is this an experiment, Sherlock? Because if it is, it’s not really funny.’

  ‘It is an experiment for me. This is ground upon which I have never trodden but I assure you my sincerity is absolute. Of course, it is probably far too much to hope and definitely too much to expect, a reciprocity.’

  She began crying.

  ‘Oh dear, I see I overstepped the mark.’

  She could only shake her head. Finally, she managed to find words. ‘I feel the same way.’ She saw his eyes light up. ‘But I’ve failed you.’

  He looked at her with great tenderness. ‘You have not failed me, Watson. You have freed me.’

  Then he collapsed, pulling her down with him.

  ‘Is there any improvement?’

  Simone brought her over a warm tea; perhaps Holmes’ finest achievement – he had managed to teach Simone how to dunk a teabag. Georgette looked down at him now, stretched out on the sofa, sleeping.

  ‘No. His concentration is really short and he becomes disoriented quickly. He drifts in and out of the past.’

  It was five days since the events of Central Park. Within a minute or two of Holmes collapsing, Simone had arrived, moments ahead of police. They had just enough time to concoct a story. Holmes had been admitted to hospital. Georgette lied that he had fallen from the carriage while trying to rescue her. He had spent one night in hospital, his symptoms mirroring concussion enough for the story to fly. He had regained consciousness in the ambulance and been well enough to discharge himself from hospital after a ten-hour stay but his mental condition had deteriorated steadily and he had not been out of the apartment since.

  ‘They’re not going to charge me,’ announced Simone as she stroked Holmes’ forehead.

  ‘Nor should they,’ said Georgette.

  To remove Holmes as far as possible from the story, Simone had volunteered to say that she was the one who had shot Burgess with his own weapon that he had dropped when Georgette had tried to free herself.

  And so, driven by a desire for revenge, William Burgess had squandered the life of his remaining child.

  Simone said, ‘Dad interviewed Burgess again. He was the one who drove it, followed you, broke in here, and left the globe. It was Ryan who met up with Rebecca Chaney. His father killed her and then they both removed and stored the body. That’s when Ryan wrote on the mantlepiece mirror. Ryan dumped the body and his father called it in. Burgess is still blaming Dad, still thinks it’s all his fault his life fell apart.’

  From what they could glean from remaining family and friends, Ryan had struggled after the death of his mother and sister and, when his father had descended into alcoholism, Ryan had left the country and drifted aimlessly around Europe. It seemed that the older Burgess had located his son and brought him back home. When Ryan found his father sober, functioning and driven, he had joined his dark enterprise. ‘Like a cult,’ the police psych had said.

  ‘Is there anything you can try?’ asked Simone, giving the recumbent Holmes a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘I’m going to freeze him. I don’t see any alternative. I’ll keep looking for something that reverses the process.’

  ‘The blood transfusions don’t help?’

  ‘They help the physical side of things but not this disorientation.’

  ‘So it’s like Alzheimer’s?’

  ‘Not exactly. The symptoms are similar but there is no physical scarring in the brain, no lesions. My neurologist friend says it is more like a battery running down; if it could get a recharge, it would be fine.’

  But what was going to be the source of that recharge? That was the big problem. Looking at the brains of the hamsters, the neurologist had said they resembled those of people who had spent most of their lives malnourished. The physical weakness Holmes was experiencing was more a question of the brain transmitting to the muscles. The neurologist likened it to the effects of concussion, which Georgette had kind of intuited anyway. It might have suggested a way forwards; however, despite transfusions, massive doses of vitamins and protein supplements, both Amelia and Benji were now also showing signs of disorientation and physical weakness. Of all the hamsters, only Columbus powered on, but then, he was the most recent to be revived, so that was likely why.

  Mirabella had called, but Georgette had not returned the call. Benson had also been in touch. Rather than avoid him she told him straight that she just didn’t think she could be more than a friend.

  ‘Percy, hey?’

  She admitted she had discovered she had strong feelings for him.

  ‘He’s a lucky guy,’ Benson had said. Looking at Holmes now, he seemed anything but lucky. As for Benson, he had wasted no time calling Simone to line up a date.

  ‘You sure you don’t mind?’ asked Simone now as she stepped back from Holmes.

  ‘Of course not. I like Benson. And he might be good for you.’

  ‘When are you going to refreeze him?’ asked Simone.

  ‘Unless things change, this time tomorrow.’

  It was later in the afternoon and she was in the kitchen making some pea and ham soup for Holmes, more as a treat than for any medicinal benefit, when she heard him call out with the kind of vigor of old.

  ‘Watson, I believe I have it.’

  It was exciting to hear him so boisterous. Maybe the regime of protein shakes and heavy vitamin dosage was working. He strode into the kitchen and stopped.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry, I thought you were my friend Watson.’

  An icepick through the heart might have been easier to deal with. His face showed absolutely no recognition.

  ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ he said, bowing from the waist.

  ‘Georgette.’

  ‘Smells very nice, what you are cooking. One of the only meals I can actually make, pea and ham soup or boiled egg.’

  ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘If it is no trouble.’

  ‘No trouble. You can eat and wait for your friend. It is very cold out.’

  He stopped then and looked around confused. ‘I seem to be disoriented.’

  ‘You may have forgotten. You are in New York.’

  He shook his head, disturbed now, taking in the electric lights.

  ‘Perhaps you should lie down?’

  He played with the light switch. ‘I seem to know how to operate these but have no memory of when I learned it.’

  Her heart was breaking. ‘I believe Doctor Watson mentioned you had received a heavy blow to the head.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Yes. He said it might affect your memory for a time. Perhaps some soup will make you feel better?’

  She sat him down at the table and fed him the soup, watched his every mouthful. Before he had finished, he said, ‘You must forgive me, Georgette, but I feel immensely tired.’

  ‘Of course. Why don’t you rest yourself on the sofa?’

  He took himself back into the living room and lay down.

  She could wait no longer. She was going to have to return him to the state in which she had found him.

  Georgette had checked and rechecked the equipment. Everything was working. Amelia and Benji had already been placed into limbo without any issues but Columbus was still going strong. So far, she had managed to push away thoughts of what she must do after Holmes was in limbo but the charade could not continue. His body would need to be stored somew
here, identification papers would have to be produced. At least Holmes would be spared dealing with his celebrity. After his rest following the most recent lapse, he had awoken fully cognizant, except for having no memory that three hours earlier he had not even recognized her. But he had deduced from her reactions what had occurred.

  ‘I reverted, did I not?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had nodded solemnly then and said, ‘Then we must not delay. When I go back into that frozen limbo I wish the last thing I see to be your face.’

  And now there was no reason to stall. Simone had just arrived. Holmes was sitting quietly in the room where three months ago he had been resurrected.

  ‘It’s time,’ said Georgette.

  Holmes stood. Simone hugged him, started crying.

  ‘Just imagine it’s a long movie shoot on the South Pole,’ she blubbered.

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘And don’t forget me.’

  ‘Highly unlikely, Simone. Thank you for everything.’

  Simone discretely moved away and then it was just him, standing in front of her.

  ‘It has been quite an adventure, Watson.’

  She knew she was biting her lip, trying to not dissolve into a formless mess.

  ‘I’m going to miss you so much.’

  ‘And I you,’ he said, gently brushing the hair back from her forehead but there was no strength in his hand now.

  She seized his face and said, ‘I will do everything I can to bring you back.’

  And she kissed him as hard as she could, until she had no more air in her lungs.

  Holmes gently prised their bodies apart. His smile was wan but it was the same droll Holmes.

  ‘I shan’t be going anywhere.’

  And then he climbed into the capsule which was just like you saw for astronauts on those deep space movies, and he lay down face up.

  She leaned over him, trying to memorize every tiny line of his face.

  ‘In all my years before, I never experienced such pleasure as my time with you, Georgette. Thanks to you I was not so much reborn, as born.’

  Her tears were falling now, splashing his cheek and through them she could see moisture in his eyes.

  ‘I won’t ever leave you,’ she said. And then, summoning all her will, she punched the red button that slid the capsule lid closed, the signal for the gases to begin pumping.

  She pressed her face close to the perspex.

  He smiled up at her. And then the swirling white vapor covered him and the lid began to steam over thicker and thicker until she could just barely see a tiny sparkle of his eye … and then nothing.

  She forced the tears to stop and checked the gauges. Everything was working. Simone for once said nothing, letting her have this space as the monitors showed Holmes’ brain activity slowing, slowing … one beep … two …

  Gone.

  After about fifteen minutes of rechecking every hose and seal and gauge, she announced, ‘That’s it. He’s in limbo.’

  Simone opened her handbag and pulled out a bottle of tequila. ‘You need one of these.’

  ‘No,’ said Georgette, grabbing two small beakers. ‘I need more than one.’

  The alcohol dulled the pain and she could no longer see Holmes’ body but she could conjure his voice as if he were next to her. Simone poured them both another drink.

  ‘You and Benson could work,’ Georgette said now, thinking about it in a kind of alcohol-riddled way.

  ‘Maybe. I’m used to cops. And he’s into speed metal.’

  They clinked beakers, sipped.

  ‘Do you think there was any purpose in all this?’

  Simone was aware her sister was gesturing loosely with a beaker of tequila.

  ‘Sure. It brought us closer together, it gave Holmes life, and you love. Or maybe the other way around. You love and him life. Although this lab still reeks of …’ by the looks of it she was carefully selecting the right word, ‘… lab.’

  The alcohol worked. They both laughed.

  Simone continued. ‘It’s too clinical and drab and …’ she peered around. ‘Where’s my plant?’

  ‘Your own fault. You left open the cage. Columbus ate it.’

  ‘I’ll get you another. Geraniums, something he won’t like.’

  Georgette pulled herself up, instantly sober. Columbus ate it.

  Columbus ATE it.

  Columbus ate the fucking plant!

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said dropping the beaker which, being designed not to shatter, merely bounced. She turned back to the capsule, her mind running through options the way a dog who has been cooped up in a car crashes through a field.

  ‘Where did you get that plant? I want every single one of those freakers you can get your hands on.’

  NEW YORK 2021

  You hit the water from that height, it should be like hitting the ground after leaping from St Paul’s, but it must be something to do with the waterfall itself, breaking the surface tension because there is only black, then a few sparks in your head.

  And then you remember nothing.

  Or maybe you remember nothing anyway and this is just a trick of the brain, an invention as to what happened to you. Or maybe you are dead. Suddenly it feels very, very cold and looking up, you see you are in a heavy, heavy fog.

  What am I doing, you think? Am I lying in a canoe or the bottom of a boat looking up at the misty sky? Are these the clouds that surround eternity, the afterlife?

  No.

  Memories, newer ones, crowd like seagulls, tentatively on a gunwale. A mighty city, the future: New York.

  The mist is clearing.

  It is not a canoe, is it? It is a capsule. You were dying after being resurrected.

  Something is happening above you now, movement.

  Life.

  The mist is retreating rapidly, your lungs filling with air. A face slowly materializes.

  Her face.

  She is looking down upon you, smiling, and there has never been a more wondrous sight than this, than you …

  My dear Watson.

  AUTHOR NOTE

  On my twelfth birthday I was given a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. While I was very grateful – I was an avid reader of Biggles and other books at the time – I did not realize how profound an influence on me this book would have. No doubt the new six-stitcher I also got, or the cricket pads or Bobby Charlton Casdon Football game (which I still own) seemed just a fraction more exciting. Yet here I am, more than half-a-century on, and Holmes and Watson are still dogging me through my subconscious.

  In 2003, while my brain was burning through ideas for film and TV series, I had an inspiration that electrified me. What if Sherlock Holmes and Watson came back and Watson was a woman? This may have well come from me thinking about my own three-book crime series of the time where I had rock-and-roll detective Andrew ‘The Lizard’ Zirk in the Holmes role and his no-nonsense driver, Fleur, in the Watson role. I was excited by the possibilities of the restrained romance between them, and also of seeing Holmes in a contemporary setting. Whatever the exact stimulus, I immediately began developing the idea. At the time Conan Doyle’s works were still in copyright and there was very little in the way of Holmes’ material about.

  My first version was a feature script titled My Dear Watson. Set in the present, female scientist Georgette Watson leads an expedition and finds the frozen body of her long-lost relative who has been buried by an avalanche on the North Pole. Remarkably it thaws out and voila, the ‘body’ is alive. It turns out it is Holmes not Watson, who turned back early on their voyage after a bout of sea-sickness. Holmes accompanies Georgette to New York where she lives, and they investigate the death of one of her close friends.

  Trying to get a high-concept idea like this off the ground in Australia is impossible, so I took it to Los Angeles on a trip in 2005 and tried to pitch it with some other film ideas of mine. When I heard nothing, I switched to a TV series idea and was making good progress when the Conan Doyle copyright cleared
and the plethora of Sherlock Holmes movies started. I had reworked the concept to give Georgette Watson a connection to the NYPD. After getting caught up with other projects I finally decided to go all out with the TV series and had just got it ready to send out when a new TV series appeared out of the US featuring a female Watson. I have to say I was shattered. For seven years I had nursed this big new idea and now somebody else had done it – not only with a female Watson but based in New York!

  I plunged into Holmesian melancholy for years off the back of this. Unfortunately, it is a fact of life for Australian writers that even if we come up with an idea a decade before the US, it will inevitably be ignored by local broadcasters and producers until the US has caught up. I am not the first Aussie writer to be gazumped after coming up with a hot original idea.

  After I had finished my most recent novel, River of Salt, I thought, stuff it, my concept is still original because it features not simply a contemporary Holmes but the Victorian-era one in the present day. This time I decided I would not waste time trying to get it made as a screenplay but write it as a novel, which gives it the breadth to be more than just a crime story. It allows it to be a story of dislocation, of a man wondering where his place in the world is in 2020 – and that is not a question just for a 166 year old Holmes. It also opens up the possibility of exploring Watson more fully and looking at the relationship in a very different way. If you’ve made it to this part of the book, you likely enjoyed it but I thank you anyway for joining me on my adventure.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am so very fortunate to have Georgia Richter as my editor and I thank her for always making the manuscript better. She needed to be something of a Sherlock Holmes herself to solve the riddle of this manuscript. Because I was dealing with a relatively unfamiliar setting in New York, I have called on a number of New Yorkers past and present, to scan the manuscript for dumb mistakes, so I thank them for their time and efforts: Jack Feldstein, Christie Moore, Christopher Adamchek, Ro Hume and Rachel Skinner-O’Neill. Rachel was my agent way back when I first began working on the movie script that became the novel. Thanks too to Manju Hallisey in Virginia for her careful eye. Thanks also to my current agent Wanda Bergin and to Jane Fraser at Fremantle Press and all those on the Fremantle team including Claire Miller and Jen Bowden. None of this would be possible without my wonderful wife Nicole. And thanks to my late grandmother, Maude, for giving me that first Sherlock Holmes book all those years ago and introducing me to the genius of Conan Doyle and those masterful characters he created.