Life is but a Dream... (A Sherlock Fanfiction)

*The Great Game: Part Eight*

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Calm Before The Storm

I woke the next morning, clutching a pillow in fear of the gunshot from my dream. It had carried itself through my head from the night before. Sitting up from my dream, I tried to calm the buzzing in my head. I hopped off and went to the door, stopping on the side of the threshold. John and Sherlock were awake and speaking outside.
"There are lives at stake, Sherlock- actual human lives." John stressed. "Just so I know, do you care about them at all?" Why did I feel like I was included in "human lives?"

"Will caring about them help save them?" Sherlock asked, irritated.
"...Nope." John said, as if he was looking straight at me.
"Then I'll continue not to make that mistake." he said.
"And you find that easy, don't you?" John asked.
"Yes, very. Is that news to you?" Sherlock asked, and I felt a small knife pierce my heart.
"No." I mumbled, recalling the last few weeks.
"I've disappointed you." Sherlock deduced as I remembered he was talking to John, not me.
"Yeah, yeah that's a good deduction." John said, and I could tell he seemed angry.
"Don't make people into heroes, John. Heroes don't exist and if they did I wouldn't be one of them." Sherlock stated. I suppose he was right on that one...

Their phone rang at that moment, and I realised something: looking at John's clock I saw it was 1030 am. I had missed my morning classes! Something told me not to go today... I had already missed some of the important subjects anyway...
"Aspen? You're awake?" I heard and saw John on the couch by the door.
"Oh, um yeah." I said, wondering if he too realised I missed school.
"Well, come out here then." He said, patting the couch.
"Um..." I hesitated, walking out into the grey morning light coming through the window. Sherlock was with his phone as I sat down next to John, who was going through a pile of newspapers on the coffee table. My book was next to it, and I picked it up to read.

"Archway... suicide." John said, and I glanced at him through the corner of my eye. Ever since I started, he's wanted to avoid saying that word.
"Ten a penny." Sherlock snapped, causing John to throw him a look.
"Two kids stabbed in Stoke Newington." John offered again, then threw the paper aside. "Ah, man on the train line- Andrew West."
As if the events had poked Sherlock's last button, he sighed in despair.
"Nothing!" He exclaimed, then dialled a number on his phone. "It's me. Have you found anything on the South Bank between Waterloo Bridge and Southwark Bridge?" He asked. After a while, he hung up and took his coat.

"John, we're going out." He said. "And if you don't want to go to school, then you're not going to just sit here all day." Sherlock said quietly to me.
* * *
We came to the South Bank on the River Thames, where Lestrade was waiting for them. John motioned me to go over to the side of the river, where I sat, tying my hair up into a bun. I took out my papers for school, most of them still several drafts of our poems, though they aren't due for another month or so...
I held one up to my eyes, reading some of the material I had worked on so far... nothing had inspired me that was pleasant enough to share with my classmates. However, pushing to break down the wall of my brain were some thoughts I had locked in my head.

Shaking the thought from my head, I saw the water a meter away, crawling against the current and begging to escape, only to be pulled back again over and over again. My thoughts were pulled back when I found myself looking to John, Sherlock and Lestrade over a mans body. Once again procrastinating, I shuffled my papers back into a folder, then went over to the trio.

"... Have you ever heard of the Golem?" Sherlock asked them. I did. My mother taunted me with that story when I was a child.
"Yeah." I said, not loud enough to hear me.
"Golem?" Lestrade repeated.
"It's a horror story, isn't it? What are you saying?" John asked.
"It's a Jewish folk story." I chimed in, and they looked at me. "A gigantic man made of clay." I said, my voice growing thin near the end.
"It's also the name of an assassin- real name Oskar Dzundza- one of the deadliest assassins in the world." Sherlock added, then pointed down to the body. "That's his trademark style."

"So this is a hit?" Lestrade asked.
"Definitely. The Golem squeezes that life out of his victims with his bare hands." Sherlock informed. Suddenly Lestrade shifted the conversation to some painting, frustrating Sherlock. I looked to John, who just a shook his head.
"Alright, alright girls, calm down. Sherlock, do you want to take us through it?" He asked. After a while, Sherlock took a step back and looked to the body.
"What do we know about this corpse? The killer's not left us with much - just the shirt and the trousers." He started. "They're pretty formal - maybe he was going out for the night, but the trousers are heavy-duty, polyester, nasty, same as the shirt - cheap. They're both too big for him, so some kind of standard-issue uniform. Dressed for work, then. What kind of work? There's a hook on his belt for a walkie-talkie." He deduced.

"A tube driver?" Lestrade asked, receiving a glare from Sherlock.
"Security Guard?" John asked.
"More likely. That'll be borne by his backside." Sherlock said. Wait, what?
"Flabby. You'd think that he'd led a sedentary life, yet the soles of his feet and the nascent varicose veins in his legs show otherwise. So, a lot of walking and a lot of sitting around. Security guard's looking good. And the watch helps, too. The alarm shows he did regular night shifts." He explained to a taken back Lestrade.

"Why regular?" he asked. "Maybe he decided to set that alarm the day he died."
"No-no. , the buttons are stiff, hardly touched. He set his alarm like that a long time ago. His routine never varied. But there's something else. The killer must have been interrupted, otherwise he would have stripped the corpse completely. There was some kind of badge or insignia on the shirt front that he tore off, suggesting the dead man worked somewhere recognisable, some kind of institution." Sherlock continued to deduce. I was actually, slightly impressed at him today. He was on fire.
"Found this inside his trouser pocket." Sherlock said, holding up a ticket stub. "Sodden by the river but still recognisably.
"Tickets?" I squeaked.

"Ticket stubs." Sherlock corrected, and I felt a small sense of accomplishment. "He worked in a museum or gallery. Did a quick check - the Hickman Gallery has reported one of its attendants as missing." He explained, then looked back to the body. "Alex Woodbridge. Tonight they unveil the re-discovered masterpiece. Now why would anyone want to pay the Golem to suffocate a perfectly ordinary gallery attendant?" Sherlock said, still not stopping. "Inference: the dead man knew something about it - something that would stop the owner getting paid thirty million pounds. The picture's a fake." He concluded.

"Fantastic." John thought out loud. Sherlock shrugged, and it seemed he was annoyed at their conversation earlier.
"Meretricious." he said.
"And a happy new year!" Lestrade joked. We looked at him as he grinned sheepishly. I looked to John, who was looking at the body.
"Poor sod." he mumbled.
"I'd better get my feelers out for this Golem character." Lestrade said.
"Pointless. You'll never find him." Sherlock countered. "But I know a man who can."
"Who?" Lestrade asked, falling for the joke.
"Me." Sherlock declared, grinning as well. He then turned and started walking back to get a taxi. John and I followed.