Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (38 page)

Jim and his gang hadn’t bothered John again. He wasn’t sure why.

Sherlock turned the page of his textbook and began another sheet of problems. John couldn’t explain it, but it was hard to take your eyes off Sherlock. John had always been the kind of student who got told off for gazing out of the window, but these days he found his gaze gravitating toward Sherlock instead. Whatever Sherlock was doing, be it excitedly explaining his theories as to why Mr Harrison was the school disco flasher, eating his lunch or simply doing nothing at all, John found himself watching, head turning like a compass needle always pointing north. He’d noticed other students doing it too.

John wasn’t quite sure how to articulate this particular annoyance, so he wrote ‘
attention whore
’ and stared at the big blue letters for a moment. He was aware this wasn’t quite fair of him, but he couldn’t work out how to say
‘commands the attention of any room he’s in’
without sounding a bit, well, gay.

“You left out my amazing good looks.”

It was true, Sherlock did have the kind of good looks that you expected to see on a poster pasted inside some girl’s locker.

His hand started to write ‘
good looks
’ before his brain caught up and figured out what he was doing.

“Who said this was about you?” John thought he’d been clever by leaving the list untitled.

Sherlock smirked, and went back to his equations. (Impossible to hide anything from.)

John hid the list with his left hand, as Sherlock was on his left, and wrote ‘
SMUG GIT,
’ in sharp blue letters.

“So we’re on for later, yeah?” asked Sherlock.

This was another problem with Sherlock, John mused. He was very difficult to say ‘no’ to.

“Sure.” Damn it.

After class, John went to meet Sherlock at the bike sheds, where the students went if they wanted a sneaky smoke or a secret snog with one of the girls from the Catholic school.

Sherlock was waiting for him, lighting up one of his Mayfairs.

John hated the cool way that Sherlock smoked. And hated how good he looked in that black coat. If John had tried either of those things himself, he’d have had the same effect as a sparrow sticking raven feathers to its wings and pretending it was dark and interesting.

The problem was, thought John, the real problem was that he’d been perfectly happy assuming he was straight, before he’d met Sherlock. He’d liked girls, he’d liked the way they felt and the way they looked in tight clothes; still did, in fact, only now he was noticing the same things about Sherlock, too.

“You’re too tall for this,” John told him, reaching up to Sherlock and locking his hands behind his neck, pulling the other boy down to his level.

Sherlock quirked one dark eyebrow. “Add it to your list.”

One thing John liked about Sherlock, one thing he liked very much, was the way he kissed.

Here the legible part of the extract ends, as the author has scribbled deep, angry biro marks all over the pages, with notes such as ‘stupid, stupid!’ ‘high school story = dead giveaway, idiot’ and ‘NEVER PUBLISH THIS’ scrawled in the margins.

J
ANE WASN
’
T SURE
what she expected to find when she reached the school roof, but it certainly wasn’t Charlotte standing on the edge of the building. She had Jane’s notebook in her hands and looked as if she were about to leap onto the pavement four floors below. Jane’s heart jumped into her throat.

“Don’t jump.” She couldn’t live with herself if Charlotte jumped, she couldn’t live without—

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Oh, thank god.” Eric was nowhere to be seen. Now Jane thought about it, Charlotte didn’t seem so much like she were about to leap, more like she was watching something below. She had another horrible thought. “What did you do with Eric?”

Charlotte smirked, and gestured over the roof ledge.

“You didn’t...”

“Nope. I threw his iPhone into the road.”

“Good aim.” Jane came forward, peering over ledge, into the playground and the school gates and the busy street beyond. “I hope he gets hit by traffic.”

“But imagine some poor sod having to go to prison just because they’d hit
Eric Sadler
.”

“Prison? He’s a lower life form. It wouldn’t even be like hitting someone’s dog, more like hitting a squirrel.”

“A mangy pigeon.” Charlotte offered.

“A rat. A really disgusting one.” The girls grinned, and then Jane broke Charlotte’s gaze awkwardly. “So what did the rat say to you?”

“He said a lot of mean things about you, about me. There was truth in there too, but... nothing I hadn’t already worked out for myself, over the last few days.”

“He showed you the book?” Jane felt ill.

“Yes. But you didn’t have to put us in a high school for me to realise who you were writing about, all this time.” Charlotte looked angry.

The void was back in Jane’s insides. This was starting to feel like the end of something: denial, maybe. Friendship, possibly.

“I’m sorry. I’ll delete all the fics, I’ll stop sitting next to you in class, I’ll understand if you never want to talk to me again—”

“Why did you lie to me?”

Jane was taken aback. “Lie to you? I didn’t lie, I—”

“You hid your feelings, you didn’t tell me what you were going through. We could have talked about this. I might have understood. I could have helped!”

“You might have understood?”

Charlotte sighed, exasperated. “In all the time you’ve known me, have you ever known me to show any interest in boys?”

“No.” Jane thought about it. “You’ve never shown any interest in girls, either.”

“There is one girl I spend a lot of time with.”

“Oh. Um.”

The two girls were silent.

“So does that mean we can—” Jane left the question unspoken. Do what? Kiss, date, hook up? Pretend like Jane wasn’t the creepiest creeper who ever creeped?

“I think... I think I need some time. You’ve made it weird, now. Studying me, how I dress, how I talk. Publishing it online all this time. We’re not Sherlock and John, Jane, we’re you and me.”

Charlotte reached into her coat pocket for her Mayfairs, looked as if she were about to light one, saw Jane watching and put it back. “I’m going to have to change brands, aren’t I.”

“I’m really sorry, Charlotte.” Jane felt tears pricking at the corner of her eye. “Really, really sorry. I can delete the fics, I mean it. All they were—it was a way to deal with how I felt. Writing it out on the page made it feel like fiction, something that wasn’t really happening to me.” Yes, there was a tear. She was actually crying now, and her face would go all red and blotchy and this was not what she needed. Jane cursed the way her tear ducts had betrayed her. “I couldn’t talk about it with my parents, you know what they’re like. They were heartbroken when I left Eric. I don’t know how they’d take the news I was into girls...”

“Oh hey, look, don’t cry.” Charlotte hugged her tentatively. “And don’t delete the fics, you’ve worked hard on them. You’re internet famous. Well, you’re a bit internet famous. A little bit.”

Jane grinned the kind of soppy grin you make when someone makes you laugh through the tears, and they stayed hugging for a little too long.

There was some shouting from below, and they saw Eric pointing up at the roof, speaking to a teacher. As the girls made a quick break for the fire escape and the staircase leading below, Charlotte shouted, “I didn’t know you liked Star Force.”

“You read that one, then? Not my best work.”

“There’s a movie out next month.” There was, it was one of the remakes with all the lens flare. “I’d been planning to see it. Seehow badly they get it wrong.” Charlotte jumped a few more stairs, then said thoughtfully, “You want to come with me?

Jane almost stopped dead in her tracks. Charlotte wanted to see a movie. With her. They’d seen movies before, but did this mean she wanted to
see a movie
with her? Maybe they’d even go for dinner, too. Jane stopped herself—she knew that anything that happened between them now would have to happen slowly, if it happened at all. “Sure. I’d love to.”

“It’s a date,” said Charlotte.

“Is it?”

“I think it could turn out to be, yeah.”

Guy Adams
(guyadamsauthor.com) has written far too many books. In recent years these have included: the
Heaven’s Gate
Trilogy for Solaris; the
Deadbeat
books for Titan and the
Clown Service
series for Del Rey UK.

He has, as yet, not written far too many comics but he’s working on it: he’s written a number of strips for
2000 AD
including a reinvention of Grant Morrison’s
Ulysses Sweet: Maniac for Hire
, scripted
The Engine
for Madefire and is the co-creator of
Goldtiger
with artist Jimmy Broxton.

A lifelong fan of Sherlock Holmes (once playing him, rather badly on stage) he has written two original novels,
The Breath of God
and
The Army of Dr Moreau
, as well as a couple of nonfiction books.

J. E. Cohen
’s (julie-cohen.com) life changed at age eleven, when she bought
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
because it was the biggest book in the shop. She joined the Baker Street Irregulars at sixteen, and at age twenty-two moved to England to study Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement in the Cottingley fairy photographs. Despite not being able to draw, she is an official cartoonist for
The Sherlock Holmes Journal,
with her feature “Overrun By Oysters.” Under the name Julie Cohen she writes novels which have sold nearly a million copies worldwide. Tweet her @julie_cohen.

Joan De La Haye
(joandelahaye.com) writes horror and some very twisted thrillers. She invariably wakes up in the middle of the night, because she’s figured out yet another freaky way to mess with her already screwed up characters.

Joan is interested in some seriously weird stuff. That’s probably also one of the reasons she writes horror.

Her novels,
Shadows
and
Requiem in E Sharp
, as well as her novella,
Oasis
, are published by Fox Spirit (foxspirit.co.uk).

You can find Joan on her website and follow her on Twitter @JoanDeLaHaye.

Ian Edginton
is a
New York Times
bestselling author and multiple Eisner Award nominee.

His recent titles include the green apocalypse saga
The Hinterkind
for DC/Vertigo;
Steed and Mrs Peel
for BOOM, the steam and clock-punk series
Stickleback
,
Ampney Crucis Investigates
and
Brass Sun
for the legendary UK science fiction weekly,
2000 AD
; game properties
Dead Space: Liberation
and
The Evil Within
for Titan Books and the audio adventure
Torchwood: Army of One
for the BBC.

He has adapted the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes novels into a series of graphic novels for Self Made Hero, as well writing several volumes of Holmes apocrypha entitled
The Victorian Undead
. He has also adapted H. G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds
as well as several highly acclaimed sequels,
Scarlet Traces
and
Scarlet Traces: the Great Game
.

He lives and works in England. He keeps a Bee.

Kelly Hale
(kellyhale.blogspot.com) lives in the magical city of Portlandia where the streets are paved with espresso beans and the garbage recycles itself. She is the author of many short stories, three novels in progress, a play, a novella, some overwrought poetry, a co-authored TV tie-n novel of the Doctor Who variety, and her award winning novel
Erasing Sherlock
. She is the proud mother of a stand-up comic, a tall ship sailor, and grandmother to geeks in process. You can watch her flail, struggle and ultimately triumph on her blog “Mistress of the Jolly Dark.”

Although she’s best known for science fiction, paranormal, horror, and fantasy,
Gini Koch
’s (ginikoch.com) first literary love is mystery and suspense, and her first literary crush, at the tender age of 7, was on Sherlock Holmes. Gini writes the fast, fresh and funny
Alien
/Katherine “Kitty” Katt series for DAW Books, the
Necropolis Enforcement Files
series, and the
Martian Alliance Chronicles
series for Musa Publishing, and as G. J. Koch she writes the Alexander Outland series. Gini’s made the most of multiple personality disorder by writing under a variety of other pen names as well, including Anita Ensal, Jemma Chase, A. E. Stanton, and J. C. Koch. Her dark secret is that pretty much everything she writes has a mystery in it— because mysteries are the spice of literary life.

Jenni Hill
has written short stories for several anthologies and is also working on a sci-fi novel.

She lives in London with her husband and their several million books, but you can find her on Twitter @Jenni_Hill.

First published at the tender age of 8,
Kasey Lansdale
is the author of numerous short stories as well as editor to several anthology collections. Her most recent project,
Impossible Monsters
, was released from Subterranean Press summer of 2013. A full time singer/songwriter, she has also just completed her first novel. She is the daughter of acclaimed author, Joe R. Lansdale.

James Lovegrove
(jameslovegrove.com) was born on Christmas Eve 1965 and is the author of more than 40 books. His novels include
The Hope
,
Days
,
Untied Kingdom
,
Provender Gleed
, the
New York Times
bestselling Pantheon series – so far
The Age Of Ra
,
The Age Of Zeus
,
The Age Of Odin
,
Age Of Aztec
,
Age Of Voodoo
and
Age Of Shiva
, plus a collection of three novellas,
Age Of Godpunk
– and
Redlaw
and
Redlaw: Red Eye
, the first two volumes in a trilogy about a policeman charged with protecting humans from vampires and vice versa. He has produced two Sherlock Holmes novels,
The Stuff Of Nightmares
and
Gods Of War
.