Laurie King - The Beekeeper's Apprentice

With a shriek of animal fury she broke. The gun rose and swung up to face Holmes, and I, my useless right hand lying limp on the table, picked up the heavy bottle of ink and threw it hard and straight at her hand. The room was split again by a flash and deafening report, and the gun flew spinning against the wall. She came out of the dark corner in a dive for the pistol, and reached it a moment, just an instant, before I hit her in a massive, launched tackle that sent us crashing into the shelves, showering us with books and bottles and pieces of equipment. She was immensely strong in her madness and rage, and she had the gun in her hand, but I held her down with my entire body, and my hand hung with all its strength onto her wrist, to turn the weapon away from Holmes, slowly, so slowly against her impossible strength, and then came a confused jumble of impressions, of something slipping and my left hand holding a hot, empty palm just as a third and completely deafening explosion went off beside my head, and the shock of it went through me like a physical jolt.

She stiffened beneath me in a curious protest, and coughed slightly, and then her right arm went limp and her left hand came down across my back. I lay stunned in her embrace for a moment until my eyes focussed on the gun,inches away from her arm, and I pushed the gun hard away from me so she could not reach it, and then thought, Oh my God, where had her second shot gone, and turned to see that Holmes was unhurt but something was wrong,something was suddenly very wrong with my right shoulder.

And then finally the pain came, the immense, overwhelming, shuddering roar of pain that built and beat at me, and I flung out my hand to Holmes and cried aloud as thunder filled my ears and I slid down into a deep well of black velvet.

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love.

Endless hours, what seemed weeks, washed in a sea of dark, muttering confusion, a labyrinth of blurred images and disconnected snatches of voices, speech from the other side of an invisible wall. The Dream without end, horror without an awakening, casting about for solid ground only to be caught up again by the pain and flung back into the roaring, hissing blackness. My brother's rumpled hair framed by the car window. Patricia Donleavy, gaunt and sick, lying in the spreading lake of incredibly red blood. A beaker of liquid copper sulphate, smashed bilious green and dripping slowly from the workbench above me. Donleavy again, standing above my hospital bed and offering to throw me from a cliff. Holmes, so still on the laboratory's tile floor, one lonely hand curled about his head. Cold and fever burned me, and I lay consumedby a universe of shivering nightmares.

Slowly, stubbornly, my body began to reassert itself. Slowly the fever burnt itself out, flickered, and died; gradually the drugs were cut back; and late one night I swam up towards rationality, to lie on my back looking incuriously up into the room from a point just below the surface.

A thin, shimmering film was fixed between me and the painted white ceiling, the white tile walls, the machinery above my head, the pair of grey eyes that looked calmly, quietly at me. I floated closer, bit by bit, and finally the bubble softly burst, the thin membrane collapsed. I blinked.

"Holmes," my lips said, though no sound entered the room.

"Yes, Russell." The eyes smiled. I watched them for several minutes, remotely aware that they were somehow important to me. I tried to reconstruct the circumstances, and though I could remember the events, their emotional overtones seemed, in retrospect, excessive. I closed my heavy-lidded eyes.

"Holmes," I whispered. "I am glad you're alive."

I slept, and woke again to find the morning sun blazing painfully through the window. The fuzzy glare was broken in several places by darker shapes, and as I squinted at them a figure moved to the source of the light, and there was the swish of curtains being drawn. With the room now at a tolerable level of dimness I could see Holmes standing on one side of the bed and a white-coated stranger on the other. White-coat laid firm, gentle fingers along the inside of my wrist. Holmes bent forward and settled my glasses onto my nose, then sat on the edge of the bed so I could see him. I could not move my head. He had shaved that morning, and I could see in intricate detail the pores of his hollow cheeks, the soft, powdery quality of the skin around his eyes, the slight sag to his features that told me he had not slept in some considerable time. But the eyes were calm, and a faint hint of a smile lay at the comer of his expressive mouth.

"Miss Russell?" I took my eyes from Holmes and looked at the doctor's earnest young face. "Welcome back, Miss Russell. You had us worried for a while, but you're going to be fine now. You have a broken collarbone, and you lost a great deal of blood, but other than one more scar for your collection there will be no lasting effect. Would you care for some water? Good. The sister will help you. Just a bit at a time until you get used to swallowing again. Mouth taste better now? Fine. Mr. Holmes, you may have five minutes. Don't let her try to talk too much. I shall see you later, Miss Russell." He and the nurse went out, and I heard his voice going down the hallway.

"Well, Russell. Our trap caught its prey, but it nearly took you with it. I had not intended quite such a generous sacrifice."

I licked my dry lips with a thick tongue.

"Sorry. Too slow. You hurt?"

"By no means, you reacted as quickly as I thought you might. Had you been slower her bullet might indeed have seriously disarranged my insides, but thanks to your father's ideas concerning women on the cricket field, your good left arm saved me from anything more than a bruised rib and a missing flap of skin the size of your finger. I am the one to apologise, Russell. Had I been faster to my feet the gun would not have gone off at all, and you would have an intact collarbone, and she would be sitting awaiting charges."

"Dead?"

"Oh yes, very. I shan't trouble you with the details now, because the white-coated people would not be happy if I raised your pulse, but she's dead and Scotland Yard is happily rooting about in her papers, finding things that will keep Lestrade busy for years. To say nothing of his American colleagues. That's right, shut your eyes for a while; it is bright in here." His voice faded. "Sleep now, Russ, I shan't be far away." The hard hospital bed rose up and wrapped itself around me. "Sleep now, my dear Russell."

Low voices woke me in the afternoon. The room was still dim, and my shoulder and head throbbed beneath the stiff dressings. A nurse bent over me, saw that I was awake, thrust a thermometer into my mouth, and started doing other things to various parts of me. When my mouth was free again I spoke. My voice sounded strange to my ears, and the pull of muscles sent twinges into my collarbone.

The routine was all too tediously familiar.

"A drink, please."

"Certainly, Miss. Let me raise the bed for you." The low voices had stopped, and as she cranked the handle my field of vision gradually dropped from the ceiling above the bed to include the bed itself and my visitors, rising from their chairs in the corner. The nursing sister held the glass for me, and I pulled methodically at the straw, ignoring the hurt of swallowing.

"More, Miss?"

"Not now, thank you, sister."

"Right-o, ring if you need me. Ten minutes, gentlemen, and see you don't tire her."

"Uncle John, your moustache is almost back to normal." (Doddering old fool. .)

"Hallo, dear Mary. You're looking a sight better than you were three days ago. They're good doctors here."