The Lazarus Machine

Chapter 36

With John tucked away for the night, Sherlock went up to his room and adjusted his clothing to his comfort.  The dreadful neck cloth flew towards the fireplace and only the lack of aerodynamics inherent in a wadded strip of linen saved it from being ash.  The close-fitting jacket and waistcoat were next, replaced with a dark blue silk banyan which he let drape around him rather than tying it closed.  He slipped his feet out of his dress shoes and into a much more comfortable pair for around the house.

When he went past John's door downstairs, he could hear the man inside readying for bed, limping across the room, crawling between the rustling sheets and sighing as he settled in.  Light still glowed from underneath the door, brightly, as if a lamp had remained lit just beside the door.  Logic would indicate that the light would remain by the bedside so that John could extinguish it without walking across the room in the dark.  Conclusions: he meant it to remain lit; childish habit, unlikely; unfamiliar bed, likely; consistently woken by unpleasant dreams, possibly.

Sherlock continued on into the sitting room and glanced around at the crates of books stacked around.  He frowned.  Mycroft had deliberately instructed that the books be packed away in random order, instead of taking them off the shelves in the proper order so they could be more easily reshelved.  They appeared to be sorted due to size, height and then width.  It would take the rest of the night to reorganize them.

Sherlock emptied the first few boxes out onto the floor, made a few calculations in his head of the length of the available shelving, and began placing books where they would belong.  He drank the tea Matthews had left for him, though after the first two mouthfuls, it had gone cold.  He drank it anyway, in one long gulp.  It sloshed a bit uncomfortably in his belly for a few minutes, but the sensation was lost as Sherlock set his mind to the completion of the task before him.

By the time the fire had died down due to lack of attendance and the room began to chill, Sherlock had discovered that Mycroft had kept the second volume of his favorite treatise on medicinal herbs, his copy of Albini's Tabulae Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani and, most grievously, both volumes of Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates.  The villain.  All could be replaced, true, but the first two were already full of his notes and corrections and repeating himself on a new text would be tedious.

Sherlock was distracted from his indignation by a noise from John's room, part exclamation, part groan. 

Nightmares, then.  He tilted his head towards the sound, listening closely.  There was no sound for several minutes, but then the covers rustled and the bed creaked.  Feet hit the floor.  Floorboards creaked as footsteps padded slowly back and forth just the length of the bed as if John was using it for support.

Sherlock glanced at the face of the clock on the mantle, without moving from his kneeling position by the bookshelves.  Nearly half three and John was pacing clumsily in his room.  Sherlock continued to listen as John, for nearly half an hour, paced, never once sitting, never once climbing back into bed. 

Sherlock could hear him so clearly, he may have been sitting in the room watching.  That was one of the things Sherlock loved about the dark hours: so few other distractions.  People were mostly asleep and the world was as close to still as it ever got.  The flow of information slowed to a crawl and Sherlock's brain, well, it never rested or he would be dangerously bored, but it could process only the information Sherlock himself introduced.

When the ticking clock neared four, Sherlock heard John sigh and climb back into his bed.  After a few minutes, Sherlock stood, knees hardly stiff thanks to Mummy and her ridiculous insistence on hours of kneeling prayer when he was bad.  He wrapped his banyan tighter around his waist and installed himself on the sofa.  Mrs. Hudson had kindly left a knit blanket draped over the back, so he curled up with that, too.

Sleepless John filled Sherlock's mind.  He'd not come out of his room to see if Sherlock was still awake, doubtless assuming he wasn't.  He'd barely left the side of the bed, until the end when he'd stirred the dampened fire a little and added a little coal.  His step had not been steady or regular as he shuffled about.  Aside from that first noise upon waking, though, John hadn't made another sound that Sherlock could hear.  Sherlock's deduction turned from nightmare to pain, and pain regular enough that John was used to it, that he bore it without complaint.

That thought made Sherlock's nerves tingle in odd places, above his upper palate, in his throat.  He swallowed a few times and the feeling dissipated.  Odd.  Sherlock closed his eyes and listened more intently.  He couldn't hear John breathing beyond the wall separating them and above the flames in the fireplace.  John didn't snore and if he made any soft snuffling noises when he slept, they weren't loud enough to detect from here.

Still, Sherlock was content with the lack of further shuffling that John had fallen back asleep, and he let himself follow suit.