Lock & Mori by Heather W. Petty
To my mother,
who will never read this
but lives on every page
London, Present Day
Chapter 1
I wore a hat with a feather plume the first time I met Sherlock Holmes. It was the fourth of March. I only remember the date because all three of my brothers glommed onto the Marching Forth pun for the entirety of breakfast. Freddie even had a stupid, hollering ringtone for his mobile that shouted, “March FOOOORTH!” over and over until I threatened to flush the thing down the toilet. For once, leaving for school felt more like bliss than drudgery. But the bliss didn’t linger.
First was double maths, where yet again I was forced to explain that just because our professor was ignorant of the latest in math theory, it didn’t mean he could mark my homework wrong when clearly it was the book that was in error. Next came economics and a lecture from books I’d read for fun last summer’s break. Lunch was followed by a long, boring lab as Marcus Gregson turned our chemistry experiment into a black, smoldering thing that stank up the entire room. How he managed to do so, despite the two contingencies I’d put in place to make it impossible for him to ruin it, the greatest detective in history would never be able to deduce. I warned Marcus his calculations were off, but Professor made me promise to let him run at least one lab on his own before term was over. Not my fault her room would smell like chemical warfare for months.
I thought I’d escaped the madness when I settled into my final class of the day, but even that turned into a colossal cock-up. Still, I hadn’t quite expected that a fire drill would send me into the inner sanctum of the most eccentric, highly notorious boy in my class. And by the time that happened, it had already been a very, very long day, to say the least—the kind of day that could only ever end with me wearing a feathered hat.
The very minute the fire alarm started to simultaneously scream and flash lights at us, Miss Francis, the drama teacher, instructed the class to calmly make their way out of the theater, except for me. She said, “Mori, do be an angel and nip downstairs to storage to fetch our Mr. Holmes.”
Miss Francis was always calling us angels and champs. “Can he not hear the alarm on his own?” I asked.
She might have nodded or shook her head, but she was already pushing me out the theater’s side door, so I couldn’t see. “Sherlock doesn’t seem to pay attention to things like alarms when he’s working. Be quick about it, will you?”
I, of course, had heard of Sherlock Holmes and his secret lab in the basement of the theater. It was just cartoonish enough of an image to spread widely around the school. He found the chemistry lab inadequate to his needs, which was the only part of the story that had intrigued me, and his mother had somehow talked the headmaster into letting him have a space of his own. I suspected she used Headmaster’s favorite kind of persuasion—the monetary kind.
I spent my trip down the steps to the shadowy basement hall picturing what a lab that so outshined our chem lab would be like and wincing against the flashing fire-drill lights, which were all the brighter in the dim. It wasn’t until I swept open the double doors of the storage room he used as a workshop that I remembered I was still in full costume, from hat to lacy trim, which barely brushed the dusty linoleum floors of the hall. I wasn’t too embarrassed, however, because Sherlock’s hair stood up on one side, almost as tall as my plume. With his back to me, he ran fingers through his mop, readily displaying how it had gotten that way.
The lab itself was fairly unimpressive—two long tables with all the basics: glassware, tubes, flames, and even a centrifuge and an autoclave. But instead of brown glass bottles full of chemicals for experiments, Sherlock’s shelves were stacked with specimen containers, Baggies filled with various samples, and books—stacks and stacks of books on every subject imaginable, from Who’s Who to physics, mountaineering to crimi-nology. I probably would have continued to explore were it not for the constant screeching reminder of why I was there.
“What is it?” Sherlock shouted over the alarm, without turning to acknowledge me. Instead, he hunched farther over the table in front of him, one hand typing furiously at a tablet, while his other carefully turned a small plastic knob to adjust the flow of red fluid from what looked like an ancient glass IV bottle. The red substance dripped down a tube and into a cup with a rather alarming rhythm.