Chapter 1
Notes
Welcome to the mystery! I am so happy you’re here. I’ll pop in with notes before and/or after some chapters to say hi. If there’s anything that would be helpful to you as you read—content warnings, for example—please get in touch via the comments or the Contact page of the website. Because this is a mystery novel that relies on suspense and surprise, I’ve elected not to post anything that might be a spoiler, but I know some folks would prefer to have a heads-up for certain kinds of content and I’m happy to provide it if you reach out. (Also, just FYI, if this were fanfiction, it would be rated Explicit—i.e., there’s sexually explicit content in it.)
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Charles
There are things that are real and things that are not real, and by the time he is twenty-seven, Charles Shelley believes he knows the difference. He has learned the hard way to accept that while he will always long for the not-real things, the moment he stretches out his hand to touch them, they will become, like Midas’s daughter, solid and heavy and substantial; in a cruel alchemical twist he has witnessed too many times to count, the stuff of mist and memory and desire will turn as prosaic and ordinary as the pull of gravity. It’s a sort of reverse transmutation: the not-real into the real, and there is no undoing the process.
He has tried to explain what he means by not real to a number of people over the course of his life, and it’s never been easy. “Like time travel?” they ask. “Like unicorns?” And yes, time travel and unicorns count, he explains, or could count, but the not-real covers a lot more than that, including things that have already happened and things that can still happen, except for the fact that if they do, they will become real. He can tell something is not real by what it does to him: a brief glimpse of it overwhelms his vision, freezes his breath at the base of his throat, snags somewhere deep in his chest and tugs, hard, in the direction of elsewhere. He teeters on an invisible edge between his actual surroundings and whatever otherworldly place or state of being has him in its grip. The not-real can be vague or detailed, prolonged or fleeting, incoherent or painfully sharp. It’s the smell of the sea conjuring visions of a doomed ship, a lighthouse in the fog, the feel of thick rope and canvas under his rough fingers; it’s the passing sight of a woman, red curls and red shoes, turning away on a street corner as he drives past. It’s the age-old desire to pile suitcases in his car and escape to a sun-drenched, flowers-in-your-hair, gold-rush, end-of-the-American-highway California. It’s poets and poems, especially the old Romantics, shrouded in glorious ambiguity, their lives and loves twined together like silver-thin cobwebs, their faith in the emotional, the irrational, the mystical, the not-real. He wants these things—and thousands more—with an intermittent, breathtaking, painful longing, and sometimes he still agonizes over whether he will ever find them, glistening like a pearl or a jellyfish, fragile and perfect, in the palm of his hand.
But he knows it’s not possible. The point is that they can’t be found. They can’t exist. It isn’t just that he literally can’t be Percy Shelley and he can’t sail a three-masted ship; it’s that trying to catch hold of them, any of them, is like trying to grasp a soap bubble. Talk to the red-haired woman on the street corner, and all the million possibilities she was harboring beneath her pale skin fly out of her like butterflies departing, cloudlike, from a bush—set down roots in California and its honey-gold glow dulls in the increasing familiarity of the pines and the palms and the grit of the sand. The not-real must always be precisely that: not real. And that, of course, is why he wants it.
Charles Shelley is running away from the not-real like a fox from a hound: fast and hard and as if his life depends on it.
It’s about to catch up to him anyway.
The night before it all begins, Charles is staring at his computer, open to an ad on Craigslist:
Private investigator seeks assistant. Position primarily includes receptionist and secretarial duties but may extend to other miscellaneous tasks. 9-5 weekdays with additional hours as needed. Scheduling flexibility preferred. Enquire at 3636 Long St. during business hours or call (412)-555-8468.
Charles has an appointment the following morning to interview with this detective, whomever they may be, and he is trying to be realistic about it. He is trying to suppress the images and sensations that are rising up inside him as he gazes at the neat black text of the ad: a lit cigarette, a single hanging lamp above a desk upon which two shiny-shoed feet are crossed, the dry rustle of old files and the damp smell of one a.m.—no, he thinks, resisting the imagined chill of a dark clearing pooling with fog, no, he says to the acrid taste of pipe smoke, the fireplace heat, the scratching of a pen across paper as it records the adventures of the best and wisest man the world has ever known. No, no, no.
He digs his fingernails angrily into his palm. The biting pain helps, just a little, and he forces himself to conjure up the image of a balding, sweaty man, fifty or so, who spends his time trailing cheating spouses and picking through wastepaper baskets for old receipts and sordid letters. Charles pictures fetching him greasy lunches and making him coffee. He imagines offering tissues to drippy clients and filling out stacks of paperwork.
Would that really be better than his current job, writing feature articles for the second-largest Pittsburgh newspaper? It’s true, he’s had it up to here with young math champions and church pierogi cook-offs, arts festivals and fundraising marathons. Last week—and truthfully, this is what prompted the impulsive Craigslist job search—he was assigned an article on crosswalks. Crosswalks. But still, it’s a real job, relatively secure, far from some flight of fancy he knows better than to pursue.
Detectives. Honestly.
Charles slams his laptop shut and crosses to the window in one swift movement. The sliver of Murray Avenue he can see from behind the outcropping of the brick building next door is dark and quiet, a few Sunday-night stragglers heading home from the bars. After a moment he sighs and turns back around—might as well get some sleep. He brushes his teeth while staring moodily around his one-bedroom apartment. IKEA table. Target desk. Secondhand bedframe. Sedately abstract prints in muted colors bought in a fit of what seemed at the time to be maturity. On the old brown fridge, a set of magnets from London museums—V&A, Natural History, the National Portrait Gallery—collected during his semester abroad in college. He returns to the bathroom and spits in the sink. He picks up his floss and frowns at his mousy-haired, average-faced reflection.
“What happens when we get carried away about career prospects?” he asks himself sternly.
He pulls out a length of floss, snapping it off neatly at the end.
“We have anxiety attacks in front of several dozen of our students and drop out of graduate school,” he mutters.
He flosses the bottom row of teeth.
“Detectives, though,” he says to himself.
When Charles was young, in the years surrounding Y2K, he was obsessed with a TV show called Young Sherlock, a popular if low-budget production starring a kid named Julian Ellsworth. Julian Ellsworth wasn’t an actor. He was a real-life detective prodigy who solved actual cases written in by viewers. Despite the cheesy voiceovers and bad studio lighting, Charles never once doubted that he was a true genius. Both boys were aged ten to thirteen while the show was on the air (Julian’s birthday, wonderfully, was precisely one month after Charles’), and for those three years Charles wished with all the burning fervor of early adolescence to be a detective, and (more secretly) to join Julian Ellsworth on the TV show as his sidekick and best friend.
Charles raced home from school every Wednesday to perch on his sofa and watch Julian locate misplaced valuables, recapture lost pets, track down out-of-touch friends, and on one thrilling occasion crack a secret code somebody’s teenaged grandfather had made to conceal the location of letters to his sweetheart, which Julian Ellsworth had extracted, yellowing and miraculous, from beneath the floorboards of a dusty attic. Charles dreamed in private of magnifying glasses and footprints, devoured Sherlock Holmes and The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, longing with a painful and powerful ache for his own mysteries to solve and the genius it would take to solve them—an ache he would identify, much, much later, as the ache of the not-real. When it grew too strong to be sated by books and games of pretend, he would lie on his bed and stare unblinkingly at his poster of Julian Ellsworth, whose face was alight with that mischievously mysterious look he had, until tears started up in his eyes.
He finishes flossing and lies on his bed, trying to make his eyes focus on his cracked, discolored ceiling, eyes that stubbornly keep peering into some distant time and place, a world of footprints and magnifying glasses, a world beneath the world, an esoteric realm of secrets and shadows spreading out in invisible lines right beneath the eyes of the people too short-sighted to see it.
Piper
Piper met Lu Fairchild during the first week of graduate school. Piper was fresh from undergrad; Lu had taken a year off after finishing her B.A. at Smith to travel cross-country. She had seen the world’s largest pistachio in New Mexico and the world’s largest carousel in Wisconsin. She, like Piper, was planning to study queer theory and nineteenth-century British literature. That was all Piper had found out before they’d been made aware that since Lu was planning to work with Dr. Francis Pace, the historicist, and Piper was planning to work with Dr. Isabel Ortiz, the presentist, the two of them would not be friends. The fifth-year Ph.D. student of Dr. Ortiz’s who steered Piper gently towards a group of punch-clutching graduate students didn’t exactly put it so bluntly, but the fact became crystal clear almost at once as the geography of the English department conference room shifted like tectonic plates and opened up a chasm right down the middle of the cheese platter.
Piper met Lu more properly after they had both just received their M.A.s and were supposed to be making plans for their qualifying exam and subsequent dissertation. That year, Lu had a spectacular crisis over her project that caused her to abandon Pace and his cohort and join up with Ortiz’s crowd. The latter greeted the deserter with a certain amount of glee—it was well known that she’d been a favorite of Pace’s since joining the program—and once any lingering suspicions about her loyalty had been quelled, the field was clear for Piper and Lu to pick up the conversation they had dropped years before.
After two Big Azz Margaritas each at Mad Mex in Pittsburgh’s South Oakland neighborhood and two hours of enthusiastically agreeing that Sherlock Holmes’ loyal sidekick and biographer Dr. John Watson bottomed both sexually and epistemologically, Lu declared that she was utterly relieved to have abandoned strict historicist analysis and suggested that they celebrate by doing some bottoming of their own.
“Both of us?” Piper asked, dropping the last tortilla chip into the last soupy dregs of salsa, and then, “Sexually or epistemologically?”
Lu had grinned, a wicked, almost feral grin that Piper suddenly suspected they would spend the next few years chasing, and told them to make their best attempt at deduction.
By the time Lu disappears, Piper knows her as well as anybody else in the world, but they still think of her as a mystery. Their own life is quite transparent to them: their friendly but distant relationship with their parents, who live all the way out in California; their dissertation, on track to completion not this year but the next; their career aspirations, which, wretched job market permitting, will hopefully see them through to some small liberal arts college that isn’t too terribly white; and their friends, whom they love with quiet and steadfast devotion. They think themselves lucky to be in the orbit—for orbit is how they think of it—of Lu Fairchild, who is sharper and spikier than they are; who is estranged from her wealthy family (who gave her the unforgivable name Lucretia, which she considers a curse word if not an actual curse); who, in Piper’s starry eyes, seems to catapult herself over disciplinary fences with such aplomb that her professors, though concerned for her safety, can’t help but marvel at her daring; who sleeps with lesbians in Lawrenceville and soccer moms in Shadyside and, in the shitty apartment they share not far from campus, Piper.
By the time Lu disappears, Piper would absolutely describe themself as an epistemological bottom.
If you walk down Forbes Avenue, past Carnegie Mellon, past the Carnegie Library and the University of Pittsburgh, and turn right just before Schenley University extends its white-stone bulk into the overcrowded sprawl of South Oakland, you can slip off onto a side street and through a maze of half-dilapidated houses-turned-apartments (bikes chained to the porches, pizza boxes overflowing the trash cans, the occasional red Solo cup lying crushed under the stairs), and make your way around the back of a narrow three-story house with a sagging green awning and a charming iron railing, and then up a tight staircase and through the door of an apartment officially designated 2B but marked with a chalked-in 21 squeezed between the numbers, you can find yourself in 1898.
That’s where Piper is, this night, the night before it all begins: sitting in a stiff wingback armchair, ankles crossed atop a faded Persian rug, gazing absently at the façade of a mantelpiece on which rests a stack of letters affixed to the wood with a knife and a slipper full of tobacco. They hold a dark-grained pipe in their fingers and puff at it occasionally, though they never inhale enough to really feel its effects. They are dressed as Dr. John Watson.
They are Dr. John Watson, in some sense, for beneath the cravat and the collar and the smoking-jacket their body has adopted the man’s bearing (a trace of military stiffness even when relaxed, a slight skewing of the shoulder and the leg due to lingering war wounds) and their head is full of the good doctor’s thoughts: the details of a recent case, the import of an article on plastic surgery in renal distension in the latest edition of The Lancet, the swirling background images of crowded cobbled streets and gaslamps and the shepherd’s pie he ate for lunch and, over and under it all, the awareness that somewhere in the world exists the great detective, Watson’s dearest companion, Sherlock Holmes.
(Piper is there, too, and the memory of their own peanut-butter-and-jelly lunch, the progress of their dissertation chapter, the worries about their own dearest friend’s recent strange behavior impede their attempts to slip fully out of this century and into another; but they let these thoughts flit around in the back of their mind, knowing that the less attention they pay them the more they will fade away.)
Piper-as-Watson hopes Holmes will return this evening. Sometimes, when he is on a case, Holmes stays out all night without warning his friend, and Watson tries not to worry, tries not to feel hurt at being left out, but he is a simple and loyal man and this distance chafes at him. (Piper shifts in their chair, pushing back the echo of their own life, burying their own dissatisfaction with a similar recent experience deep in the back of their mind.) Normally the doctor is a settled, imperturbable man, but Holmes can shake up his soul like nothing else and Watson is restless tonight. He wants to feel Holmes’ unyielding grip on his wrist, the detective’s bruising grasp an anchor and a promise.
Footsteps on the stairs. Piper looks up sharply, heart quickening, and allows themself a moment of fierce hope that the person who’s about to walk through the door will be willing to slip into Sherlock Holmes tonight.
“Hello,” Piper says, and their voice comes out deep and upper-middle-class Londoner without conscious effort.
Lu Fairchild stands in the doorway for a long second, looking at Piper. Her face does something funny that Piper can’t interpret, like it’s struggling between two expressions, neither of which Lu wants to display. Everything contracts—eyes narrowing, eyebrows furrowing—at the same time as it opens up—lips parting just a little, neck tilting back—and then it all flattens out, in a matter of heartbeats, Lu’s face impassive and impenetrable; more even than it has been recently, and Piper’s heart sinks.
But then Lu crosses to them quickly and gives their wrist a tight squeeze. “Give me five minutes,” she says, her voice low with promise, “and I’ll be with you.”
Piper nods, their skin warming with the flush of anticipated pleasure and the sharpening edge of need, but Lu doesn’t move for a moment; she looks at Piper for another second—like she’s working up to saying something—before she turns away quickly and disappears into her bedroom. Piper breathes in slowly, wondering. It’s these moments of indecision, of hesitation, that worry them, that have been worrying them these past few weeks. It’s not that Lu is never inscrutable, but she does even the strangest things with absolute certainty, or if not certainty, with reckless indifference to the consequences of jumping into the unknown. Though she’s done nothing truly out of the ordinary yet, her recent tendency to pause halfway through sentences, to linger in doorways, to lose the thread of a conversation, has been making Piper nervous. Something isn’t right.
They sigh, unfolding themself from the armchair, trying to slip into being Watson once more. They cross to the small cloudy mirror beside the antique writing-desk, staring into its depths. Piper doesn’t look like most people’s image of the doctor-turned-biographer—their delicately-boned face, their skin medium-brown, their moustache spirit-gummed to their upper lip—but Piper feels good in Watson’s body, settling into it more easily than they often do into their own. They’ve long since made peace with the irony of assuming the identity of a British army doctor who helped prop up the British empire despite the fact that their parents were both born and raised in New Delhi. This version of Watson is theirs, and no one else’s; and they take their pleasure and their comfort where they want.
“Admiring yourself, my dear Watson?”
Lu-as-Holmes’ voice cuts across the sitting room, a sharp-edged drawl, tinged with acerbic amusement. Piper-as-Watson flushes, turning away from the mirror.
“Just waiting for you, Holmes.”
Lu-as-Holmes’ thin lips inch upwards in half a smile. “That seems to be your perpetual state of being, does it not? Waiting for me?”
Piper-as-Watson feels something hot flare up in their stomach and shifts uncomfortably, casting their eyes down.
“Look at me,” Lu-as-Holmes says sharply, and as if attached to a marionette string Piper-as-Watson’s head jerks up. “Are you ashamed to admit how much you want me?”
Piper’s cheeks grow hot under Lu’s unrelenting gaze. They swallow, uncertain, growing suddenly tongue-tied and nervous, losing the steadiness that comes with being the doctor.
“Answer me, Watson,” Lu-as-Holmes says commandingly, and Piper is pulled back into the fantasy world, into 1898.
“Yes,” they reply hoarsely, and the heat of embarrassment turns from sour to sweet. They look at Holmes through thick eyelashes. “Yes, Holmes, I am always waiting for you.”
Piper-as-Watson waits now, feeling the air in the room tighten as Holmes’ face flickers through satisfaction and consideration before turning predatory. “Waiting for me to do what, Watson?” Lu-as-Holmes asks, eyes dark and hooded. “I want to hear you say it.”
Piper-as-Watson swallows again. “Waiting for you to touch me, Holmes.”
“To touch you?” Lu-as-Holmes queries, raising an eyebrow.
Piper-as-Watson feels the urge to look away again, but suppresses it. “To—to take me,” they utter a bit breathlessly.
“Better,” Holmes murmurs, but does not move.
Watson’s cheeks burn. “I—please, Holmes.”
“Please?”
“Please, I—I want you to.”
“To touch you?”
“Yes, please, touch me.”
“And?”
Watson’s whole body feels flushed, exposed like a nerve under Holmes’ intense, dissecting gaze. It’s a painful sensation, but intoxicating, too.
“Take me. Please, I need you to, please—” His voice chokes on the plea, thick with the embarrassment of saying aloud what is already so obvious to them both. “I need you—”
“To take you?” Holmes smirks. “Take you where, my dear fellow?”
Watson nearly growls with frustration and arousal. Holmes loves to do this, to peel back his layers of protection and dignity and make him lay bare the raw truth of exactly what he wants, what he needs, which is Holmes, Holmes, always Holmes, he’d go to Holmes on his knees if he asked, hell, he’s already done just that more than once, why must Holmes always insist—
“To claim me, Holmes, I want you to claim me, make me yours—” Piper-as-Watson bursts out, the need, the desire, cutting through the jumble of confused half-ashamed thoughts and exploding into the room, bright and hot and true, the words Piper wants to say all the time—
“Yes,” Lu-as-Watson breathes, surging towards them, “you are mine, Watson, all mine,” and she crushes them back against the wallpaper, hands fumbling at Piper-as-Watson’s chest, pressing down on their bound breasts below the rough fabric of the waistcoat, tongue digging into their mouth, Piper can’t breathe and it’s glorious, Lu-as-Holmes consuming them, claiming them, and the intensity with which she’s focusing on them, all on them, she hasn’t felt this close in weeks, months, even. “Mine,” Lu whispers in Holmes’ voice.
“Yours,” Piper breathes back.
“What do you want,” Lu-as-Holmes hisses, biting at their ear. “What do you want me to do to you?”
“Anything,” Piper-as-Holmes admits, gasping, “anything you want, please—”
“What do you want—?”
“Anything, anything—”
“For once,” Lu pants, snaking her hand around Piper and grasping, making Piper gasp, “for once, let me do everything you want, Watson, just tell me what you want.”
“You,” Piper insists, “you, please, I don’t care, whatsoever you wish to give me, it’s enough, don’t you understand—oh God, yes, there—it’s enough as long as I’m yours, oh, yes, I don’t care if you—if you don’t let me climax, or, or if you make me spend myself again and again until I’m weeping, or—ah, God—bind my wrists and make me watch as you caress yourself, or—or fuck me and leave me on the floor if you like, as long as you leave marks I can look at later and know I’m yours—”
Lu lets out a cry, almost a sob, torn from her throat and oh God, Piper thinks frantically, they’ve gone way off the path, Piper’s Watson is needy but never like this, and Lu’s Holmes is always so much more in control, endlessly patient, wringing truths and moans and pleasures from his friend like he pulls clues from a crime scene, but now, now he is forcing Watson around, pushing him to the ground, face down on the carpet, both of them panting hard. Lu-as-Holmes scrabbles with Piper-as-Watson’s trousers as their hands clench and unclench, trying to find purchase on something as Piper hears the snick of a bottle opening and then Lu’s fingers are on them, inside them, oh God.
“Mine,” Lu-as-Holmes breaths, opening Piper up, sliding in a third finger as Piper gasps, eyelashes growing damp with want, need. “You’re mine.”
After a few endless minutes of choked-off moans Lu’s fingers disappear. Piper groans in disappointed frustration but a few seconds later they feel a cool slick length of silicone lined up against their ass.
“Deep breath, my dear fellow,” Lu instructs through gritted teeth, and pushes home.
Piper feels themself drowning in sensation as Lu fucks them swift and hard, the strap-on almost painfully big, eclipsing all other thoughts and feelings except yours and the sharp bite of Lu’s teeth as she sucks bruises onto Piper’s neck. Piper can feel their arms rough against the carpet, rug burns later, good, more marks, more proof—
“Watson—”
“Holmes—”
With a fumble of fingers it all comes to a head. Both of them convulsing, whiteness briefly overtaking Piper’s vision, somebody shouting—and then the slow terrible return to themself.
Piper hates this part, hates the feeling of waking up again.
“Bed,” Lu murmurs from beside them, in her own voice. She slides a hand down Piper’s shoulder, still encased in the smoking-jacket, now badly rumpled. “Let’s get you into bed.”
Piper squeezes their eyes shut, fighting against the onslaught of sensation that reminds them it is 2015, that their body is merely their own, that they are themself and Lu is Lu…
“Come along, Watson,” Lu whispers softly, British accent creeping in once more. Piper resists for a moment and then relaxes into it, letting go.
“Yes, Holmes,” they mumble obediently, and allow Holmes to help them to their feet, to lead them to their bedroom and strip their clothes gently from their body. Lu fetches a wet rag and wipes them both down as Piper lets themself feel fuzzy, sleepy, only half there.
“Stay with me?” they murmur plaintively, allowing the filters that would normally stop them from asking such a question in such a tone to remain offline, just for tonight.
There is silence for a moment. Then Lu’s voice comes back, low, uncommonly soft.
“Of course,” she says. “Of course I will.”
She slides into bed, wrapping her naked arm around Piper’s waist, pulling them close. Piper drifts slowly off to sleep, feeling warm, safe, at home.
When Piper wakes up the next morning, Lu is gone.