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In 1892, a Norwegian Traveller named Sigerson walks into a ghost story on the coastline of India. The ghost has the face of the dead Ilse Von Hoffmanstal. However Holmes doesn’t believe in ghosts, so either the woman in front of him in is a doppelganger, the lack of food truly is getting to him or that really is Von Hoffmanstal.
He’s not one for nostalgia or romanticism as Watson is. In the few years since they parted ways, Ilse’s youth is starting to fade. Her mouth is a bit pinched, there are hard little lines around her eyes and she wears a corset laced overly tight to compensate for slight weight gain. She is not Irene Adler, whom he had seen six months ago with her husband, looking dainty as ever even with a pregnancy stretching her womb. Von Hoffmanstl’s hard life has taken her toll on her frame. He wonders how she could have escaped in her fate in Japan.
Holmes doesn’t have to ponder this miracle long. Ilse glimpses him and glides across the beach; a smile bringing youth back to her face. “Holmes, what brings you to this shore.”
“Hoffmanstal was it?” he asks, rapping one of his fingers against his chin, “Or was it Gabrielle Valladon or Mrs Ashdown? Or do I pick one? I don’t expect you to explain the circumstances of your survival.”
She chuckles. “Same old Holmes. I assume there is also a reason for your presence here.” Ilse gestures with an arm that once held an umbrella. “As I recall you detest anything outside the city.”
“Watson’s work,” Holmes says lightly. “He doesn’t think they sell without a bit of romance. But doesn’t the truth need to be seem for the ugliness it brings.”
“I could ask the same thing.” She replies. “I’ve read the papers. The question earlier was rhetorical. I know about your death at Reichenbach Falls. Which clearly means the man before me is a stranger, just as Ilse herself is dead.”
“And talking in third person,” he adds, with a rueful laugh.
She holds a gloved hand to his mouth. “Clearly this means that two strangers have met on a shore. Do you see Holmes or Von Hoffmanstal here? I only see us.”
He placed a kiss to the tips of her fingers. “Well played, Madame.”
---
Sigerson and his nameless companion linger by ocean as they muse over how each body of water could carry its own scent despite them all being interconnected. Holmes wants to get more scientific and go into the process, but Sigerson is a traveller, nothing more, nothing less. There is no reason for Sigerson to point out the reason why coastline smells different than the other; Sigerson isn’t the great late consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. He’s a simple explorer who writes vapid articles that Holmes would have written. But that is whom Lars Sigerson is and who he shouldn’t.
And she is… whomever she chooses to be. Perhaps she hasn’t chosen to be anything since Mrs Ashdown was shot down in a hail of gunfire. She doesn’t mention how she escaped her fate. There are no tales of body doubles or escapes in the night. To be honest, Holmes is not sure how long they been on this private beach. They could have been there several eternities, as little sense that made.
“Do you know how fast the earth goes around the sun?” she idly asks as the tide laps at her shoes. Despite her slight weight gain and her overreaction to it (really it is a trifle compared to some and it escapes him as it does most men as why women fret so over their appearances when such things are ephemeral), at that moment, she looks frail enough to snap to pieces on the rocks. “Do you?”
“Oh, now you’re just mocking me,” he says. “I’ll never live that comment down.”
“It just amuses me, that is all,” Ilse the nameless says. “To think that you wouldn’t know such a fact. True or not?”
“True,” he says, “Astronomy bored me to tears. I slept through my lessons and as there was no need for it I never learned it.” Seeing her quirk a brow, he added, “I do know that a year is 365 days with the exception of leap years which make 366. But that knowledge is needed for my work.”
“But what if a killer was using astronomy as a way to kill people?”
He winced. “I’d grit my teeth and learn it, I suppose.”
“Is that your answer to everything? Your Watson… more right than you know.”
“Except on the height.”
“Of course,” she said, eyes mockingly wide.
“And the violin skill.”
“You’re too humble,” she said.
---
Sigerson has nothing to forgive the stranger beside him, but Holmes has every reason to side-eye Ilse. Women have always been the fly in the ointment. Even Irene Adler had been another deceptive lot. And A Scandal in Bohemia was published; he began to receive mail that speculated on his relationship with the contralto and how it unfolded. No doubt if he came back from dead, the child Irene and Godfrey now called their own would be changed from a daughter to a son and made Holmes’ son to boot. Fortunately Watson had not put the affair of Loch Ness Monster and the Lady who wasn’t to pen.
There were too many feelings between them and not all of them positive. They only meet on the shore. It seems wrong to go into the local town, wrong to be seen together. Because being seen together makes it real even in a town where two pale foreigners are nothing and the populace has never heard of Mr Sherlock Holmes.
There is no reason to linger this town, the rumour of one Moriarty’s ilk being there being entirely wrong. But Ilse doesn’t leave the town or for the matter the shore. She seems rooted there, almost fearful that if she leaves the world will eat her alive. Over the next weeks, Ilse loses weight beyond is healthy, stealing her away from the world.
“You don’t need to stay here,” she says when he raises his concern about her weight. “Worrying about little ole’ dead weight me.”
“It can really wait,” he insists as she presses into him, corpse cold, her blond hair mattered and lank.
---
She never lets him see her undressed. They’ve moved into his rented room together in the night and leave separately, unwilling to be seem as a them. People are not halves looking to be whole, they’re just people. And she’s seen his scars that he’s collected in his wanderings. He assumes that beneath Von Hoffmanstal’s once radiant silken dress (the ony one she has left, he notes) are myriad scars. Holmes finds himself curious as to what lies beneath her garb, but knows not to press.
Watson had been the same way with his war injuries. For all his prowess with the ladies, he knew from talking with Mary Morstan that Watson was very uncomfortable with showing ladies his scars. Ilse no doubt was similar. Still he couldn’t help but wonder. Sigerson isn’t supposed to wander about the stranger who sleeps in the bed across from him in a cotton nightdress that hides her form from sight.
Ilse had once slept in the nude nightly. She kicked the sheets aside on the train and when he had gone to retrieve them for her, he had got quite the eyeful. She had breasts that were small and pert with nipples that were surprisingly large and dark with areolas that were erect in the cool night air. Her stomach was flat and pleasing to look at if one preferred that sort of thing. And the hair between her legs, on her mound of Venus, was several shades darkness than that on her hair and dewy damp.
But women weren’t to be trusted and he covered her slim white, although pleasing to some, form up and climbed back into his own bunk. Throughout that long night he tried to tell himself that the woman whom at the time he thought was Gabrielle didn’t affect him. Tried to convince himself the dreams he had about another man’s wife were meaningless. It was his body’s nature to respond to stimulation and if his body chose stimulate itself to climax against the mattress whilst he slept against his brain’s better judgement, which was hardly his fault. And any reaction of his member stiffening between his legs at the sight of the false Gabrielle’s body was purely a chemical reaction.
A thinking man such as himself hardly cared about these matters, although if Holms admitted to himself they troubled him. Decades later, research will reveal that the brain is the centre of all emotion and you can no more divorce yourself from feelings than you can from your body. But Holmes knows none of this and believes in a sort of illogical logic. If he’s not chasing after the high of playing the game for the game’s sake, he’s going for the bite of syringe, waiting for the next case.
And women are the one thing that don’t fit in to this illogical logical world. Even this stranger that meets him daily on the shore in her ill-kept dress, like some sort of reminder of the old days. Wraithlike and vengeful looking, she sits on the rocks, her eyes sympathetic nonetheless. As if she has the audacity to forgive him. As if he had anything sins to be forgiven for.
What about Watson?
He’d understand. Eventually. Has a wife now. The guy springs back easily enough.
And Mycroft?
Probably didn’t even notice he was gone. Went back to procuring some more vintage spirits from Waterloo.
“Do you know how long you’ve been here?” she asks.
Holmes shrugs. “To be honest,” he admits, “I’ve lost track. It doesn’t really seem important anymore.”
From her rocky perch, Von Hoffmanstal shakes with silent laughter or maybe she’s crying out of misplaced pity. “That’s the nature of this place, Mr Holmes, you can be here for several eternities…”
“An eternity is forever,” he says wearily, head suddenly heavy and hot. And good God, when did his brow feel so hot?
She’s by side in a second. “Or in nothing at all. That is the nature of this place. It is what you want it to be.”
When you have eliminated the impossible…
“What I want?” he asks.
…whatever remains…
“You know what you want,” she says, “To be with her.”
…however improbable…
“Don’t you mean you?”
…must be the truth.
She leans in and whispers in his ear, “But Ilse Von Hoffmanstal is dead, Sherlock Holmes. She was executed in Japan. You know that. All you have left are your regrets.” She gestures at her frame. “Come now, you can’t even picture her properly. Memories fade. You hope she’s aged, but you’ve aged her up poorly. You want to be with her, but you don’t know how.” She pulls back so she can look into his eyes. “Don’t you find that a piteous existence for the great detective? No?”
“Perhaps.”
Von Hoffmanstal smirks. “I think you don’t want to be lonely anymore.”
She leans down and presses her lips to his, her tongue parting his own and slipping into his mouth to lick against his teeth in brief frustration before parting. His member stiffens partially under her clothed rear and she rearranges her skirt around it, so her improbably unclothed bottom can rub against it.
She’s not wearing anything underneath. The realization caused him to stiffen fully. Clearly this was a fault of his body and not his brain. Ilse grinned wicked and freeing him from his trousers and underneath, slid his cock into her warm slick heat.
Her skirt hid the act from view as she began to ride him on the beach, slowly at first, her inner muscles squeezing every time she came up. She didn’t say anything about the size of his member or how it compared to others, but since Holmes didn’t care, she didn’t care either.
She sped up presently, her breast bouncing it what was probably a most pleasing way. She rode him, seeking her own pleasure through, gyrating her hips, little mewing sounds escaping her lips with every buck and twist of her hips. She was a goddess in her own right and probably deserved to be somebody better than hawk-faced him.
Her nails cut into his hands as she pinned them to his sides. “Don’t you see what you’re missing?”
“A mess, I think.”
She huffs in anger. “If you think, you’re not doing it right.”
Von Hoffmanstal’s hands left his own and there was a sudden rip and buttons flew in all directions. She had ripped open his shirt. “You do know how those work, don’t you?”
“I know,” she says, “But I don’t care.” She said, pinching a firm flat nipple. Watching as he bucks up, she whispers, “I’m going to make you forget your own name.”
---
He doesn’t know who he is. He’s naked, sated, and pumping into the moist heat of a goddess in a silken dress, golden curls, and a parasol over her shoulder. He knows one thing. He loves her. He worships ever part of her. The parts seen and the parts unseen.
“I worship you,” he chants as another orgasm grips him.
“Yes,” she says and cups his face, strokes the sharp beak of his nose.
She’s his everything. His queen bee. His alpha and his omega. The beginning and the end. Where the oceans meets the sea.
He must see her, all of her. Without asking, his fingers pull at the neckline of her gown and pull.
The fragile silk rips too easily.
Beneath the silk the ruin of her flesh is too obvious.
Lars Sigerson blanches, but Sherlock Holmes sees the truth. “I see. You really are dead.”
Ilse Von Hoffmanstal or whatever she is, pulls the ripped gown around her, hiding the ruin of her chest around her. Of course it’s ruined, being executed will do that to you. He doesn’t know if the real Von Hoffmanstal looked like that on death, he can only imagine. He only has Mycroft’s world.
Perhaps she escaped and is exploring the world on a pirate ship. Or maybe she has become the queen of a nation and has her own army of spies. Or the more likely truth is nobody rescued Von Hoffmanstal and she died. The life of a spy is a short one and she had no regrets.
“I am.”
“So what is this place?”
“What do you think?”
“A punishment…”
She chuckles. “No. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Come… walk with me to the shore.”
They do. It’s awkward journey. He’s nude, sore in places he’s never been and there’s sand everywhere sand has no places being. Ilse lets the tide lap at her toes. She begins to foam in the heat. Holmes tries to draw her back from the tide. But she shakes her head.
“What do you think this is, Sherlock?” she asks, calling him by his given name.
“I have no idea,” he confesses, “For once I’m a loss.”
“Good morning, Mr Sherlock Holmes.” She dissolves on the next breaking wave.
---
In 1892, a Norwegian Traveller named Sigerson came down with a case of brain fever.
He was in a coma for two weeks.
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t believe in ghost stories. He believes in logic and fever dreams.
The End