No Vacancy at 221c: A BBC Sherlock Fanfic

A Trail of Red

The pair walked silently down a narrow hallway with Sherlock lighting the way with his beam of light. The light of the torch bounced off of thin walls, hole ridden and defaced. The sound of Celestia's boots on the hard concrete floor echoed throughout the hall, breaking the eerie silence.

They passed broken doors that led into offices with trash and overturned furniture littering the stained carpet, when finally the passage ended. Sherlock grasped the metal handle hesitantly and pulled open the heavy door that completed the corridor, releasing the scream of rusted metal against metal.

The detective slipped inside, Celestia following behind as gracefully as a shadow. The door shut behind them with a dull thud that resonated around the vast room they now stood in.

Celestia looked around, quickly storing a flood of images. The ceiling had collapsed in a section, sending littered rays of bleak winter light into the void. Her boots crunched over the crushed glass of a bottle as she took a step forward.

"This place has to be more than 15 years old," Celeste remarked as she picked up a relatively unharmed wine bottle that had rolled into a corner. It was empty and covered with dust and cobwebs. The label had warped and yellowed with age and the moisture that hung in the dense air.

Sherlock cleared his throat, looking around in clinical disgust. He nodded after a moment and turned to meet her questioning gaze. "The article I found was about a restoration project. Someone was planning to bring this street 'back to life' or some sort of blithering nonsense. Of course, whenever they actually found out what was here and what they would be dealing with, the project fell through."
With a curt nod of acknowledgment, Celestia started to move deeper into the warehouse. She moved away from the shelves of bottles and corks and broken glass to a corner of the room. It seemed almost enclosed with high steel bars that connected to form platforms where barrels were wedged.

Sherlock rushed to keep up with her hurried pace. The dim half-light that filtered through the ceiling was blocked by the massive wall of barrels and when Celestia walked between the rows she stopped, waiting for Sherlock to appear with the torch. As he stood next to her the wooden containers were illuminated to reveal spray painted graffiti creeping up the stacks, some of the marks almost as high as the top stack that almost reached the ceiling.

Celeste's eyes narrowed as she squinted in the darkness. "Sherlock," she turned to him suddenly, then walked forward. She waved for him to do the same. She crouched on the ground ahead and Sherlock quickened his pace in curiosity.

Looking up at him expectantly for a moment, she inquired. "Shine the light on the floor here, would you?"

Without a reply he obeyed. He knelt down beside her and wiped his finger against the floor and sniffed it. "Red wine," he announced as he crinkled his nose "and extremely old too."

Celeste looked around her for a place that the wine could have spilled from, but found none. "It's fresh, it must be." she said puzzled. "It's been here less than a day, but from where did it-"

Sherlock shined his light further down the row, cutting her off short.

"Oh."

All along the cement a trail of more red dots ran, plummeting into the darkness at the end of the reach of the torch. Celestia stood up slowly. "I'm assuming someone wants us to go that way."

"Precisely," Sherlock said, as if to himself. He hesitated a moment, his fingers reaching into his jacket to grasp the cool metal of his weapon for reassurance before assuming the lead and starting forward.

She hurried after him, running on her toes to keep her heels from clicking. Abruptly, the row ended in a set of stone stairs, descending a short ways before stopping at a landing and a door. Taking one last look over her shoulder, Celestia followed Sherlock and waited as he pressed his ear to the door a moment. The hinges creaked softly from disuse as the detective pushed the door gently.

The pair was doubly surprised to be met with light; dim, but still light. The industrial fixtures that hung from the ceiling flickered gently. Cautiously, they descended another set of stairs and found themselves in a room lined with bottles, held in a lattice sort of device and marked clearly with numbers.

The trail wound itself around a stack of unused barrels that blocked their view of the rest of the room. Everything seemed to be neat and organized here, the walls free of writing. Traces of vandalism were nowhere to be found. It looked as if at any moment someone would come running through the door to retrieve two of the bottles, or take one of the barrels for use upstairs: ordinary tasks the room would have seen in better days. But of course, no one came, and naturally the room remained vacant save two brave investigators.

There was now no doubt in either of the two companion's minds that someone was here, and they could very well be walking into a trap.

Sherlock pulled his gun out and motioned for Celestia to stay behind him as they rounded the stack of barrels and paused, holding their breath as they froze yet another moment before whirling around the edge with anxiousness.

Celeste sighed and ran her hands through her hair as Sherlock lowered the weapon slowly. No one was to be seen. The trail simply ended in a puddle of the substance, a smashed bottle contaminating the otherwise clean floor.

In the puddle floated an envelope, crisp and clean on top and all too familiar. Celestia jolted forward and snatched the paper up out of the wine, gasping as her gloved fingers grasped it. She whirled around, staring down at the dripping paper.
"Sherlock..." she said slowly. "It's still warm."

Almost as if it had been held in someone's inside pocket, she thought in alarm.

Suddenly the lights shut off and the sound of the barrels being pushed over could be heard. The pair was knocked over and Celestia was about to call to Sherlock when a metal rim made contact with her temple, and the already pitch black world somehow became a shade darker.