I awoke on the ground, staring dizzily at pavement that rocked and swayed like a storm-tossed sea. A strange buzzing filled my head, a wretched sound that reverberated throughout my skull causing my eyes to roll unfocused in their sockets. I smelled smoke, dust, and blood—my blood. The ground under my head was warm with it as it pooled steadily beneath my cheek. It was snowing. 

There was something oddly familiar about the street in which I lay, but my mind couldn’t place it. I had no idea how I’d gotten there, but I knew that I was dying. As I laid there, powerless and vaguely aware of the fact that my life was ebbing away, a strange, indistinct voice reached my ears. The voice called my name, echoing as if it were coming from out of a long, vast tunnel. I wasn’t sure if I could move, so I tilted my chin ever so slightly and looked above me. 

Ash and dust floated through the air dreamily, twinkling as it passed through shafts of sunlight among dense clouds of smoke and flickering orange flames. Everything was moving at half-speed, lazily, as though time itself was slowing down to draw out my last few moments in the world. It was cold, but I could feel the radiating heat of a great fire roaring close by. 

It’s rather peaceful, I thought, dying. 

Then the voice called my name again and I saw a dark, hazy shadow of a man running toward me out of the chaos. He was blurry and indistinct at first, then clearer as he drew close, kneeling over me. A look of grave concern was etched on his pale face, and panic raged in his clear blue eyes. He had a gash above his eye from which a curtain of blood flowed, staining the right side of his face. I knew him, but his name would not come to me. It was buried somewhere deep. A memory already consigned to the grave—a grave which I, too, was fast approaching.

“John!”

His lips moved, but the sound was delayed and scattered. It reached my ears in fits and starts. I was becoming agitated. All I wanted was to sleep, to drift away with the ash floating on the air and fall into nothingness, but the voice kept calling me back. It crashed around in my head like a crazed bird flinging itself against the bars of its cage in an effort to escape. 

“John! John!”

Slowly, the lips and the sounds they were making fell into sync. The world suddenly drew back into sharp focus. The buzzing in my head cleared, but in its wake a surge of pain like I’d never felt in all my life filled up every muscle and bone of my body. I could not think nor speak nor do anything but lie there and writhe with it, like a man trapped in a violent struggle with an invisible python. 

My tour of duty in the Afghan war schooled me in the realms of torture, trepidation, and tragedy. I have witnessed the horrors of men falling on every side, smelled burning flesh and heard the bloodcurdling screams of the dying. I’ve squirmed as the warm, sticky blood of some poor bastard dried to a crust on my flesh and watched as the light faded from his eyes. I’ve felt the air literally cut by a thousand whizzing bullets and the sudden, searing slice of a shot tearing into its mark. But nothing, nothing could ever possibly compare to this. 

I howled as wave after wave rolled over me, starting at the top of my bleeding skull and radiating all the way down to my toes. It was more than pain. It was a living terror that engulfed every inch of me until my nerves pulsed with it and I knew that at any moment my mind would break with sanity and I would be left with nothing but fear and agony. 

Surely death is better than this, I thought.

“Stay with me, John!” 

The voice again. So familiar, so earnest. I sensed the man to whom it belonged cared very much whether I lived or died. His throat constricted with fear, and there was panic behind his plea, but the voice didn’t understand. It couldn’t. It had never known this hell. How could it be so unreasonable, begging me to stay? 

“AAUGHH!” 

The guttural cry that erupted from my throat sounded so inhuman that at first I didn’t realize I had made the awful noise. 

“KILL…ME!” 

The words struggled out between swells of pain. 

“PLEASE…GOD…KILL ME!” 

I didn’t want to stay, not here, not in this torment. I wanted it to end. I wanted it done. My body convulsed and spasmed so severely that my bones threatened to crack.

The man was fumbling with something now: a small, leather-clad case he’d pulled out of the inside pocket of his coat. He withdrew a hypodermic syringe and held it in his shaking hand, then a tiny bottle of some silvery, shiny liquid. I saw him penetrate the lid with the needle and pull the stopper until the syringe was full. As I watched, I heard myself screaming. It sounded far off, as if my body and I were no longer one and I was slowly slipping away, drowning underneath the relentless, torturous flood. 

I was only barely conscious as he grabbed my arm with his left hand, pinned my shoulder down with his knee to keep it still, and plunged the needle into my vein. I felt the cold flood of liquid begin working its way up my arm. The next surge of pain rattled through me like a wild animal in the throes of death. I had an absurd thought of a severed snake’s head, twitching and biting pointlessly as the nerves fired their last. Another wave, but its strength was abating. My heart hammered away at what felt like three times its normal rate, my ears pulsing with every beat.

Then the demon that had been coursing through my body gave one final shudder and fell still. In the quiet that followed I simply laid there, barely breathing, staring up into the gray London sky. Suddenly my body, seemingly of its own will, drew in a great, ragged, wheezing breath. My nostrils and throat burned with the smoke filling the air, and I coughed violently. My body began to shake, my teeth chattering so hard I wondered why they didn’t break. The wound on my head was still bleeding.

“Can you hear me, John?”

For a moment I’d forgotten about the voice and the man it brought with it. His grip was strong on my arm as his lean form craned over me. Weakly, I looked up at my savior. His sharp, piercing eyes roved about my face, searching for some sign of my recovery. His features were marked with determination, a quality magnified by his thin nose and prominent chin. Dark hair framed the hawk-like face and, with a rush of recognition, the name I’d been seeking rose up out of the depths of near-death and found its way to my trembling lips.

“Holmes,” I rasped. The word was barely a whisper, a wisp of breath which condensed above my face in a tiny cloud and was gone.

Sherlock Holmes’s pale face flushed with relief. He gasped, closing his eyes and slumping forward momentarily with an immense sigh. His hand still held onto my arm fiercely as if he feared my soul might possibly slip away. I could not help feeling touched at this uncharacteristic expression of emotion, at the depth of love and loyalty hidden away beneath that astounding and sometimes infuriating intellect. In all our years together I’d always accredited the illustrious detective with an ample amount of brains, but with little heart, if any at all. The exposure moved me. 

“Holmes…” my voice faltered. “I didn’t know who you were.” The words felt like a confession, but my friend’s face split into a smile that further softened the sharp, alert features, diffusing them with a glow of camaraderie. 

“I shall have to forgive you on that account,” he grinned, and even though I was still very much worse for the wear, I found myself half-chuckling, half-coughing in between shaky breaths. Sirens wailed in the distance, swelling above the sound of the crackling flames. Gingerly, I looked around at the scene.

“Holmes, what happened?”

At this, my friend’s smiling face grew solemn once more. I still could not place where we were. Through the shroud of smoke I made out the carnage of a brick-front building. Its ragged edges gaped upward against the sky like a mouth open wide in some terrible wail. Smoke belched forth in large, rolling clouds that filled the air. The street was littered with debris—papers, glass, chunks of brick and flaming bits of wreckage. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it: the remains of a violin. 

It lay on the road about twenty feet from my head, blackened, smoldering, splintered into two, the strings feebly tethering the halves together. Still staring at the ruin of the instrument, I repeated my question.

“What happened?” 

My companion remained silent. The sirens shrieked all the louder as fire engines and police cars screeched to a halt around us, hemming us into the calamitous scene. I turned and looked up into Sherlock’s sober face.

“Holmes, where are we?”

“Baker Street, John,” he replied, his voice quivering. “It’s gone.” He surveyed the disaster as one might look upon a loved one in their final repose. I didn’t need my esteemed friend’s powers of perception to know that he was grieving the mornings of tea and armchairs, newspapers and new clients; the long afternoons of pacing, test tubes, writing and tobacco; the evenings of roaring fires, wine, whiskey, and serenades on the now mangled violin. Shock and horror mingled with the memories now rushing upon me. My mouth went uncomfortably dry.

“How?” I asked.

He turned his blazing eyes back to me and I read the answer in them before he spoke. I’d felt it somehow, known it from the moment the question had left my lips. He hesitated, and I willed him not to answer, for to speak would be to drag my shadowy, fearful assumption out into the light. He seemed to war within himself also, fighting against the truth now sitting heavily on the tip of his tongue. A small, sharp intake of breath and, finally, he spoke. 

“You blew it up, John…”