Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) Read online

  Sherlock Holmes:

  The Coils of Time

  & Other Stories

  by

  Ralph E Vaughan

  Dog in the Night Books

  2013

  Also by Ralph E Vaughan:

  Sherlock Holmes Adventures

  Sherlock Holmes in The Dreaming Detective

  Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time

  Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods

  Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures

  Professor Challenger in The Secret of the Dreamlands

  Paws & Claws

  Paws & Claws: A Three Dog Adventure (P&C #1)

  A Flight of Raptors (P&C #2)

  K-9 Blues (P&C #3)

  The Death & Life of an American Dog (P&C #4)

  The Dogs of S.T.E.A.M. (P&C #5)

  The Dog Who Loved Sherlock Holmes (P&C Special)

  The Adventures of Folkestone & Hand

  Shadows Against the Empire

  Amidst Dark Satanic Mills

  Other Works

  Reflections Upon Elder Egypt (nonfiction)

  HP Lovecraft in the Comics (nonfiction)

  Fear and Loathing in the World of the Alien (nonfiction)

  Upon Unknown Seas, Beneath Strange Stars (collection)

  Oh, Mr Yoda (play w/Patricia E Vaughan)

  The Horses of Byzantium & Other Poems (poetry)

  A Darkness Upon My Mind (poetry)

  Midnight for Schrödinger’s Cat (poetry)

  As Editor

  The Many Worlds of Duane Rimel (Duane Rimel)

  The Second Book of Rimel (Duane Rimel)

  Dreams of Yith (Duane Rimel)

  Fungi From Yuggoth (HP Lovecraft w/Nick Petrosino)

  Martian Twilight (John Eric Holmes w/David Barker)

  Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories

  ©2013 Ralph E Vaughan

  “The Coils of Time” was previously published in 2005 by Gryphon Publications as “Sherlock Holmes in The Coils of Time,” in another format, and has been extensively revised for its inclusion here. All other stories appear in this book for first publication.

  Dedication

  To my former co-worker and laborer against ignorance, Lorna Samuel, who never hesitated to say “Piss off, Ralph!” whenever I needed a reality check, and to Gary Lovisi, owner of Gryphon Books, without whom nothing would have been written.

  Table of Contents

  The Coils of Time

  Adventure of the Long-Suffering Landlady

  An Incident In the Night

  Lestrade & the Lost River Pirates

  The Man Who Was Not Sherlock Holmes

  The Adventure of the Counterfeit Martian

  The Dog Who Loved Sherlock Holmes

  Sherlock, Gary, HPL & Me

  Note to the Reader

  The Coils of Time

  Prologue

  The stench of the charnel pits…

  Vanquished humanity shuffling into darkness…

  The crack of the whip…

  The eternal murmuring and sobbing of infernal machines below the once-great city…

  The white winged sphinx looming over the ruins of London beneath seething charcoal skies…

  The cries of Morlocks triumphant…

  London…1954.

  Fleeing that impossible and nightmarish realm, Moesen Maddoc, who often thought of himself simply as the Time Traveller, sought the imagined security of his old home in Richmond upon the Thames, that venerable brick manse overlooking Richmond Green near Cholmondeley Walk, northward of the Old Deer Park along Kew Road, a legacy of the First Charles, prior to the falling of the axe. By the map, he was less than a dozen miles from the great city of London, normally the briefest of journeys along the L&SW Railway, but these were not normal times, and it had taken him several days, hiding in ruins and undergrowth, evading the savage Morlock bands and their human serpents, to make his way back to the tumbled wreck of his house.

  He hacked his way through the overgrown gardens surrounding his house to his machine hidden beyond the shattered panes and the gaunt brick walls. Thankfully, during his absence it had not been molested. It took him mere moments to reattach certain brass and crystalline levers to the control panel, then a timeless eternity to return to shortly after he started again.

  Back to the Year of Our Lord 1894.

  As Moesen Maddoc’s workshop materialised around him as it appeared before ruination, he felt as if the familiarity of the large windowed room should have been as soothing to his nerves as an opiate, but the chamber now seemed ominous and shadow-infested, the gas lamps dim and uncertain. He saw the stability of the present, but felt the encroaching shadows of the future.

  He started as something pale and furtive flitted through the gardens beyond the windows, moving in the direction of the large, heavily wooded Deer Park, but it vanished before he was sure he had seen anything at all. Most likely a deer or some other animal, he hoped. A great weariness seized him and he slumped in the machine’s padded leather chair. The books with which he had hoped to rewrite the future slipped from his grasp and thudded harshly against the scuffed wooden floor.

  Stepping away from the now-quiet machine, he almost went sprawling as the physical brutality of recent events overwhelmed his ebbing adrenaline and slammed him full force. He staggered down the teak-panelled corridor connecting the workshop to the main of the house. He was weak from hunger, thirst and exhaustion, faint from loss of blood. He wanted nothing more than to collapse into unconsciousness, blessed oblivion untroubled by dreams, visions or memories of what was to come, but he forced himself forward.

  He had to learn where the path to the future had gone astray, and whether he was to blame. The answer could only be in the present.

  At corridor’s end he threw the bolt back and tumbled through the open door.

  Maddoc staggered into the dining room, nearly bowling over good Mrs Watchett, his housekeeper of long memory, almost causing her to drop the main course. She uttered a sharp cry at his uncouth appearance, the cuts and bruises upon his face, his tattered and bloodstained clothes. The startled men seated around the dining table shot to their feet.

  “Good God!” exclaimed the Medical Man. “What happened? Were you in a carriage accident?”

  “Give him a glass of port!” cried the Editor.

  “Were you attacked by coves?” demanded the Brigadier.

  “He has obviously undergone a tremendous shock of some kind,” remarked the Psychologist.

  Maddoc felt a strong grasp guiding him to his usual seat at the head of the table, and was surprised to see white-haired Mrs Watchett at his side, even more surprised to see the concern in her eyes. A full glass was pressed into his trembling grip. Only when he saw it being refilled did he realise he had downed the first glass of port in a single gulp.

  “Tell us what happened to you,” urged Philby, a red-haired man whose usually argumentative nature had been suddenly replaced by a strange urgency of tone. “We waited dinner nearly an hour pending your promised arrival.”

  The circumstances of these men gathered around his dining table suddenly became intelligible to him. Yes, he had invited them here, but the issuance of that invitation seemed a lifetime ago. Had it merely been a week since he had so foolishly, so naively demonstrated the tiny working model of the Time Machine to some of these men? A week for them, surely, but for him…an eternity.

  In a sense, that had been another man who stood before th
em then, as confident in himself, in his visions of science and technology, as in the future itself. He had hoped for, yet not expected, a bright future in which Britannia still ruled the waves, but he had expected a future of exalted technological achievements no matter the petty foibles of politics, a destiny crafted by an enlightened and ennobled humanity. The men of that remote era, of AD 802701, should have proven wise elder brothers to him, but they had turned out to be little children afraid of the dark, more needful of his guidance than he ever could be of theirs.

  How he had yearned to lead the Eloi out of darkness, out from under the shadows of the Morlocks. So greatly had that desire burned within his breast upon his first return from the future that he had immediately set out again upon the seas of time, abandoning his own era and such foolishness as this dinner party, such mundane fools as these men..

  “Have you been time travelling?” asked Wells, a man Maddoc had first met at the Royal College of Science in the mid ‘80s. “Have you voyaged into history, or have you…have you seen the future, the maturity of the race, the destiny of mankind?”

  Maddoc met their curious gazes. Not all currently present had seen the earlier experiment with the model of the Time Machine with their own eyes, but those who had not would have certainly heard of it in detail from the others, especially that damned Wells, who fancied himself a writer. To now deny the existence of the Time Machine now would be to invite investigation and belief, neither of which he wanted any longer, nor even cared about. He dare not tell them the truth, of course, at least not all of it, but he was a man of science, not a storyteller able to cobble a satisfying tale out of nothing. All he possessed was the cursed truth. The trick, then, was to tell them nothing of the second journey, and just enough of the first to allow them the luxury of disbelief, the opportunity to dismiss him as an eccentric inventor and view his story as nothing more than a cautionary allegory based on current social conditions.

  “Yes, my friends, I have travelled through time in a machine of my own design,” he finally said, forcing a lightness into his voice that he did not at all feel. “I shall tell you of my sojourn among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the far future, more than eight hundred thousand years from now.”

  “Quite fantastic,” the Brigadier murmured.

  “But first I must partake another glass of this fine port and have some of Mrs Watchett’s excellent mutton, for it seems months since I have had decent food.” At least that much was true, he thought ruefully. “Then I shall relate to you the events which occurred during my voyage upon the seas of time, as much for your judgement as your enlightenment. When you have learnt what is derived from the decisions made during our own time, your confidence in the current social order may not be as sound.”

  Later, amid the soft clatter of dishes being cleared and the quiet hiss of the gas lamps and the quick scratchings of Wells’ pencil upon his notepad, Maddoc spoke to his once-welcome dinner guests:

  “I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, demonstrated my model, and even showed you the actual thing itself in my workshop. After I finished remaking one of the nickel bars and regrinding a crystal lever, the first Time Machine began its first journey into the future, piloted by myself. Here, then, is what happened…”

  Then, for all their sakes, he lied.

  Chapter I

  A Cry in the Night

  Young William Dunning cautiously made his way across cobbled, fog-strangled Albion Yard in the Rotherhithe section of Bermondsey, south of the Thames. Behind him, barely visible through the yellowish soot-laced mist, rose a forest of gaunt masts, tokens of unseen ships at the quays of the Albion Dock, resting from their argosies across the deeps and up the Thames. Many of those barnacle-scraped hulls belonged to his family…

  No, he thought, not without more than a little bitterness, they belonged to his brother.

  If the Dunning Commodities and Trading Company could be viewed as a great ship that furrowed the seas of finance, much as Great Britain’s merchant fleets ploughed the ocean, then Sir Reginald Dunning was the captain, almost godlike in his realm, and William little more than some blackamoor cabin boy, dismissed if he was seen at all. He would have been better off as that cabin boy, he thought ruefully, for then his fetchings and servings would take him across a ship’s rolling deck, beneath the flutter and snap of billowing white sails. He would know the vastness and grandeur of the trackless sea, the thrill of unvisited shores heaving out of the blue distance, and the romance of exotic ports of call freighted with mystery and seasoned with hints of dark danger. But the closest he ever came to those greyhounds of the sea was when he visited the Surrey Commercial Docks, inspecting cargoes, manifests and bills of lading. Such mundane tasks had occupied his afternoon and evening, cargoes of exotic hardwoods from the jungles of Burma and Ceylon, grains from the northern lands and the Dominion of Canada. But all those mundane matters were all, quite literally, behind him now, and he could rightly claim to be his own man, master of his own destiny, at least till he reported to the company offices in the morning.

  He turned right onto Swan Lane, then left onto Albion Street. There were no gas lamps along this commercial reach and the fog swirled like black tentacles. Bleak brick warehouses and granaries rose sheer into the vapours, their empty windows like the staring eyes of dead men. The faint tappings of his buttoned boots against the pavement echoed hollowly off the grimy walls.

  It was a lonely noxious night, devoid of fellow travellers, and the claustrophobic vastness of the London fog worked upon his imagination, inhabiting the deep night with deeper stygian shadows and pale flitting silent forms, which uncomfortably brought to mind the so-called East End Ghosts so common in the more sensational papers for a month. After several long minutes traversing the suddenly sinister street, he saw a dim illumination afar off, and was as glad to see the gas lamp in the darkness as a man would be to see an oasis in the desert. When he finally came upon it, he fairly clung to it, at the intersection of Neptune Street, reluctant to set off again into the darkness.

  He had intended to make for nearby Rotherhithe Station and take the underground through the Thames Tunnel into the more populated regions of the City, and from there take a hansom to his flat, but was derailed by a sound, then by a sight. The sound was the faint gay plinking of an ill-tuned piano and slurred voices raised in a sea shanty he well knew:

  “For broadside, for broadside

  They fought all on the Main;

  Blow high! Blow low! And so sailed we.

  Until at last the frigate

  Shot the pirate’s mast away.

  A sailing down all on

  The coasts of High Barbary.”

  The sight was a golden glow spilling against the fog though a double row of grimy diamond-paned windows, a merry repulsion of the night’s gloom. And he suddenly understood why he had taken such a roundabout track to the nearby station. It was, of course, the Neptune Tavern, a loitering place for toilers upon the sea, a public house to which he was often drawn when in the region and at loose ends. Obviously he could not consider himself such at the moment, for it was quite late, he had to appear at the offices quite early with his inspection report, and his brother’s instructions had, as usual, been quite specific.

  Nevertheless, he gravitated toward the Neptune as surely and inexorably as an iron filing is drawn to a lodestone. He was quite helpless in the matter, unable to halt the motions of his feet.

  The entrance of the pub was flanked by deeply carven images of the sea lord on mast sections taken from the deck of an ancient merchantman. Above the doorway, attached to a projecting beam, was a wooden placard emblazoned with a colourful image of the ocean’s monarch, seaweed-entangled locks aswirl and regally brandishing his trident. So strong were the emotions stirred in Dunning’s mind by the nautical images suddenly looming about him that he could almost feel sea spray against his face and smell the tang of salt air in his nostrils.

  Just as a ship is helpless be
fore a great wave pushed across the deeps by the Hand of God, Dunning was swept through that maritime embellished doorway and into the boisterous smoky interior.

  The place had first been called The Blue Mermayde, built when the present system of Surrey Commercial Docks were little more than shallow ponds, when most ships either pulled up to jutting boards or unloaded directly on the muddy banks. The Neptune on this foul night was filled with such noise and laughter as would have been scandalous in The Prince’s in Piccadilly or The Café Royale in Regent Street. The air was blue with smoke, thick with the burning weeds of a dozen lands, but still sweet compared to the toxic soup that now flowed through London’s chartered streets. The weathered rafters were thick with a black patina of years.

  Many of the old tars abiding within the Neptune took one look at the newcomer and quickly judged him just another slumming toff tired of West End certainties, anxious for those ambiguities of life which were the essence of being east of Charing Cross and south of the River. With the measured disdain and peculiar snobbery of the lower classes they noted his curly-brimmed top hat and high-buttoned boots and spats, his starched winged collar and spotted bow tie, his brocaded frock coat and waistcoat, his narrow trousers and tightly furled umbrella, and imperiously decided he was not one of them.

  But what most of these people might think of him did not matter to him one whit! They saw only the outward man, the mark made upon him by the world in which he lived, as a master might brand a valued and useful animal, touching only the skin and penetrating the heart not at all. A few regulars knew him as a good listener to their yarns, as a man good for a few rounds during the course of the night, but even they did not know his dreams of mysterious deeps and of coastlines brushed by spice-laden trade winds, for he was always a private man, even when sojourning among those rough men whom, under different circumstances, he might have called mate.