Sherlock Holmes and The House of Pain

by Stephen Seitz

  I propped the wooden bar against the door, making it firm so that it would be extremely difficult to open. I moved my cot to the side, and managed a fitful night’s sleep. Knowing I had a second appointment at the House of Pain first thing in the morning did nothing to calm my nerves, but did strengthen my resolve.

  The early rays of dawn poked into my room, but the noise behind the door snatched me from slumber. First the door handle rattled, and then Montgomery began pounding.

  “This is foolish, Holmes!” he yelled. “You can’t avoid the inevitable. Resistance is useless.”

  Montgomery shoved his shoulder against the door, but my barrier held.

  “Right, then,” he said with a sigh, and I heard him take a few steps back. Calculating quickly, I dislodged the bar. With both my hands, I raised it over my head as I stood to the side a few feet in, the most likely position for attack. The door smacked hard inward, crashing solidly down onto the floor and sending a surprised Montgomery sprawling on his face. I brought the bar down on him hard, breaking at least three ribs and earning a gratifying howl of pain as he writhed in agony on the floor.

  Fangs bared and claws out, Ares bounded into the room, but I caught him firmly on a shoulder and sent him slamming against the wall, where he landed on Montgomery’s head. Hercules, close behind, managed to get some claws into my ankle, but I thumped him on the nose and sent him scampering down the hallway. Blood began to flow, and the wound to sting, but I simply could not worry about that. I would not have a second chance, and after what I had endured the day before, this pain was nothing more than a bee sting.

  I took the nearest stairway and ran down it, brandishing my wooden bar as if it were Spartacus’ sword. No sign of anyone. Peering out the window, which faced the main gate, I saw Moreau rounding up his rat creatures and giving them instructions for the day’s work. He had prepared for them some sort of artificial sustenance, which they consumed with great gusto.

  You have told me, Watson, of some of your battlefield inspirations, those bursts of insight which can only come in trying and emergent times. I had one of those at that moment, prompted by the sound of Montgomery hobbling down the other staircase. I raced to the rear door and stepped outside into the clammy, hot and hazy jungle air.

  About thirty yards of open ground lay between me and the three or four grass huts which contained the imprisoned sailors, all guarded by Moreau’s canine rats. Behind me, Montgomery had gained the lower floor and had to be looking for me.

  I bolted, holding my wooden cudgel as low as I dared, and cracked the first guard rat as hard as I could on the skull, killing it instantly. Banging the door down, I yelled to the others, “Let’s get out of here! Are we rats or men? If we must die, let us fight and die like Englishmen!”

  Five men poured into the sunlight as what seemed to be a horde of angry guard rats raced toward us. The man nearest me kicked at the hut’s wooden door, which buckled immediately and provided instant weapons. Though the horrid beasts swarmed around us, they were much shorter and provided easy targets. In our anger, we barely felt their teeth and their heads broke with sickening, but satisfying crunches, their bloodied bodies shuddering with death throes under the brutal sun.

  By now, the other huts burst open, and the sailors followed suit, grabbing anything they could hit with, even as sharp rodent claws rent their flesh, and blood now flowed freely between both man and animal. We managed to club our way free and began to rush at the main gate when a crisp gunshot cut through the air.

  Alexandre Moreau fired again, killing one of the sailors, and our escape attempt ended as quickly as it began.

  “You are a damned nuisance, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” Moreau snarled. “You’ve set me back by several weeks at least. I can tolerate this no longer.”

  A commotion outside the compound caught everyone’s attention. Frustrated, Moreau left us in care of the remaining guard rats and went to the main gate, one of his vicious cat-dog creatures trotting at his side. Not a moment later, both he and the cat thing ran toward the main house.

  At that, the guard rats raced toward the main gate, where the welcome sight of Her Majesty’s Marines made their way through the jungle and closed in on us. We cheered as we heard their axes break the gate, and charged toward them with our own crude weapons, trapping the guard rats between us. A squad dropped on one knee and began firing at the creatures, whose true rat’s nature showed as they immediately scattered for any dark space they could find.

  The canine cats proved more dangerous. Eight of them came out of nowhere, felling two of the sailors, and nearly crippling me, but I was able to force it off. Several of the beasts circled the marine troop, snarling and waiting for an excuse to pounce.

  But they hadn’t counted on the second wave, which stayed in the brush and fired from behind the trees, wounding some of the animals. Three of them ran into the jungle and apparently made their escape. By that point, I was simply exhausted and collapsed onto the ground, bleeding from bites and lacerations, faint with dehydration and lack of nutrition, numb from pain, my energy spent.

  I regained my senses back at the main house, where a soldier calling himself Captain Howard said he wanted to talk to me. I demanded water first.

  “I’m told you know what this place is,” he said.

  “It is a pit of evil,” I said. “Have you captured Dr. Moreau?”

  “Who is that?”

  “The master of this hell, and creator of those vile creatures outside.”

  “Yes, what are they?”

  “The product of vivisection gone mad!” I told him. “I won’t deny Moreau’s genius, but he uses it for the most evil of ends. This whole place needs to be razed to the ground and removed from man’s knowledge. Otherwise, dark days lie ahead. Find Montgomery. He knows much more about this place than I.”

  “There is no one here save yourself and those poor sailors,” said Captain Howard. “Most of them seem to be babbling idiots. Their tale makes little sense.”

  “Give them some time to recover,” I said. “They have suffered the torment of the damned. May I ask how you found us?”

  “One Lieutenant Gleascott, who accompanied you here,” Howard said. “He had a bullet in him, he’d lost a lot of blood, but he made it back to your vessel and sounded the alarm. You owe him a great deal.”

  “If you have stopped that monster, so does mankind,” I said.

  “And that, Watson, is the story of the Matilda Briggs and the Giant Rat of Sumatra,” Holmes said. “I think you can see why the general public should be kept in the dark about this. Science could go down a dark path indeed if this became generally known.”

  “What about Challenger?”

  “You tell me, Watson. You spent an hour with the man. What did you observe?”

  “He’s young, brash, ambitious, egotistical, and impatient. He could certainly use a good barber to tame that beard.”

  “What else?”

  “His suit has seen better days, but neat enough. My guess is that he is unmarried.”

  “Yes, that was obvious. What that overeducated oaf’s appearance tells us is that he is richer in vanity than he is in pounds sterling. I spotted plenty of subterranean mud on his boots, an indifferently maintained suit, and a beard that resembles the inside of a horsehair mattress. The man can’t afford a clean tie, let alone an expensive, specialized voyage. I don’t think he is likely to go anywhere except back to the classroom and those students he clearly despises.”

  “That won’t necessarily stop him from trying to find Moreau. His name happens to be ‘Challenger.” He may well live up to it.”

  “What of it? He’s no different from any other underappreciated academic blowhard. He’ll go back to his studies and, who knows? Perhaps he may one day follow Moreau’s path, but in a different direction. Perhaps Challenger will unlock the secret to unive
rsal blood transfusion, and actually justify the opinion he has of himself. For ourselves, we still have a missionary to find.”

  Challenger’s Journal

  February, 1887

  Loath though I was to do this, and with all the humility I could muster, I reluctantly went to the Royal Society to ask for aid. It took a great deal of effort to force myself to go, given that so few members are willing to even talk to me or shake my hand. Why, I can’t imagine. I do have a blunt manner, that is true, but is that any reason for being shunned so completely? How is it my fault that they deliberately blind themselves to the cause of scientific advancement? Surely it is not asking much for them to rise above their petty prejudices and entrenched dogmas to hear what I have to say. Science should not be reduced to rigid doctrine and stagnation.

  But I digress. While my manners have made me all but a pariah at the Royal Society, I am not without resources. There are those who can look past a forbidding façade to see the truth beneath, and the great paleontologist Dr. Chester Trevor, to my good fortune, is one of them. Once a target of similar calumny, Trevor is the most open-minded of men, and he granted me an audience. Once comfortably settled, I gave him Langdale Pike’s pamphlet, which he greeted with distaste.

  “My, this brings back a few memories,” the old man said.

  Trevor had been a giant in his day, a pioneer of evolutionary biology and a trail blazer in the field of dinosaur research. One of the reasons we have remained on good terms is the treatment his hypothesis received at the hands of his peers about 30 years ago. Trevor believes there are places on this earth where prehistoric creatures still roam. Despite some rather persuasive evidence indicating such a possibility, I must reluctantly admit I did not find enough there to fully support his hypothesis, and I have to say the very idea is utter nonsense. But I’ll say this: Trevor stands by his convictions.

  “What can you tell me of Alexandre Moreau?” I asked him.

  “A deluded madman, but a genius,” Trevor said. “We were at university together. Even then, he was a little wild, fascinated with the nervous system and its response to pain. My private belief is that he enjoyed tormenting animals.”

  “What of these accusations?”

  “I believe every word of it,” said Trevor. “Everything in this tract is consistent with the Moreau I remember. He always preferred to work in private, and his family had the money to make it possible. Of course, he’s probably dead now. He has to be, or we would have heard something.”

  “We have heard from him. He is still alive and at work.”

  “What? Challenger, that can’t be possible.”

  “I have seen his creations with my own two eyes, Trevor. His creatures lurk under the streets of London. They have both speech and reason.”

  “What? Seen them, you say?”

  “And heard them speak. They have apparently developed a bizarre religion around Dr. Moreau. Somehow, Moreau has managed to fuse rats and other creatures to create a crude and primitive new breed of … something. I call them Rat Men for the time being. We’ll have to capture some in order to make a formal classification, of course. “

  “Challenger, do you have proof of this?”

  “I can summon three witnesses and take you to their temple.”

  I recounted the events of the past few days. I still have yet to talk to Sixtus Jones. I hope the terrors of that night haven’t put him off. Our best hope of finding Dr. Moreau is to capture one of these things alive and asking it from whence it came. For all we know, Moreau is back in England.

  “Remarkable,” Trevor said softly once I completed my tale.

  “Do you see the potential of this research, Dr. Trevor? Do you see why we must find him and use his work for the good of mankind?”

  “I-I-Honestly, I don’t know what to think,” Trevor said.

  “Where might Moreau be found?”

  “He likes his privacy, which means he could be anywhere,” Trevor said.

  “Wherever he is, he needs equipment and supplies,” I said.

  “True. My guess is he would be somewhere in the Far East.”

  “Why?”

  “Because his family has rubber and trade interests there. That’s a large part of the Moreau financial empire. They have a plantation on the island of Sumatra, I believe, and gold mining interests in South America. Those are among the few areas of the world where Moreau could elude British justice should that be necessary.”

  “The man has committed no crime.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter, Challenger,” Trevor replied. “The public, if they knew what you told me, would rise as one and demand his head. You have described truly fearsome creatures. What if they breed like rats and not men? They could prove a great threat.”

  “I had not thought of that. I must find him, Dr. Trevor. The man may be mad, but he has unique knowledge which could be lost forever if Sherlock Holmes has his way.”

  “Yes, Sherlock Holmes. I have heard of him. Some sort of private policeman, I’ve been told.”

  “He calls himself a consulting detective, but in fact he is nothing more than an amateur scientist with enough knowledge to be dangerous, and he has a knack for finding trouble. His own encounters with Moreau have made him a fanatic, and I fear Holmes could set evolution, biology, and zoology back a hundred years if he gets to Moreau first.”

  Trevor signaled for tea.

  “That may not be such a bad thing,” he said. “Scientific advances should be made slowly, in the laboratory, with full and proper documentation, and they should be done humanely. The problem with Moreau is his narrow view, and he is a man who does not know what he does not know. That sort of research must be conducted under the most rigorous of protocols, and subject to the scrutiny of qualified peers. It may not matter if you find him, Challenger. The information may be completely useless by our standards.”

  I pondered this before replying.

  “We can work backward from his conclusions and we can reason from his results,” I said. “We can replicate his experiments without doing harm. We can study his creatures and perhaps find safer and more ethical ways to the same destination.”

  “You appear to be as penurious as ever. I don’t see how you can afford such an undertaking, especially having no idea where to begin.”

  “That is an obstacle, true. I thought I might sign on in the merchant marine. My back is as strong as that of any stevedore’s.”

  Trevor laughed.

  “I can only imagine how the roughs of the merchant marine will take to your natural charm. You assume much, my friend.”

  “One must assume much to learn much, Dr. Trevor. Does anyone else here have any ties to Moreau?”

  “I’ll ask, but I can’t promise anything.”

  “You have my card,” I said. “Please let me know if you hear anything.”

  Part Four

  Watson’s Journal

  February 15, 1887

  I believe I may safely say that the rat people are no more. Human-like no longer, they have become as they once were before the poor creatures passed through the hands of Alexandre Moreau, except for their unnaturally large size. They are now nothing more (or less) than giant rats. Still dangerous, but mere animals once more. A further blessing: Moreau, wisely, has not given them reproductive capability – yet. We have alerted the proper authorities, who, as I write this, are purging the sewers before these things get into the Underground.

  I do not think Hastings will be effusive in his thanks at our finding his sister, for she is in a horrible state. Holding onto life, that is true, and very much in fear. But I shall recount that in due course.

  Holmes returned to the temple where we first discovered Sister Hastings, but could find nothing to indicate where the woman was taken or where the rat people might have regrouped. We had come full circle,
waiting for someone to spot something, but at least we had a better way of proceeding than before. Mr. Sherman had been kind enough to entrust Toby to our care for the next week, and I must say I have had a bit of sport at Mrs. Hudson’s expense. She does not allow dogs in her rooms, and so we have been going to comically extravagant lengths to keep Toby’s tenancy a secret. We are thankful he is a quiet guest.

  This time, Holmes enlisted Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard to report any sightings of large and unusual animals. Yesterday afternoon, he surprised us by dropping in for afternoon tea.

  “I was investigating a series of burglaries near here, and thought I’d save myself wiring you.”

  “Ah, that,” said Holmes. “My informants have been keeping me well supplied with current information. You’ll find the booty at this address.” Holmes scribbled something on a piece of scrap paper. “I have been observing activity in the shops. I believe I know who the guilty parties are.”

  Lestrade scowled.

  “I was already close, thank you,” he muttered.

  “I’m simply saving you a bit of shoe leather, Inspector. Have you something else for us?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. You wanted to know if there have been any sightings of unusually large, rat-like animals?”

  “Yes, standing about four feet on hind legs. Their fur runs from black to brown to grey.”

  “Then you’re in luck. Some panicky women reported just such a creature near London Bridge, on the Southwark side. They said they saw it around twilight.”

  “Capital, Lestrade, capital. Watson, are you game for rat hunting tonight?”

  “I’d prefer dental surgery after the last encounter, but I am your man.”

  “Excellent! So, Lestrade, what other news is keeping the Yard busy these days?”

  Mid-February at sunset is no time to be poking around the banks of the River Thames, even if one is armed and ready. Tonight would be a frosty one, and our very words seemed to take on extra menace, because of the condensation in the air making our breath visible.