Nellie sat at the edge of the wooden bench, squeezed between a burly rancher who was more bear than man on one side and nothing on the other. As she tried to keep her balance on the plank that could barely hold one of her hips, let alone two, Nellie tried to look anything but the buttocks of the man standing in front of her. The train car wasn’t built to hold this many souls – as a matter of fact, it was meant to hold cargo, not people – and Nellie felt that she was breathing the air that everyone else had already taken a turn at. And everyone cramped together caused the temperature in the car to throttle, until it reached the point where Nellie wanted to jump outside and dip her feet in the beach of sandy snow.
But as many people as there were in the room, the conversations were at a murmur. She would have thought that there would be more firecrackers of excitement in the air. After all, if the rescue train hadn’t shown up when it had, then they would have made the front page of every paper when their bodies were eventually found. But then she thought of her own brushes with death, and how those moments stayed with her long after, like mucus rotting away in the lungs. It would be weeks, months, years even before the fear left them, and when it did, it would be as a nervous chuckle that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
Nellie watched curiously as the sea of murmurs suddenly began to part like a mouth about to yawn. Wondering who could be working their way through the crowd, Nellie peered through the forest of arms and gave a little gasp. She stood up and sat Ian down as gently as china. Her hand shaking a little, she took a scarf from her pocket and began dabbing away the blotches of blood that stained Ian’s face.
“I don’t need first aid,” Ian said dumbly, his eyes glazed. “It’s not my blood.”
“I guessed as much,” Nellie said as she scrubbed away at a stubborn spot of blood on Ian’s cheek. “It’s just that people ask questions if they see a bearded man wearing blood like rouge.” She lowered her voice a notch. “What happened?”
“I…I did something that the professor never thought I would do.”
“Professor? What professor?” Nellie wondered.
Ian ignored her. “I had no choice.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m not going to lie and tell you that whatever it is, it’s over. One thing I’ve learned about you is you know what the definition of obsession is.”
Nellie said this, in the hopes that Ian would respond with something sarcastic. Instead, Ian looked at her for a long moment and asked, “Do you remember the story of Heracles and the Twelve Labors?”
She wasn’t expecting that. “Vaguely.”
“How did Heracles kill the Hydra?”
“If I remember, after he decapitated each of the heads, he cauterized the wounds so that the monster couldn’t regrow them. May I ask why we’re talking about this?”
“Because I just found out that I have my own Hydra I have to kill.”
“And here I thought that I would never apply my knowledge of classical mythology to everyday life,” Nellie said, forcing a laugh.
But Ian’s mind was already elsewhere. He was ransacking his soul, desperately looking for something that he recognized. But everywhere he looked, all he saw was a crackling portrait of a grinning Professor Moriarty, his nemesis. And as Ian stepped closer and looked deep into the paint chips peeling off the canvas, he realized that they were the same color as what he saw the night before, when he was huddled in the blowing snow. It was that same, dangerous shade of white that was so dark that it was black, the lighthouse of color that tricked sailors into sailing on the rocks.
And that was when Ian reached an understanding. In the eternal night before, he had to shed his memories in order to survive, and while he did outlive the night, it had come with a terrible cost. Both Ian and Moriarty were forged from the same vein of iron: both were geniuses who had a venomous disregard for the society around them. The only thing that separated the two men was the memories that had polished Ian until he shone. It was through his encounters with people like the loyal Dr. Watson, the clever Irene Adler, his omnipotent brother Mycroft Holmes, and even Inspector Lestrade that Ian saw the heights of humanity where Moriarty could only see the lows.
With those memories gone, Ian thought, what separated him from Moriarty? And he realized that before he could save the world from the mad professor’s scheme, he was going to have to defeat the evil that was rising up inside of him like bile.