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When considering the mysterious circumstances at the centre of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes says to Watson that in order to begin, there are two questions that must be considered. Firstly, if a crime has been committed at all, and secondly, if it has, what it is, and how. 

I met Harry for the first time at the public pool, where he was stuck in a pair of handcuffs. Treading in the deep end, I watched him try to tug himself loose, sunlight flashing on the metal. I let him struggle until I was sure he wasn’t going to manage it, then pulled myself out of the pool and retrieved a bobby pin from my things.

“Would you like some help?”

He squinted up at me. “No,” he said finally, but ducked his head and didn’t make any real effort to pretend he didn’t need it. He was halfway in the shade of a big yellow umbrella, and not dressed to swim. He looked just as uncomfortable as I felt in the heat.

“How exactly are you planning on escaping?” I asked, the water I’d trailed on the ground already evaporating back into nothing. The concrete scalded the bottoms of my feet.

He held his wrists out to me. “Fine.”

I’d never freed someone from handcuffs before. I’d read how to do it on the internet. I had to pull his hands into my wet lap for it. He was so surly while I worked, wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

It took eleven seconds for me to get them open, water dripping from my hair onto my shoulders, onto our hands. 

Such began the great tragedy of my young life.

---

I was not allowed to wear the tweed deerstalker at the dinner table or in class, so it sat beside me like an especially loyal little dog. All other times, it remained firmly fixed to my head, even when it got quite hot and made my hair stick to my face. 

Compiling my wardrobe had been slow going. I knew better than to ask my mother to buy me the kinds of clothes I wanted. She knew better than to say anything about it. I’d found enough of the nice button-downs and pairs of trousers I was partial to at Goodwill and wore them in rapid rotation with a pair of brown leather monk strap shoes. The shoes were beaten up by the time I finished sophomore year, and I would wear them until they were an embarrassment, then far past that.

The only truly nice thing I had was a bottle of Dior Homme cologne that I’d bought with a gift card I’d received for my birthday. I secreted it behind some books, the last place my brothers might stumble across it. I’d been so attracted to the spicy woodiness of the scent, the amber of the liquid. It smelled how things were supposed to smell. I’d babbled to the cashier that it was for my boyfriend—a too-obvious tell—as I palmed it. I told her I didn’t need a bag and slipped it in my blazer pocket, thinking of the sultry French syllable of homme, the tagline: I’m Your Man, like a shiver.

Reader, you’ve let me stall. 

I didn’t do a lot of crime solving. Perhaps I could have, but I wasn’t aware of any crimes. It’s awfully convenient, in detective novels, how many things go missing, how many people die under mysterious circumstances. Mostly, I did odd little experiments, watched people, memorised useful facts, and did taxidermy on the animals I found by the side of the road.

I had a lot of time for projects and Harry was aching to be one. I spotted him again on the first day of junior year: summer tan, tawny brown curls down to that middle place between his shoulders, hunched under his backpack and wearing a T-shirt that looked like it didn’t know how to hang on him. At that point, he was still shorter than me by about three inches—mostly shoulders and a solid build to his hips.

He sat alone at lunch with a book where his food should have been, lunch bag slid carelessly to the side on the sticky tabletop.

I glanced surreptitiously at the book as I sat down across from him with my own, a compendium of bugs native to North America, full colour.

I set a finger on the centre crease of his book, reading the title out to him. “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.”

He squinted up at me the same way he had when I found him at the pool. “Yup,” he said. Then, a little defensively, “He’s cool.”

Three weeks later, I got him a straightjacket.

---

So I was looking for a Watson, whatever. I’d pretty much given up by the time I found him. I didn’t tell him he was the only person who hadn’t run screaming in the other direction when I suggested that maybe they’d like to see my collection of disguises. Maybe that was obvious. I never asked Harry if it was that he didn’t know or didn’t care about how I was. It seemed crucial to me that he didn’t care, because if he didn’t know, then there was always the chance I would do something and suddenly it would be awful and plain, like a dropped birthday cake.

Late that autumn, I brought Harry out to the shed where I did all my experiments. I had taken great pains to disguise how nervous I was, I believe quite successfully. We’d been spending lunches together by then, but there was the forgivable coincidence of sitting beside each other in the cafeteria and then there was what I wanted.

When we arrived, the first thing he said was “Did you steal a microscope from school?”

I was scandalised both that he would suggest this and that this would be the first thing he’d think to point out when the alternatives were a bird skull and my printer’s tray full of geotagged vials of dirt. “Certainly not. It was getting thrown out. Mr. G set it aside for me.”

“Who?” Harry asked, reaching out to stroke Bertha, an early squirrel taxidermy who was missing her tail and one of her legs. She was rather unfortunate looking. The recent ones were much better.

“Careful, she’s vicious,” I told him, sitting down and then realising that the shed only had one chair. It hadn’t occurred to me to need another. “He’s one of the janitors.”

I think Harry looked a bit impressed by that. “You know the janitors?”

I tapped the side of my nose. “To the expert in crime, nothing is more imperative than paying attention to every person in a room, even those most often overlooked.”

“Shall I write that one down?” Harry asked, imitating my inflection. “Will there be a quiz?”

“Aren’t you even going to ask about my bird skull?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of a comeback. He was merciless with me every time I was serious. He was the first person who had listened enough to be so.

---

In January the sky moulded over, but by then we were inseparable.

We wrote notes using ciphers. We bickered constantly, like sharpening a knife. We brought the microscope in from the shed and took skin samples from our gums. I held his mouth open to stick the swab in, then wiped the saliva off on my thigh. We learned Morse code and tapped messages back and forth: silent for hours, then brief, belated laughter. That winter, it felt like he would follow me into hell. I was so certain of it.

It didn’t matter that Harry’s mom did not find me charming or that my brothers were hideous to us. Our bedrooms had locks. It was hours of Harry in the handcuffs until he could get out of them as quick as a whisper. I would sit across from him on the bed and he’d throw them back to me with a jingle once he’d slipped loose, rubbing the sore skin and then holding his wrists out to have them again.

We joked about stringing him upside down for the straightjacket escape, but had no good place to try and string him from. At that point, it still took him ages to wrestle out of the thing.

“Not bad, huh?” Harry would say when he finally worked himself free, hair and shirt stuck sweaty to him.

“It’s no upside-down-in-a-milk-crate but I do believe, considering the circumstances, I would be remiss not to give you full marks,” I would say, or, “See if you can shave five more minutes off. Then I’ll really be impressed,” or, “Maybe you should dislocate your shoulder just to keep things interesting.” He’d grin and whip the jacket at me.

“You’re impressed,” he’d say, tumbling onto the bed where I sat. He’d have such a smile on his face, then. “You’re impressed with me, Holmes.”

There are so many ways to touch someone accidentally. That cold, dark season, I catalogued them all. The depth of my desire for him threatened to turn me inside out, like the brutal tug of skinning a small animal. All winter, we stayed as close to each other as we could, the laptop between us on a twin bed, casting shadows on the wall.

I knew exactly why I wanted to touch him but could not place how it might work. I could have deduced that I was the only one, if he wasn’t just as careful to avoid acknowledging it as I was.

---

If he slept over, he would fall asleep on the air mattress while I talked. These were the only times I allowed myself to really watch him. I still can’t believe that my mother allowed him to stay the night, except I think she was under the mistaken impression that I was some sort of lesbian.

“The last glacier that came this far south only melted sixteen thousand years ago,” I told him one night. A largely useless fact, one I’d learned specifically for this. “All the water went into Lake Michigan.”

“Hmm,” Harry murmured. “Do you think it’s all still there?”

“It wouldn’t be. Consider the water cycle,” I said, though I wasn’t sure. “The glaciers in the Pleistocene were up to two thousand feet tall, which is taller than the Sears Tower. It’s a lot of water.”

“Scary,” Harry said.

“I’m only scared of fascism and hippos,” I said. 

He smiled at that weak attempt and tugged the sheet up over his shoulder, burrowing his head into the deflated pillow. The room was so dark but I knew it all by heart. I could describe the whole thing to a sketch artist, even now. “May I tell you about the landforms?”

He made a small grumble of assent, so quiet it was mostly breath. The worst part of Harry asleep was that his cheeks were so warm, his hair curled over his neck. He never moved in his sleep and, in the mornings, he would wake up with the folds of the pillow embossed into his face.

Later, as he slept, I thought about what really scared me, what the real Sherlock Holmes might have said in response. Sherlock Holmes would only be afraid of logical things and maybe everything I was frightened of was logical. If it was logical, maybe it could have been prevented. If it was logical, maybe it all proceeded in the only way it could have. I was so afraid you would leave me, Harry. Even then, I’d been terrified.

---

Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, as the snow was beginning to melt into dirty grey gunge, Harry told me about Houdini’s escape from the belly of the beast. The best part of this trick is that whatever they found on the beach was a mystery and a monstrosity. It’s identified in historical accounts as a sixteen-hundred-pound sea monster, a turtle-tortoise-fish, and a cross between a whale and an octopus. 

I think Harry liked the trick for its layers of unlikely difficulty. I liked it for the monster. It’s easy to hope or assume that the creature was just a whale that had begun to decompose, but I loved the casual horror with which everyone regarded it. The idea of looking at something and not being able to tell if it was an octopus, a tortoise, a fish, or a whale was captivating to me. How awful it must have been, in the true sense of awe, to resist all attempts to describe it.

Whatever it was, it had been slit at the abdomen and strung with metal eyelets, held together by a long thread of steel. Houdini had climbed into its stomach and been sewn inside, wearing chains. Presumably, the whole thing reeked.

“It was really dangerous. He almost died,” Harry told me from the passenger seat of my car. He had a foot up on the dash, the other crushing a McDonald’s bag. “Because of what they’d used to embalm it. He was suffocating in there.”

“Would you do it?” I asked, casually.

“And what would we use, Holmes?” Harry asked. “A trout? A daring escape from the largemouth bass?”

I shrugged. “I think any monstrosity would do.”

“I’ll go get my wee sewing kit and start gutting,” Harry said, then crossed his arms over his chest. “It wouldn’t be like if we really had a whale.”

“It’ll be deer season before you know it,” I said. I can’t say whether or not I was joking.

---

Early that summer, I caught the Yellowmouth Aguere, the deadliest snake in Wisconsin. It felt, at the time, like some kind of a highlight. It had the slippery, illicit pleasure of an escalation. So much of my research was dead, stuffed or catalogued, but the snake in the little tank watched me back, her expression as remote as any living thing’s.

I loved the cool stoicism that Harry regarded her with. He was clearly afraid but wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to me. I was afraid of her too. That was the whole point.

“You should at least tell your mom,” Harry said, somewhat stupidly, I thought, as I held the syringe up to the light.

The liquid inside was water and such a small amount of venom as to be almost inconsequential, just enough to begin building immunity. “I’ve told you, haven’t I?”

Harry was looking at the floor again, surly when he didn’t know what else to do with himself. “Maybe I don’t want to be responsible for whether you poison yourself.”

“You aren’t,” I told him, stepping out of my trousers. It wasn’t as hot as it would get in the shed, but I could already feel sweat collecting at the back of my neck. I felt a little foolish just in my button-down shirt and high socks and was glad Harry was looking more at his feet than at me. “You can leave at any time.”

His frown deepened and I spoke before he could try and ruin it. “Do you trust me?” I asked. I compressed the air from the syringe so I wouldn’t have to deliver this looking at him. The liquid beaded at the tip. “Because I trust me. I did all the calculations.”

“I know you did,” Harry said.

“It’s the same principle as vaccination, you know that.”

“If something does happen, how am I supposed to explain this?”

Something about the question made me feel terrified, then angry, inarticulate in both. “Then don’t explain it,” I snapped, then immediately wished I had come up with something debonair instead, something that might have convinced him.

He looked up at me then, dark eyed and disbelieving. I felt the twinge of panic, that he was going to say something even worse, before he set his chin on his hand and went silent.

All afternoon, we waited to see if I would die, trying to learn how to play chess and getting distracted and short with one another. I checked my vitals on the hour, noted only an unimpressive rash on the backs of my hands and fever of 99.6 degrees. I didn’t die, and all the evidence was gone by dinner. 

After everything that happened, it was an experiment I couldn’t bring myself to repeat. It wasn’t as good without someone there to watch.

---

“I keep thinking about it,” Harry said. He’d come up behind me. He was holding a bag of Combos and a Coke, his trashed sneakers squeaking on the red-square linoleum. “What you said.”

“Which?” I asked, scanning the Pringles.

The gas station attendant was watching a football game on a computer, facing away from us in the afternoon sunlight. Harry spoke so quietly I had to lean in to hear him.

“About not explaining.”

“Oh?” I asked.

“What would you say if someone asked you?” 

“You’re still thinking about that?” I asked. I reached up for a can of Pringles and then drew my hand back, stalling for time. “What’s there to explain? I did it because I was curious about it.”

He laughed a little, like we were sharing a private joke. Anyone else would have been laughing at me. “Do normal people accept explanations like that?” he asked. He didn’t sound as angry with me as I’d thought he might. It was something else.

I laughed, the sound dark and dangerous. “I think we both know the answer to that.”

I wanted him to say something improbable like Well, I’m not normal people. I would even feed him the line. I thought he would have been able to deliver it with just the right amount of self-deprecation and fondness. I wanted to do something so complete to him that there wasn’t a word for it yet. I had never wanted to do something so badly in my entire life.

“If you really can’t decide you can get two,” Harry said mildly, nudging me with an elbow as he dropped the subject for a smaller, simpler one. “It’s not against the rules.”

I turned and placed a hand on the side of his neck, warm under the collar of his shirt. I watched him while I did it, surveying for any flinch or tell. He looked like he knew exactly what I was going to do, like he’d figured it out before I had and was just waiting for me to do it. Clever boy, my Watson.

So there is one of our small mysteries cleared up. 

It was such a good kiss too, a perpetual tension, near enough to a devouring as to be really satisfying. He melted with my hand on the back of his neck, just like I knew he would.

I haven’t been honest. He never asked me that and I never kissed him. I didn’t know how to complete the gesture. The thing was over before I could figure out how to be the kind of person who could.

---

It was a golden day in August, and we’d set up a daring escape. It had taken us most of the summer to scheme and then execute, and it was a variation on the suspended straightjacket escape: Harry ten feet over a river and chained up by the feet. There were stages. First, Harry would get out of the straightjacket. Then, he would pick three locks in order to free his legs. Finally, he would untie his feet and drop into the creek below. For every minute this took him, a pulley system I had devised would lower his head five inches closer to the water. It was an absolute marvel.

The world felt so clear and immediate: the cool wash of the muddy water on my skin, the dry heat of the sun against the top of my head. If anything went wrong, it was my responsibility to drag him out of the water and cut the jacket off him. I stood with the creek up to my waist, my T-shirt half drenched, a folding knife clutched in my hand, and I watched.

Houdini never died during a trick, but it was a close thing. The first time he did the buried alive stunt, he was pulled out of the grave by his assistants, unconscious. In Houdini Upside Down, the trick where he was lowered into a tank filled with water while locked in stocks, he had an assistant with an axe ready to break the glass should he fail. Intellectually, I knew that what we were doing was dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid. I knew he would be perfect. And god, he was.

Everything was so green I thought it would burst if I squeezed it hard enough. Harry drifted above me like a spider on a silk line, creating the slack in the straightjacket as the sunlight sparkled off the creek and the chain lowered him slowly. His hair hung down in dark curls, his body a collection of gold expanses in the late afternoon shadows. Watching him, I lost track of time.

He peeled off the second skin of the straightjacket and dropped it into the river, where it swept into my arms. He began to pick the locks, a grin on his face like nothing I’d ever seen, so full of joy and teeth. The chains made a melodic splash when they hit the water. I felt it in my chest. I watched the curve of his spine, the softness of his stomach, the bones and sinew of his shoulders, all descending as he curled up to undo the tie around his ankles.

He did beautifully. After he’d gotten himself free, he just swung there, hands clasped on the pulley system, one breath of madcap delight before he splashed down. He came up quickly, making an inarticulate joyful noise and flinging droplets everywhere. Together we felt the thing that can only be felt through mutual witness.

I thought there were things you could do with someone that would bind you together. I thought this was one of them. I thought I had him, that once we’d gone all the way in, there would be no way out again. It felt like it could be like that forever, that we could live in the middle of that mystery, as if in the belly of a beast.

That day at the creek wasn’t the last time, but I like to pretend it was. A momentous final occasion. Since we never acknowledged the ending, I could never argue him out of it. School started in the fall and he was harder to get a hold of, then impossible. I thought perhaps something was wrong, then realised I was just being avoided. I watched him orbit friend groups instead of me, sitting at the ends of different lunch tables. He went with some normal girl to homecoming. He matched his tie to her dress. I pored over the pictures of them and tried to deduce, with insufficient evidence, if he looked truly happy.

I think it would have been more embarrassing if I’d begged him to tell me what I’d done wrong. Sometimes I wonder if I should have begged anyway. We saw each other a few times afterwards, but it had changed, between us. It was like he’d put away some part of himself. This was special, I wanted to tell him. I tried every way I knew how to make it so. I thought he might have known and that made it all the more humiliating. I would have memorised the entire encyclopedia if I thought it would make him look at me like he used to, like he was already preparing a rejoinder to whatever I was going to say.

I re-examined old conversations, all the times I’d been sure we were both in on the joke. I thought about how unhappy he’d been about the snake and all the predictable things my brothers had said and wondered which was the evidence and which was the red herring, and how to know. I feel I should have known there would be a limit, especially for me. 

Sometimes, I was convinced that he’d liked all of it, but that liking it had become too much for him. I thought he’d gotten caught up in explanations, in worrying about how it looked, or what it was. I imagined the conversation where I wrung this answer out of him, talked him away from this brink and back to me. I would reassure him I forgave him, that I understood how terrifying it can be to want something strange, to be odd, different. I found this fantasy terribly satisfying and, for this reason, could not comfortably believe it.

The question of why it ended the way it did could only ever elude me. In truth, I have not come to a satisfactory conclusion regarding even the first question: if there had been a crime at all. Had I been mistaken about the whole thing? As it was happening, I’d thought we were both looking to go as close to the mystery as we could. I worry now that I was the only one.

Even in possession of all available evidence, even as the star witness, I can not make sense of it. I’ve gone over every clue again and again, with nothing subject to more scrutiny than that last good day in August, as if this time it will be sufficient enough proof.

If it were a photograph, it would be worn and creased from frequent use. That indelible, inarguable image: when he stumbled towards me through the water, laughing, knees cut up and bleeding into the creek.

It had seemed so important. Both of us lit by sunbeams, I’d been so sure he’d really seen me.

 

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FRANCIS VAN GANSON is a fiction writer, bookseller, and organ donor. They attended the Clarion 2023 Writers’ Workshop, their short story “What I Know Is in the Ocean” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their favorite NASCAR driver is three-time champion Joey Logano. Their writing explores violence in movies, sex on TV, and what grief, trauma, and mental illness do to narrative. Some would say that they are best known for a One Direction fan fiction in which Harry Styles gets brain cancer and dies. Find them on Instagram @fire.motif.

 

Featured image by Rach Teo, courtesy of Unsplash.