“Why, Holmes?” Kent asked.
“The Morlocks are nocturnal,” Maddoc answered. “Their eyes have become very sensitive to light from dwelling long centuries in their caverns. Light will be a weapon against them.”
“Ah,” breathed Kent, “the dark lanterns.”
“But with the dawning, they will be returning to their lairs,” Maddoc continued. “If we could have got here before dawn or…” He voice trailed away. “If only I had not been persuaded to destroy the Time Machine, I could…”
“I would have thought, Mr Maddoc, that you, of all people,” Holmes said coldly, “would have learned the dangers of, shall we say, fiddling with time.”
Maddoc lowered his gaze, but made no reply.
“All right then,” Kent said, pulling his revolver and approaching the opening. “Lord, what a smell.”
The three men entered the eternal night of London’s underworld just as vague dawn was creeping over the great city. They had not penetrated deeply when they were forced to light the dark lanterns, but they adjusted the shutters of the devices so only the barest of gleams escaped, though they would be able to open wide the shutters in an instant. With the thin shafts of light that filtered down through street openings they had sufficient light to their needs.
The air within the sewer was foetid in the extreme, freighted with smells of human and animal waste. The walls were mostly of brick, probably dating back to the Poor Law Commission of 1843, nearly two hundred years after the Commissioners of Sewers settled the drainage problems of the gentry in the City, but some sections were faced with nothing more than hard-packed impermeable clay; everywhere, though, all the walls were encrusted with pale nitrates and tiny stalactites were suspended above them. The clotted water that sloshed around their boots shone prismatic in the dim light, infused as it was with pungent naphthalene and other chemicals that ran off from above.
“How could any creature endure this?” Kent demanded, keeping his voice low.
“Adaptation through necessity,” Maddoc murmured. Then, even more softly: “Evolution.”
“Forces from the Yard should be entering about now,” Kent remarked, ignoring the inventor’s musings.
“The Pinkertons, too,” Holmes added.
The veracity of their words were confirmed by sudden sounds echoing through the miles of sewers, shouts and gunshots.
“Which way, Maddoc?” Holmes demanded urgently. “We must take advantage of the diversion caused by the others.”
“This way,” Maddoc replied, moving to the fore.
Screams and shouts echoed out of the blackness, but there was no way of telling how close or how far away they were. With Maddoc in the lead, they made their way as quickly as possible. They were dogged by unseen splashes and stealthy treads all around them, and they often caught in the narrow beams of their lanterns flashes of white which vanished almost as soon as the light fell upon them.
As they penetrated deeper, the smells of the sewer, which were at least the odours of a human city, were overpowered by other smells, feral and noxious scents, the smells of matted fur and a strange musk, of waste made by an animal not of this world.
They passed through a ragged opening tore through a brick facing and entered a region of new excavations. At the same time, the sounds of conflict dropped away to be replaced by deep mechanical throbbings. Strange machines rose about them, powered by energies unfathomable to these men dwelling toward the close of the Nineteenth Century.
They were attacked almost immediately, white-pelted creatures surging at them and dropping from above. They opened wide the shutters of their reflecting lanterns.
The creatures revealed in the sudden glare fell back from the light, holding their hairy arms and wide-spread taloned hands up to shield eyes large as saucers and as reflective as those of cats or lemurs. They wore no clothing, but the fur that covered their thick bodies seemed to accentuate their nakedness rather than conceal it. Their noses were not much more than slits, and their red-rimmed mouths gaped to reveal jagged yellowed fangs, denoting a diet composed entirely of meat, and even Holmes shuddered at the thought of what unwholesome nourishment these creatures might find savoury in the heart of London.
The men hesitated the barest of moments before firing their weapons, sending volley after volley into the Morlocks. The bestial descendants of men fell before the attack, and they gave way into the heart of their underground empire.
The penetration was a setback but not a defeat for the Morlocks, and they attacked the invaders with even more ferocity. Kent fell as a Morlock smashed into him, but as the beast bent to tear out the inspector’s throat Maddoc put a bullet through its brain. Kent’s lantern flew against a machine, broke open and spread flaming coal-oil across a line of attackers. Holmes’ lantern, too, was dashed away by a clawed hand, but it merely went out, leaving them with just Maddoc’s lantern, which could only illume one direction of attack at a time.
Kent clambered to his feet, firing with Holmes and Maddoc at the flashes of white which kept at them.
“Does not look good, Mr Holmes!” Kent snarled, firing a last shot, then reloading as quickly as possible.
“I cannot find fault in your logic,” Holmes replied, aiming, then firing.
Pitiful cries for help and moans of terror and pain sounded from the darkness in the direction they had been making – human cries, human moans.
“Prisoners!” Kent yelled.
“We’re too late to help them, or ourselves!” cried Maddoc. He fired his weapon, but the hammer clicked on empty chambers.
“Listen!” Holmes said, as he shot a charging Morlock full in the face.
Maddoc and Kent then knew what Holmes, with his sensitive hearing, had known for several moments – the tide was about to turn. Dozens of shafts of light abruptly shot through the machinery-filled cavern, and the foetid air suddenly echoed with gunshots and the bellowing voices of grimly determined men.
The Morlock defence crumbled under the wave of Scotland Yard officers and Pinkerton operatives, who drove before them the remnants of the creatures they had encountered in the outer tunnels, ruthlessly killing them before they could flee. In the lead were both Lestrade and Gregson.
“Good to see you’ve wasted no time in keeping busy and causing trouble, Mr Holmes,” Lestrade said. “I shall surely give your best to Colonel Moran when I see him.”
They found about three dozen prisoners, most of them alive, but a few so close to death they would likely not survive to see the surface world again. All around them were the grisly remains of Morlock repasts, so gruesome that even some of the operatives and police agents fainted dead away, even after the terrors they had already endured to attain this point.
Among the prisoners was William Dunning, whom Holmes recognised from the likeness given him by Sir Reginald. The young man was gaunt in the extreme, terribly weak and glaze-eyed. It would be some time before Dunning recovered from the horrors of captivity and cannibalism, but given enough time and care, he would regain his senses.
“The Mother-Thing is not here or among the dead,” Maddoc told Holmes.
Lestrade and some of the police broke open the newly constructed cells while Gregson and the Pinkertons hunted down the remaining Morlocks.
Maddoc, Holmes and Kent deserted the others for a narrow opening pointed out by Maddoc. They pressed through a smooth-walled tunnel and found themselves in yet another artificial chamber.
“Great God in heaven!” Kent breathed.
“Good lord,” Holmes murmured, and he fired a shot.
The target of Holmes’ shot shimmered as the bullet passed through it. The creature in the midst of the machine was naked except for a tool and weapon belt; it was a swollen mockery of motherhood, with pendulous breasts like a sow and limbs so heavily muscled as to shame a stevedore. It glared at the three men with all the hatred of a mother who has witnessed the murder of her brood, and with all the cunning of a she-wolf seeking another lair.
A whi
rlwind swept the chamber, and machine and monster vanished.
“The Mother-Thing has escaped!” yelled Maddoc. “She has escaped into time. We dare not lose another moment!”
Chapter XIII
Not So Well Wrought, But Sufficient
“They did copy my machine when I temporarily lost it in the future,” Maddoc said, “just as you theorised, Mr Holmes.”
There were three other machines remaining in the chamber. While their relationship to the Time Machine they had seen in Richmond was obvious, it was clear they were not nearly as sophisticated. Whereas Maddoc’s original mechanism had been designed with some artistic flair, with swirls and flourishes which would have earned the aesthetic appreciation of an Aubrey Beardsley or a William Morris, these machines before them were starkly utilitarian, created by a race to whom the creativity of the mind had been totally subjugated to the brutalities of survival.
“Good riddance to the beast!” Kent snapped. “Let it go.”
“We dare not!” Maddoc cried.
“Maddoc is right,” Holmes agreed. “As long as that creature is in possession of a Time Machine, it may start its terrible plan anew, perhaps in an era even less able to protect itself."”
“What do you suggest we do?” Kent demanded. He surveyed the remaining machines that had been fabricated by the Morlocks and his eyes grew wide. “Oh no! This is insanity!”
“We’ve no choice, Inspector,” Holmes said. “If you want to stay behind, then do so, but you must destroy the third machine.”
Kent scowled savagely. “Very well! Just show me how to work the infernal contraption!.”
“These are not so well designed and constructed as the original, but they shall be sufficient,” Maddoc said as he inspected them. “Not yet complete, but it will only take moments to put them in working order. The Morlock artificers had to solve the problems presented by the missing levers and instrumentation in an unknown tongue.”
“They did well enough to get them here,” Kent quipped.
“Only one of the four machines, the one taken by the creature, carried a Morlock into the past,” Holmes decided. “It arrived in Richmond, began its brood in the Old Deer Park, then made for London. These three remaining machines were constructed after their arrival in London, and represent an improvement upon their first crude copy. Here, the Morlocks began their colony in earnest, building strength and slowly increasing the colony’s numbers. To sustain themselves, the Morlocks hunted in such a way, at various points about the city, but especially among the poor and homeless, as to not bring a great deal of attention to their activities.”
“Only partly successful in that,” Kent remarked. “The East End Ghosts and the Vanishments.”
“Successful enough,” Holmes replied. “If not for the disappearance of the unfortunate William Dunning, you might not have been drawn so far into the case.”
“What about you, Mr Holmes?” Kent asked. “I know Sir Reginald also contacted you, but you had been gone three years when the Morlocks settled themselves in London. How is it that you came back to London just at the right time to throw in against the Morlocks? And Lestrade told me what happened on Baker Street, how they captured Colonel Sebastian Moran trying to kill you, him thinking you were in your rooms even though he should have know you were not, having had the Baker Street address watched all day. How is it, Mr Holmes?”
“As to the second,” Holmes said, “I can only be thankful that Colonel Moran put a watcher on the job who obviously left much to be desired as a watcher.”
“And the first?” Kent persisted.
“I received a letter while I was in France,” Holmes replied after a moment, “addressed to the name I was utilising at the time. It asked me to return and look into the Vanishments, upon the receipt of which I contacted my brother Mycroft by telegram and learned of Sir Reginald’s plight.”
“Who posted the letter?”
Holmes frowned. “Of that, Inspector, I am not yet certain, and I prefer not to indulge in baseless speculation.”
“The machines are ready, gentlemen,” Maddoc announced.
The fit of the men upon the machines was not a comfortable one, for they had been designed for use by beings of grosser proportions. The operation of the machines was not terribly complicated, and it only required a few moment’s instruction from Maddoc to thoroughly acquaint Holmes and Kent with the controls as they had been modified by the Morlocks, as well as how to disable them temporarily if necessary.
“All they really had to do was solve the problem of my energy source,” Maddoc said. “A matter of copying, really, but if they had been forced to on their own invent…”
“Let’s get on with it!” Kent snapped. “We’ve no time for a bloody lecture about your infernal machines!”
“Time is of the essence,” Holmes agreed.
Maddoc nodded. “Once we set forth into time, we shall be able to see each other, follow each other, and it is important that we not become separated.”
“How will we know where in time the beast has gone?” Kent asked.
“It will leave something like a wake in time, just as a ship lays one in its passage across the surface of the sea,” Maddoc explained.
“It has returned to the future,” Holmes contended.
“How do you know?” Maddoc asked.
“Logic dictates that it can return nowhere else at the moment,” Holmes explained. “Its base of operations here has been destroyed, and the presence of these remaining Time Machines in 1894 indicates plans unfulfilled, to infest other time periods. The only hope of the creature is to gather additional Morlock colonisers and artificers, both of which are only available to her in her own time period, since the future you witnessed in 1954 cannot now come to pass.”
At Maddoc’s signal, they activated the machines.
“Holmes!”
Holmes looked toward the entrance of the cavern and saw Inspector Lestrade standing open-mouthed and wide-eyed.
Then his acquaintance of many years seemed to shimmer and vanish.
Chapter XIV
The Realm of the Winged Sphinx
Sherlock Holmes had experienced many odd sensations during the course of his life, from the ebullience engendered by his once-beloved seven percent solution to the all-encompassing placidity he had experienced in a meditation chamber in forbidden Tibet, but nothing could compare with the sensation of voyaging through time. He was gripped by the sensation that he was moving at some great velocity, such as to make even the fastest special train out of Paddington seem slow, yet the sense of movement did not correspond to any spatial movement with which he was familiar. There was no sound, and yet, paradoxically, all was not silent.
Time travel was in itself a paradox, he realised. Ever since the start of this case, when he had received the anonymous letter written in a familiar hand, his vastly logical mind had wrestled with the paradox of cause and effect. But was it any different, he wondered, than the paradox of his very existence in world that was anything but logical. Often he had wondered if the heavens harboured any world were logic of thought prevailed, for, obviously, Earth was not that world.
As Maddoc had predicted the three of them could see each other as they moved forward in time. And they could also see the roiling, faintly luminous wake left by the passage of their quarry.
After Lestrade’s disappearance (though Holmes knew it was he who had vanished from Lestrade’s point of view) the cavern around them began to change as the processes of erosion became accelerated by his movement through time. Within the space of a few momentary decades it had vanished altogether, a victim of London’s development. As if in a vastly speeded up kinematographic projection the buildings around them were demolished and rebuilt, with brick and mortar, but also with the new construction materials of steel and glass.
The nightmare endured by Maddoc during his second venture into the future, of the suzerainty of the Morlocks over humanity, did not fully materialise, but neither did it totall
y vanish. It continued to persist, like a phantom, not of things to come, but of things that may yet be. The persistence of the vision revealed to Holmes that they had not yet vanquished the Morlocks, had not yet averted human history from that dark course.
As London was remade into a technopolis, it also lay in ruins; as humans went about their business, mobs of phantom Morlocks swarmed through the streets; as towers of commerce spired upward among the relics of London’s long history, the city was also overwatched by spectral alabaster winged sphinxes; as man took to the air in great machines, he was also crushed beneath the Morlocks’ might.
Two futures, Holmes realised.
One human, the other Morlock.
A phantom future, true, but yet possible.
Should we fail, Holmes thought.
As they neared the year 802701, the future of Morlock and Eloi came into being, just as Maddoc had experienced it upon his first journey.
“Stop the Mother-Thing!” Maddoc shouted.
The machine upon which Maddoc rode suddenly veered away from the other two, both in time and space. And he was gone.
“What the blazes, Holmes!” Kent shouted.
“He is away to Richmond, or where Richmond used to be,” Holmes explained. “We saw when we examined Maddoc’s first machine that he had at least considered the possibility of movement through space as well as time; the Morlock artificers obviously made the possibility a reality in their replicas.”
“But what is he up to?”
“To intercept himself within the Winged Sphinx,” Holmes answered. “To destroy the Time Machine and prevent the Morlocks from copying it.”
“But if he stops himself…”
“Precisely. If he does manage to destroy his machine in the future and prevent himself from returning to 1894, everything we have done will be undone, and we shall be overwhelmed by a massive paradox, one which has the potential of erasing our existence entirely.”
“Then we must stop him, Holmes.”
Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) Page 9