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

by Ralph Vaughan

  “Fourth dimension?” Kent exclaimed. “What the deuce do you mean by that?”

  “I believe Professor Hinton is referring to time as a dimension, a view gathering acceptance currently among men of science and philosophy,” Holmes said.

  “Quite right, Mr Holmes,” Hinton agreed. “We believe in the three common dimension of space – length, breadth and height – because we can so easily see them with our eyes, perceive them with our sense of touch. Understand, though, that in doing so, we accept two universes which we cannot perceive, that being the universe of the line – one dimensional – and the plane – expanse in two dimensions. We cannot see either of those universes, nor could any possible inhabitants of the lower dimensions perceive us, or each other, for that matter.

  “For example, an inhabitant of the one-dimensional universe, let us call it Lineland, would know the cosmos only an endless line,” Hinton continued. “Any existence beyond that line would be utterly inconceivable to our little lineman, but rotate his universe at right angles to itself, and you have a two-dimensional universe as familiar to Euclid as to any schoolboy who has studied plane geometry – Flatland. The lives of the inhabitants of Flatland, be they triangular women, square men or pentagonal priests, would be as an open book to us, gentlemen, observers from the Third Dimension, a universe lifted at a right angle from their own. To them, we would be as gods, able to see into their homes and beings from a direction they cannot imagine; if we attempted to physically pass through Flatland, we would be perceived only as a series of circles and ovals of changing size.”

  Kent leaned back in his chair and blew out a puff of air.

  Hinton laughed. “I understand your consternation, Inspector. Your turmoil is no different than that felt by any schoolboy under my tutelage when asked to proceed beyond the limits of vision and common sense.”

  “Now that you have worked up to the dimensions of our visible universe,” Holmes said dryly, “your next step presumably would be to rotate it by a right angle to itself.”

  “Very good, Mr Holmes,” said Hinton, as if the consulting detective were a student bright enough to follow a complex lesson. “A fourth dimension extended from our common three, the dimension of Time. Some people, even learned men, appear to think that the Fourth Dimension is in some way different from the three which we know. But there is nothing mysterious at all about it. It is just an ordinary dimension tilted up in some way, which with our bodily organs we cannot point to. A point extended becomes a line; turn a line and you have a square; lift a square and you have a cube; turn a cube as common as a gaming die in a direction we cannot imagine, and you have what I have termed a hyper-cube, a fourth-dimensional cube.”

  “Quite fascinating, Professor Hinton,” Holmes commented, “but valuable only as an exercise to the mental faculties.”

  “I quite agree, Mr Holmes.”

  “What about Maddoc?” Kent demanded.

  Hinton’s features again twisted into a savage scowl. “That Welsh mechanic!”

  “The source of the contention, then,” Holmes said calmly, subtly motioning Kent to back off, “is that Maddoc did not view it as a mental exercise, but as a means to a practical end?”

  “He utterly twisted my research and my words away from their intent,” Hinton explained. “The visualisation of Time as a fourth dimension to our common three is a means to an end, that end being the expansion of human consciousness. I did not democratise the once-ethereal realms of higher geometry simply so a mechanic with a dangerous smattering of mathematics and physics could develop an engine to power a machine. A base machine, gentlemen! A Time Machine!”

  Kent glanced at his companion. He did not know which was more disquieting, Hinton’s revelation or the utterly calm expression on Holmes’ face. There was an aura of absolute serenity surrounding the detective, and Kent was vaguely reminded of the saints of old, whose serene faces he had seen in the stained-glass windows of the chapels of his youth.

  “Do you know where we might find Moesen Maddoc, Professor?” voiced Kent in the awkward silence following Hinton’s outburst. “Madman or not, it is quite important that we speak to him.”

  Hinton shook his head. “I’ve no idea, and no desire to know.” He then frowned and gently tapped his temple with a lean forefinger. “However, there is one person you might try in London, if memory serves me correct, a young man named Wells, Herbert George Wells, a writer of increasing note upon a variety of subjects, but having proclivities toward fiction. He turned a sympathetic ear toward Maddoc when we three were at the Royal College. He wrote a piece of flippancy back in ‘88, fictionalising his charlatanry, but they may yet be acquaintances in spite of it. I’ve no idea, for I no longer have anything in common with either of them, though I have nothing against Wells personally.” He wrote an address on the back of an envelope and handed it to Kent. “He lives not five miles from here, so if you want further intelligence about Moesen Maddoc and his chicanery, please leave me to my rest and seek instead H.G. Wells.”

  The address given was Number Twelve, Mornington Terrace, just north and west of the great expanse of Regents Park. They hailed a hansom at the intersection of the Chelsea Embankment and Flood Street, then raced up Kings Road into Knightsbridge and Piccadilly. At this hour of the morning, traffic was of course sparse, but they were hardly alone in the streets, for it was not the nature of the capital of the world to ever fully slumber, and it no great surprise to see representatives of all social classes about on one errand or another. Up Park Crescent to Marylebone Road, then onto the Hampstead Road and, finally, Mornington Terrace, a quiet lane named after the Earl of Mornington, brother of the great Wellington and Governor-General of India, home to rows of attached brick residences, neat and unpretentious, set back from the broad walkways behind wrought-iron fences, with doorways atop short stairs.

  Unlike other homes on the street, a light burned within Number Twelve. Their quiet knock upon the door was answered by a thin, neatly groomed man with a straggly brown moustache and active blue eyes. There was something about the man that exuded vitality despite the lateness of the hour.

  “Mr Wells?” Kent said.

  “Yes, I am Herbert Wells,” the man admitted.

  “I’m Inspector Kent of Scotland Yard, and this is Mr Sherlock Holmes,” he said.

  “A great and very unexpected pleasure, Mr Holmes,” Wells enthused.

  “Thank you, Mr Wells.”

  “Please forgive the lateness of our visit, Mr Wells,” Kent continued, “but our mission is quite urgent.”

  “By all means, please come in, gentlemen,” Wells said. “You are my first visitors since moving here.”

  “Recently moved?” Holmes asked.

  “Quite recently,” Wells replied. “From January till March, I lived nearby at Number Seven, Mornington Place, following…well, personal difficulties of which I am not disposed to speak.”

  Wells ushered them into a nicely furnished sitting room. The only light came from a paraffin lamp upon a desk littered with writing paper, but Wells turned up two gas lamps, driving back the shadows.

  “Please be seated. You did not awaken me,” Wells explained, gesturing toward the desk, “as I was working upon a story for publication.”

  “A novel?” Holmes asked.

  “A short novel,” Wells replied. “A form of fiction I have termed the scientific romance, a genre utilising many of the conventions of the traditional romantic novel, but also employing philosophies of science.”

  “Such as the possibility of travelling through time?” Holmes asked.

  Wells’ eyes flew wide open at Holmes’ words. “Mr Holmes, I have heard many outlandish claims made about you and your powers of observation and induction, but how could you possibly know what tale upon which I am currently engaged?”

  “Then it is true that you are fictionalising the geometric theories of Moesen Maddoc?” Kent asked.

  “Actually, yes,” Wells replied, perplexed. “Are either of you gentleme
n familiar with ‘The Chronic Argonauts,’ which I penned some years back?”

  Neither was.

  “Well, it was a tale which saw publication before I had carried the idea to full fruition,” the writer admitted. “If it were possible to buy back every issue of the three consecutive numbers of the journal in which it was published, I would gladly do so. As you surmised, Mr Holmes, it was a thin fictionalisation of rumours circulating about Maddoc when we were at the Normal School of Science (now the Royal College), mixed in with liberal doses of Professor Charles Hinton’s highly imaginative views on the fairyland of higher geometry.”

  “Professor Hinton suggested we speak to you,” Holmes said.

  “I had no idea the old boy was back in London,” Wells said. “We all had something of a falling out after the publication of ‘The Chronic Argonauts,’ but Maddoc was quicker to forgive my literary foolishness than was Hinton.”

  “If you wrote up Maddoc’s work years ago,” Kent said, “what are you working on now?”

  “A grander vision of the theme explored as a social commentary on the class war that will one day split society if we cannot create a truly egalitarian world,” Wells explained. “I have also abandoned the somewhat obtuse, almost jocular title of my youth in favour of the more descriptive, though melodramatic, designation of The Time Machine. But I fail to see how an imaginative novel of scientific philosophy could at all be of interest to Scotland Yard.”

  “In itself, it is not,” Kent admitted, “but we are looking for Maddoc. Have you seen him of late? Do you know where we might find him?”

  “I last saw Maddoc not long ago, at his house in Richmond, near Cholmondeley Walk overlooking the Green, and he was in quite a frightful state,” Wells said. “It was on the occasion of a dinner party given for a few wide-minded acquaintances. In fact, gentlemen, the revelations made that night are what prompted me to gather together my notes upon the subject and re-examine ideas that have been fermenting within my mind almost a decade, and set them into a coherent narrative.”

  “What revelations, Mr Wells?” Kent asked.

  “Maddoc’s machine,” Wells replied, a hint of exasperation creeping into his voice. “Moesen Maddoc has constructed a working Time Machine and has used it to visit humanity’s future. Permit me to explain…”

  Chapter VIII

  The Phantom of Richmond

  Inspector Charles Kent and Sherlock Holmes sat across from each other in the railway car, waiting for the penultimate train to Richmond to pull out of mazey Waterloo Station. They were alone in the car, and Holmes was as silent as he had been all the way down from St Pancras after leaving Wells; his chin rested upon his breast, his eyes were half closed, a clay pipe was gripped tightly between his teeth, and he puffed furiously.

  He was an odd duck, this Sherlock Holmes, Kent reflected as he gazed out the compartment window, and at the reflection of his companion in the window. He had no idea what to make of the fantastic story related by Wells regarding either the working model of the Time Machine, or of the incredible future period related by Maddoc to Wells and the others. While Kent did not automatically dismiss the possibility, no matter how remote its likelihood, of a machine to navigate the unknown reaches of time – after all, they were living in an age of scientific marvels such as the electric telephone and Cayley’s steam aeroplane – he could not bring himself to give any credence to the development of two separate races from present humanity, a Darwinian evolution, or devolution, as the case may be. Charles Darwin had been dead just twelve years, but his shadow still loomed large over society, and his damnable theories continued to challenge the common sense of man and the basic religious principles that were the foundation of civilisation. In Darwin’s Blasphemous Gospel, humanity owed its superior position in creation not to endowments from a beneficent Creator but to accidents of birth, deformations that decried the veracity of Biblical Genesis. The idea that the same biological processes which had raised man to the pinnacle of culture in the latter years of the Nineteenth Century could also bring about his ultimate degradation, terminating in the effete savagery of the Eloi and the inhumanity of the Morlocks, was the final mockery of man and God. Kent would admit to the possibility of the Time Machine, but not to Creation without a Creator.

  “Odd that Professor Hinton would lie about Wells, is it not?” Holmes remarked.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Hinton unhesitatingly wrote down an address in which Wells has resided for less than a week,” Holmes explained. “Yet Hinton claimed no close association with the man for some time, and we have no reason to disbelieve Wells’ claim to ignorance that Hinton had returned to London.”

  “Do you think it of importance?”

  “To our quest, no,” Holmes decided. “But it is curious.”

  Kent turned his attention to the platform of London’s busiest railway station and the crowds present even at this hour, seeking their ways among the chaos of Waterloo and its seemingly random array of number platform lines, seeking trains which never ceased their comings and goings. Were his fellow humans really no more than apes in frock coats and top hats, fated to become nothing more than animals of one kind or another at the end of time? Was creation nothing more than blind chance, a symphony with neither orchestration nor conductor? Despite the strength of the beliefs that had guided him all his life, those beliefs were now as ashes in his mouth. He clenched his fists, closed his eyes and cursed Darwin’s scientific minions, the relentless march of “progress” at the expense of all that was decent and pious.

  “There is no reason to believe Maddoc told Wells the truth at the dinner party,” Holmes said suddenly. “There is no reason to believe, even given the possibility of the existence of the Time Machine, that the future is anything than what we make of it. The past may be set, but we must at least have faith that we can decide our own fates.”

  A guard blew a boarding whistle, and almost immediately the train pulled away from the platform with a series of jerks, its motions smoothing out as it crawled into the night. It moved out from under the lattice-beamed roof of the massive station, complex switching signals moving it from one set of tracks to another. To their left as they neared the end of the rail-yard was the tiny Necropolis Station, a gloom-shrouded private terminus used for funeral trains running to Brookwood Cemetery. The train cleared Waterloo Road and headed toward Vauxhall down the line.

  “I hope that is true, Holmes,” Kent said. “I know Wells is applying not only a literary imagination but a philosophical twist to whatever Maddoc told him, but even if only a part of the tale is true, then what good is our struggle? Why strive toward the light if everything ends in darkness anyway, if the endless struggle between good and evil becomes the mockery of Eloi and Morlock?” He paused and glanced out the window as the train rushed past the darkened almshouses along Wandsworth Street. “What do you believe, Holmes?”

  Sherlock Holmes struck a match and lit the pipe which had gone out. “I find, generally speaking, that belief clouds the mind almost as much as suspicion liberates it.”

  The train steamed along Putney Street and across Barnes Common, now and then coming into sight of the Thames. On the right, they passed the vast blackness of Kew Gardens and soon pulled into Richmond Station. At the booking office they were able to rouse the white-haired agent and hire a cart, and lad to drive them. Within fifteen minutes, they were across sleeping Richmond and standing before the shadow-infested manse of Moesen Maddoc, a man subjected, they were told by the lad, to much local curiosity because of the peculiar scientific experiments he was rumoured to conduct and the recent inexplicable events in the region which villagers connected by superstition to whatever scientific secrets resided in his workshop.

  “Couldn’t say exactly, guv,” the lad replied when Kent pressed him for details. “Things seen in the night what no one can explain, pale beasts flitting in the wild parts of the Old Deer Park and down Richmond Park, animals carried off and carcasses left with marks never
made by no fox. Just phantoms and high weirdness, if you knows what I mean, and who else is there to lay blame against but the scientific chap? Leastwise that’s what people hereabouts are thinking, though doing no more than windows and doors are closed tight and double bolted.”

  Instructing the lad to wait for them, Holmes and Kent approached the impressive brick mansion by way of a long walkway passing through overgrown gardens. Projecting from the main portion of the house and onto a wide lawn was an annex with frosted glass panes all about; even though a dim light wavered within, no details could be discerned.

  “That must be the workroom from which all evil springs,” Kent said caustically.

  “Simple people seek simple answers,” Holmes replied. “We may be less than fifteen miles from the most populous, most cultured city in the world, but the folk who dwell away their lives in tiny English villages, even one that has become as much a destination as Richmond, have more in common with hut-dwellers in jungles half a world away than with their fellows in the metropolis upon their doorstep. It is quite true, as the American writer claims, ‘All the world may be found within twenty miles of Charing Cross.’”

  “So you see Maddoc a victim of country prejudices?” Kent asked.

  Holmes pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Not necessarily, Inspector. Consider the furtive white shapes seen moving through the brush and the vanished and slaughtered animals – do they bring anything to mind?”

  “Why, yes, the…” His mouth gaped. “Good God, Holmes! Could this be the source of the trouble in London, both the Ghosts and the Vanishments?”

  “Perhaps its genesis,” Holmes conceded, “but unlikely its centre any longer.”

  “The distance from London?” Kent said. “The likelihood of discovery.”

  Holmes nodded. “Consider also the elements of Maddoc’s story, even though related as hearsay by Wells, the beasts of the future. Do they not bear a striking resemblance to the so-called Ghosts?”

  “Morlocks?” sneered Kent. “Morlocks in London?”