Chapter Text
Scene: The Road Through the Dark
INT. 221B BAKER STREET, SITTING ROOM – NIGHT
The fog had rolled in with the evening, settling over Baker Street like a soiled shroud. The lamp outside was a blurred coin of light. Inside, the sitting-room clock ticked with an accusatory volume.
Sherlock sat at the table, his coat already on, Pandora’s ledger closed before him. One hand rested upon the cover as if holding a lid on a boiling pot.
Mycroft occupied the sofa, hat on his knee, his expression the particular scowl that meant he was dissecting a problem and finding the anatomy foul. A thin ribbon of cigar smoke curled from the tray at his elbow.
Enola paced before the hearth in her boy’s jacket and trousers, a sharp, restless shadow. She crossed to the window, peered into the murk, and swung back again.
Watson stood by the sideboard, a glass of brandy in his hand, untasted.
“She should have been home an hour ago,” Enola said, the words cutting the quiet.
“Two minutes past the hour,” Sherlock corrected, his voice devoid of inflection. “Your exaggeration does not alter the chronology, only your own agitation.”
“And your pedantry does not disguise the fact that you are not in your chair deducting the wear on a cabman’s boot,” she shot back. “You are sitting there, perfectly still, which means you are worried sick.”
Watson glanced at the clock. “It is past ten. The hospital’s main doors close at nine. Even allowing for waiting on a porter’s report and settling Brown, the walk from there to here is twenty-five minutes at a civilian pace.”
“My telegram from the hospital,” Mycroft intoned, his voice a low rumble in the quiet room, “confirms Brown has a simple fracture of the tibia and has been sedated. The horses are stabled. The implication is that they arrived in good order.”
“And she sent word ahead,” Enola added, pointing to a slip of paper on the table. “By one of your Irregulars. Wiggins, I’d wager. He knocked like a woodpecker and scarpered. The note is there.”
Sherlock’s gaze did not leave the middle distance. He had read the note the moment it arrived. The ink had been fresh, the script hurried but legible. He had estimated its age: no more than two hours old. Accounting for the boy’s run from the hospital district… “The message was written approximately one hour and forty minutes ago,” he stated. “The hospital is an hour’s walk. She is forty minutes overdue.”
“If she left immediately after sending it,” Watson countered, finally setting his glass down. “But if she waited for a definitive prognosis on Brown, or to ensure Jamie was settled… that could add another half-hour, even an hour. She is precise, but she is also kind. She would not leave without certainty.”
“Precisely,” Enola said, her pacing resuming. “So she is walking. Alone. In this soup. With a six-year-old on her back and a basket of whatever reagent you needed authenticated.”
Sherlock did not dispute it. The errand had been minor—a sealed vial and a note for a chemist at St. Bartholomew’s, a final verification on a compound linked to the Silk Road ledgers. Brown had insisted on driving her. It had seemed perfectly benign in the grey afternoon light.
“An omnibus would be mired in this,” Sherlock said, more to himself than them. “And Brown is a competent driver.”
“Was competent until a dray forced them off the road,” Enola snapped. “Her note said the wheel was broken, Brown was thrown, leg likely fractured. It was a report, Sherlock, not an invitation for philosophical debate.”
Watson’s expression settled into one of grim decision. “If nothing is amiss, we waste a walk and earn a scolding for fussing. If something is amiss, we will not forgive ourselves for staying by the fire.”
Sherlock stood.
The movement was abrupt, definitive. The ledger on the table shifted slightly.
He took his hand from it as if from a hot stove, then reached for his coat buttons, fastening them with sharp, precise motions.
“In the past year,” he said, his voice clipped, “Pandora Witworth has been shot at, nearly crushed, defamed, threatened with social and physical ruin, and is now lost in a fog because I required a sample of sodium tartrate to be delivered to a chemist.” His eyes flicked to the table where his journal lay beside her ledger. “I cannot yet ascertain if her dreams are memory or madness. I have not even identified a starting point for that investigation. But I can, tonight, ensure she does not meet with a knife in the dark due to my academic curiosity.”
He pointed at Watson. “You are with me.”
Watson had his coat on before the sentence was finished. “Naturally.”
“Enola,” Sherlock’s gaze swept her practical attire. “Your chosen costume is suited to action. You know the subsidiary paths from the hospital through the park better than any of us.”
“I mapped them while you were still deducing a man’s profession from his hat,” Enola said, snatching her cap.
Mycroft levered himself to his feet with a soft grunt. “This is collective folly,” he announced. “I shall accompany you.”
Sherlock’s brow arched. “To intimidate the meteorological phenomenon?”
“To prevent you from assaulting the first constable who attempts to question your midnight ramble,” Mycroft replied drily. “Also, the potential political complications of a foreign envoy’s associate, and my brother’s fiancée, coming to harm in a public park are… significant. It is a matter of preventative diplomacy.”
“How civic-minded,” Sherlock muttered, snatching his hat from the peg. “We take Baker Street to the park gate, then cut across toward the hospital road. If the carriage foundered where I suspect, she will have taken the most direct route that avoids the worst alleys. Watson, watch our rear. Enola, the side paths. Mycroft, endeavour not to expire.”
“And you?” Enola asked, pulling on her gloves.
“I,” he said, turning for the door, “will do what I should have done ninety minutes ago.”
He blew out the lamps. A moment later, the front door closed behind them, swallowing them into the muffled, silver-grey world.
EXT. HOSPITAL GATE – LATER
The hospital’s main doors were barred, the lamps above them smearing light into the swirling fog. A small side gate stood ajar. Churned mud and the deep imprint of a carriage wheel told a silent story.
Sherlock knelt, his fingers hovering over the marks. “Her note was accurate. They brought Brown in here. No fresh tracks leaving. She proceeded on foot from this point.”
Enola hugged her jacket closer against the damp chill. “Then we are following, not intercepting.”
“Then we increase our pace,” Sherlock said, rising.
They moved into the park, the fog wrapping around them like wet wool.
EXT. HYDE PARK FOOTPATH – SAME TIME
Pandora walked with deliberate care, testing each patch of ground with the toe of her boot before committing her weight. The shawl from her shoulders had been ingeniously transformed into a sling, knotted securely so that Jamie’s weight was distributed across her back and hips. His sleepy breath warmed her neck, his cheek a soft pressure against her shoulder.
He had succumbed to exhaustion in the stark hospital waiting room. Waking him to walk seemed a cruelty.
“This is the last time, young sir,” she murmured into the fog. “Next time, you shall carry me.”
Jamie slept on.
The normal life of the park had been smothered. No courting couples, no late strollers. Only the distant, ghostly rumble of wheels on the carriage road and the soft, pervasive hiss of the fog.
Another sound insinuated itself into the hiss.
Footsteps. Not hers. Heavier than a child’s, lighter and quicker than a watchman’s. On the grass, not the gravel—a predator’s approach.
She did not hasten. Hurry bred stumbles, and her footing was less than sure.
At the next island of lamplight, she paused as if to adjust the sling.
A shape coalesced at the frayed edge of the light.
Two small, amber coals glowed low to the ground. The fog thinned momentarily, outlining a large dog, her dark coat drinking the luminance. Head low, ears pricked forward.
Pandora’s fingers tightened on the basket handle.
“Shadow,” she breathed, the name escaping before thought could cage it.
The dog’s tail moved once, a slow, deliberate sweep. She stepped fully into the light and sat, a statue of waiting vigilance.
Pandora’s mouth went dry. Of course. Why should anything ever be simple?
Cautiously, she extended her free hand, palm down.
Shadow rose and padded forward. Her fur was damp under Pandora’s tentative touch. Her breath carried a scent that was wrong for London: rain on sun-baked stone, and something older, wilder.
Above, the skeletal branches of a tree rattled.
Crows. Dozens of them, hunched like judges along the limbs, eyes like beads of ink. Several dropped to nearby fence posts, then leapt ahead a few yards, a hopping, black-plumed vanguard.
One was different. Larger. Her feathers held an oily, prismatic sheen that seemed to swallow and warp the lamplight. She landed on a post directly ahead and regarded Pandora with a terrifying, intelligent tilt of her head.
“You are new,” Pandora whispered.
The large crow croaked, a sound like splitting slate, and launched herself, landing with unsettling precision on the crown of Pandora’s hat. The brim dipped, then steadied as clever claws found their purchase.
“Very well,” Pandora sighed. “Make yourself at home.”
A pale shape alighted on the next lamppost. A crane, tall and stately, its plumage capturing the gaslight and turning it to muted gold. Its very outline seemed edged in metal. It watched her with a dark, piercing eye.
“A guardian dog, a parliament of crows, and a golden bird,” Pandora murmured to herself. “I look like a page from a bestiary that has violently disagreed with its binder.”
She began to walk again.
Shadow fell into place at her right heel. The crows continued their grim relay from post to post. The oily-feathered crow rode her hat like a macabre ornament. The crane glided silently from lamp to lamp ahead, a graceful scout.
The footsteps behind her had not ceased.
They had quickened. Cutting across the grass now, angling to intercept.
Pandora’s spine tightened. She let her hand fall from Shadow’s neck. The dog’s ears swivelled back, capturing sounds beyond human range.
A man shouldered his way out of the fog at the lamp’s perimeter.
“Evenin’, miss,” he drawled, the East End clinging to his vowels. “Out a bit late, ain’t ya? Dangerous for a lady on ‘er own.” His gaze swept over her—the worn shawl-sling, the practical dress, the basket. A woman who might be down on her luck, seeking shelter. A vulnerable target.
He stepped into the light. Hat pulled low. A long, shabby coat. A white rictus was painted around his mouth, a clown’s grin that stopped cold at the cheeks. In his right hand, held close to his thigh, metal gleamed.
“No place to be,” he said, taking another step. The painted smile seemed to leer. “All this fog. Easy to get lost. Or to ‘ave an accident.”
He closed the distance.
Shadow moved with him, placing her bulk between Pandora and the threat. Her head lowered, lips peeling back from teeth that looked too sharp, too white. A growl emanated from deep within her chest, a sound of primordial warning.
The man checked. “ ‘Ere now, girl. None o’ that. Good dog.”
The growl deepened, vibrating in the air. Shadow’s tail was rigid, her whole body a coiled spring.
The crow on Pandora’s hat let out a harsh, tearing hiss. The other crows rustled, a susurrus of shifting black shapes.
“I would listen to them,” Pandora said, her voice steady despite the hammering of her heart. “You should turn around. Now.”
He sneered, the painted grin distorting. “Think yer birds scare me?”
He lunged, a feint towards the basket, his knife hand flashing up.
Shadow was a blur of darkness.
She struck high on his forearm. Her jaws closed with a sickening crunch of bone meeting teeth. The knife spun from his grasp, clattering across the gravel path.
He screamed, a raw sound of shock and pain.
The tree erupted.
Crows descended in a shrieking, beating torrent of wings and claws. They mobbed his head and shoulders, a living storm of fury. The large crow launched from Pandora’s hat like a black dart, aiming straight for his eyes.
He shrieked again, batting wildly, blood now streaking his temple and cheek.
The golden crane launched from her lamppost in a flare of pale wings.
For one impossible heartbeat, Pandora saw her not as a bird, but as a tall, slender silhouette within the fog. A feminine torso seemed wrapped in tattered, feathered robes, but below… below were not legs, but two terrible, scaled limbs, ending in three massive, forward-curving talons and a wicked spur behind. A nightmare figure of grace and grotesquery. Those dreadful claws struck the ground as she moved, and Pandora turned her face away, a prayer stuck in her throat.
“Enough,” she whispered, but the word was lost.
Shadow released and danced back, a dark sentinel once more. The feathered horror and the maelstrom of black wings drove the man, stumbling and shrieking, off the path and into the deeper gloom between the trees.
Pandora pressed against the cold iron of the lamppost, one hand splayed over Jamie’s bundled legs. She did not watch. She tried not to hear. The screams were oddly muffled, as if the fog itself were absorbing them. There was a wet, decisive thud, then a silence that was suddenly vast, broken only by the rustle of returning wings.
They came back one by one, settling on their perches with an air of grim satisfaction. The large crow returned to her hat, feathers unruffled. The golden crane walked sedately out of the mist, becoming wholly avian once more as she hopped onto a post. A dark streak of crimson marred her golden side. She wiped her beak once, neatly, against the metal.
Shadow stood before Pandora, gazing into the darkness where the man had vanished. Her muzzle was dark and wet.
“Thank you,” Pandora whispered, the gratitude encompassing the whole terrible, feathered and furred jury. She did not look at the stain on Shadow’s coat.
A new sound pierced the muffled quiet—running feet on gravel. Purposeful, urgent.
“Pandora!” Sherlock’s voice, hard and clear, cut through the fog. “Pandora Witworth!”
Relief, acute and shuddering, washed through her.
“Here!” she called, her voice stronger than she felt. “We are here!”
Shadow’s ears pricked. The crows shifted but held their ground. The crane watched.
Pandora stepped away from the post and moved toward the voices, staying within the frail cages of light. Shadow paced at her side. The crow rode her hat. The others hopped ahead. The crane glided, a silent escort.
EXT. HYDE PARK FOOTPATH – WITH SHERLOCK’S PARTY – CONTINUOUS
Sherlock, Watson, Enola, and Mycroft moved at a swift walk, breaths pluming in the chill.
“There,” Watson hissed, holding up a hand. “Listen.”
A scream, abruptly cut off.
They broke into a run.
The fog swirled, thick then thin. A whirlwind of black wings erupted almost at their feet, crows scattering upwards, some so close their pinions brushed coat sleeves. Mycroft recoiled with a stifled oath.
A figure staggered from the gloom toward them.
A man. Hatless. His coat hung in ribbons. One hand was clamped over his face; the other flailed blindly. Blood soaked his collar and streamed from between his fingers. His throat and chest were a horror of parallel, ragged gouges, as if raked by gigantic talons.
He stumbled forward, mouth gaping around a wet, bubbling sound that was no longer language.
Watson grabbed Sherlock’s arm. “Steady! The man is grievously hurt—or mad.”
The man’s foot caught on a root. He pitched forward.
He slammed into the earth.
A pale, towering shape loomed behind him in the fog. For one crystalline, horrific second, Sherlock saw it clearly: a narrow, almost feminine form draped in ragged, feather-like streamers. And below, where legs should be, two monstrous, scaly limbs, terminating in three enormous, hooked claws that seized the man, driving him down with crushing force. There was a sickening, final crack.
Enola sucked in a sharp breath. Mycroft stood frozen, his knuckles white on his cane. Watson’s face was a mask of professional disbelief.
“What in God’s name…” Watson breathed.
Sherlock’s mind, his greatest tool, scrabbled for purchase. The stride, the proportions, the method of attack: they fit no known creature, no human assailant.
The pale shape went still. Its head (was it a head?) turned slightly.
Sherlock felt the weight of its regard, a cold, alien attention.
Then the fog surged. The tall outline seemed to blur, to shrink and coalesce. With a powerful beat of broad, pale wings, it launched upwards and vanished into the grey canopy above the lamps.
Silence, profound and heavy, crashed down.
For a long moment, no one moved, the image seared into their retinas.
“A bird…” Mycroft finally said, his voice uncharacteristically thin. “A large, escaped bird of prey…” He was grasping, the bureaucrat seeking a rational filing category.
“With the limbs of a lizard and the torso of a woman?” Enola’s voice was tight with awe and fear. “I’ve read the myths. That… that was a harpy.”
The word hung in the air, absurd and terrifyingly apt.
Watson shook his head, the physician wrestling with the impossible. “Myths do not leave footprints, Enola.” He gestured to the ground where the man lay.
Sherlock approached, Watson a step behind. The man was clearly dead, his neck at an unnatural angle, his back a ruin of puncture wounds that spoke of immense, piercing force.
And there, in the soft earth beside the path, were the prints. Not canine. Not human. Three long, forward toes ending in deep, stone-scoring talon marks, with a fourth, rear spur. A bipedal gait.
“Whatever it was,” Sherlock said, his voice low, “it walked upright.” He looked at his brother. “Your ornithological theory is insufficient.”
Mycroft had no rebuttal. He simply stared at the prints, his mind visibly reeling.
Somewhere ahead, Pandora’s voice called again. “Here!”
As one, they turned toward the sound.
“We will send for the constables later,” Sherlock said curtly, already moving. “The living are our priority.”
They left the grim scene behind, the strange prints already softening in the damp.
EXT. HYDE PARK FOOTPATH – MOMENTS LATER
Pandora materialised in the next nimbus of light—a small, weary figure with a child strapped to her back, a basket in hand, her hair escaping its pins.
And her retinue: the massive black dog, shoulder pressed to her skirt; crows on every available perch; the preposterous crow on her hat; the golden crane, statue-still on the lamp above.
The search party halted, a tableau of stunned relief.
“Good evening,” Pandora said, her composure remarkable. “You are all out very late.”
“A criticism,” Mycroft managed, his eyes wide, “that could be levied with greater force at you.”
Sherlock closed the final distance in swift strides.
His eyes, the deductive engine, consumed the scene: The unnatural calm of the animals. The dark, wet smear on Shadow’s muzzle and chest. The spatters of crimson on the oily feathers of the crow on Pandora’s hat. More droplets, stark against the pale gold of the crane’s plumage. A matching, rust-coloured stain on Pandora’s own sleeve, transferred by contact.
Not her blood, his mind catalogued with fierce clarity. But blood, nonetheless.
His gaze swept the path, landing on the discarded knife. He stooped, picking it up by the very tip of its handle. “Cheap steel. No smith’s mark. Recently dropped.” He let it clatter back to the stones.
“Are you injured?” he asked, his voice stripped of all but essential inquiry.
“No,” Pandora said. “He never reached us.”
“He?” Watson’s tone was sharp.
“There was a man,” Pandora confirmed, her hand finding the solid warmth of Shadow’s head. The dog leaned into the touch. “He followed from the road. He thought me… alone and vulnerable. He had a knife.”
She took a shallow breath. “Shadow disagreed. Vehemently. And the crows… they are very protective.”
Enola let out a shaky half-laugh. “Your ‘murder’ lived up to its name.”
Mycroft shot her a look of profound disapproval. “This is not a jest, Enola.”
“No,” Pandora agreed softly, her fingers still in Shadow’s fur. “It is not. He would have hurt us. They… intervened. I do not mourn him, but I would rather not dwell on the particulars.”
Sherlock’s jaw worked. “We will not dwell on him. We will dwell on the fact that you were forced into this position.” The anger in his voice was not for her, but for the world that required such defences.
“It was not the plan,” she said simply. “The cab stands were empty. Jamie was asleep. Walking seemed the swiftest solution. I misjudged the depth of the danger.”
“You seem to have judged the depth of your defenders accurately enough,” Enola said, her eyes on the vigilant crane.
Pandora did not reply to that. She looked from one stunned, worried face to another. “Might we go home? I find I am very tired.”
Watson gently lifted Jamie from her back, settling the sleeping boy in his own arms. “A capital idea.”
“Come,” Sherlock said, the word a command and a promise.
Pandora nodded, bending to retrieve her basket. As she straightened, she took a step forward.
And as she did, her strange companions faded. Shadow gave her hand one last nuzzle, then turned and melted into the fog between two trees, silent as smoke. The crows, as if on an unspoken signal, lifted in a silent, black cloud and were swallowed by the night. The golden crane spread her wings and became a pale streak lost against the darker sky. The crow on her hat gave a soft crok and launched herself upwards, vanishing.
Where a moment before had stood a woman surrounded by an animal guard, now stood only Pandora, alone in the lamplight with her family.
The walk back to Baker Street was made in a heavy, contemplative silence.