The man stuttered. “H-h-how do you know I’m a doctor?”
Holmes assessed the length of the man then waved a hand at me. “Watson, you’re a physician. What are the clues?”
Looking between Holmes and the visitor, I cleared my throat and said, “The top of the stain on his breeches ends in a straight horizontal line, suggesting a coat. Yet, he wears only a topcoat, much longer in length, which should protect him from the stain, meaning he left another coat at work.”
The man nodded and said, “A white doctor’s coat.”
Returning the nod, Holmes added, “I should think so, too, judging by your odour of antiseptic. And a rare antiseptic at that, used mostly at Saint Giles Hospital.”
“I am Malcolm Beamish,” the doctor said, blinking in astonishment. “And the constabulary does not exaggerate your reputation, Mister Holmes. It is for these powers of observation and reasoning that I beg your attention.”
Holmes returned to his chair and lit a pipe. “Tell me what ails you, doctor, and I will make a diagnosis on its criminal merits.”
Beamish produced a small strongbox. “I discovered this box in the room of one of my patients, Elizabeth Dayton. Although the box is from an international medical company, I believe its contents were purchased by a Scots physician.”
The wooden box was labeled Materia Medica. He opened it. Inside was a yellow, chalk-like substance. I reached out to examine the substance.
“Please!” said he, snatching the box away and slamming its lid shut. “Do not dare touch it! Your very life may depend upon it!”
“Very well, then tell us what it is,” Holmes said.
“I submit to you, sirs, that it is the substance that destroyed the infamous Doctor Jekyll some three years ago.”
* * * *
Holmes’s face tightened, his brow drawing closer over grey eyes.
I laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s just a sto—”
“Is it? ‘Just a story’?” the doctor snapped. “The patient who gave it to me has disappeared. I can only attribute her symptoms to the germs within that substance.”
The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde was a well-known tale of horror in which a London scientist’s experiment transformed him into a murdering, conscienceless troglodyte. Unable to revert back from his “Mister Hyde” persona and unwilling to control his animalistic impulses, Jekyll disappeared.
“Germs, you say?” I asked.
He nodded. “Doctor Jekyll vainly searched for the origin of his transformation, but the science was beyond him. The substance has no miasmatic qualities nor chemical properties that induce the change. It’s simply an organic source of food for entities that can be seen under a microscope, entities that were not considered in Doctor Jekyll’s orientation toward chemistry.”
“Now your patient has undergone such a transformation?” Holmes asked.
Nodding, he said, “She has become something of a witch—violent and full of appetite. She lives with her parents and has no siblings, otherwise I would fear for their safety. Have you studied phrenology, Doctor Watson?”
“Only a very little,” I admitted. “My training was as an army surgeon, and now I keep only a modest practice.”
“It’s remarkable, the re-generation of her skull and facial features. Science could learn so much about the criminal mind by studying this mutation,” Beamish said.
“Indeed,” Holmes said. “What of her condition before the transformation?”
“Good health, I expect. I recognised what this material was and what its potential could be, but I thought she could be restored to sound body and mind if I could return her to her natural state, just as Mister Hyde returned to status quo when he became Doctor Jekyll again. I thought I could help her. I thought I could control her. Alas, I was wrong.”
Holmes said “What crime did she commit to bring you to me rather than the police?”
Shaking his head, he said, “No crimes that I know of, but I fear they exist. As her doctor, my duty obligates me to spare her the risks of the penal system. Further, I cannot allow my profession to become an instrument of the police.”
“How can I help you?” he asked.
The doctor said, “She disappeared in Trelawny, and I hope to find her. After two months of trying to diagnose and treat her, only now have I finally perfected an antitoxin. Just as Doctor Jekyll failed to comprehend his condition’s origin, he couldn’t have understood how to suppress it.”
“Are you aware of the asylum escape in Trelawny?” Holmes asked.
“The morning’s papers mention it, but how does it bear on my patient?”
“Several residents escaped inexplicably, but a message from Scotland Yard this morning tells me there was assistance from an outsider. Could this be the work of Elizabeth Dayton?”
Our visitor paled. “She lives not too far from the asylum. Could it be possible?”
“To-morrow Watson and I will visit her home. When we find her, we will contact you.”
He wiped his forehead in relief. “I pray that you find her before the police catch her in the act of some vile deed.”
* * * *
The remainder of the evening was uneventful, but I woke with a start in the middle of the night. Loud banging and crashes came from Holmes’s bedroom. Without thinking, I ran to open his door. His chambers were locked. I bolted to the coat hooks, rummaged in the pockets of his Inverness for the key ring, unlocked the door, and flung it wide open.
Inside, a figure held Holmes down in his bed. She stood on the bed, her boot set against his spine. Raising her arm, she aimed a gun at me. Holmes’s eyes were closed, and his body was limp.
“What have you done?” I shouted.
“Calm yourself, doctor. He is sedated by chloroform and no harm has come to him.” The voice was feminine, but the figure was dressed in a Norfolk jacket and breeches. From under a top hat, her coal black hair was cut short.
“Who are you?” I yelled.
“Who are you,” she repeated, mocking me. Mascara and eye shadow darkened her eyes and an exotic tattoo marked her cheek. “Is this not the residence of Sherlock Holmes?”
I longed to cross Holmes’s room and seize the Webley from the top of his bureau.
“Do not step any closer, Doctor Watson. I may only get off one shot, but at this distance, I doubt I shall miss. However, you may cross to light the lamp.”
I moved to turn on the gaslight. Full illumination revealed that Holmes’s pyjamas were torn open and a syringe lodged into his lean abdomen.
“You injected him,” I said, pointing to the needle.
She said, “With the same material given to me by Malcolm Beamish. You might assume that I am his patient, Elizabeth Dayton, but just as Doctor Jekyll had Mister Hyde, Miss Dayton has Sarah Cole.”
From beyond the suite’s door, I heard the scuffle of lodgers and Mrs Hudson’s staff. A fist pounded, demanding to be allowed entrance.
“Not so fast, Doctor Watson!” she said. “Move to unlock the door, and I will shoot to kill. Would you like to go first, or shall I shoot the first person through the threshold?”
“Please, put down your weapon,” I said, backing away to the corner, my hands raised. “You have the upper hand, but your illness has turned you into a madwoman. I’m a physician. Tell me about your treatment with Malcolm Beamish, and perhaps I can help you.”
She hid the gun in her pocket, her expression now unreadable. “I spied him here earlier today. Malcolm Beamish was Elizabeth’s doctor. He turned into her lover, too, after several visits. She was not well, lonely, and she remained in bed for weeks. Exposing her weak heart to him felt natural.”
Apparently she read something in my countenance for her next words were, “No, do not entertain those thoughts! The hysterical rants of a nymphomaniac.” Her wide pupils burned with an angry fire.
“No, of course not,” I assured her, all the while my hands still raised and a commotion growing louder in the hallway.
/> “Miss Dayton was not improving. In fact, her health grew worse. She could not sleep, she succumbed to bizarre appetites, and her hair grew rapidly. Her blue eyes darkened until they were black as coal. Her strength and agility grew, too.”
“Until she became you?” I asked.
“Yes.” She wiped her lips. “When he retired to his home at night, I broke into his office and read over his notes. He has other experiments ongoing, other people he has contaminated during his rounds.”
“So you injected Holmes to motivate him to find a cure to save his own life?”
She shook her head. “I do not care if Holmes finds a cure or not. I do not want to be cured. Have you ever read Charles Darwin? Are you familiar with his theory of the origin of species?”
Unwilling to digress into imaginative abstractions, I remained silent.
She waved a hand at me dismissively. “I have an inkling that I am the natural progress of mankind. This condition affects my body like yeast turns grape juice into wine. What I represent is a better individual with heightened senses and quicker reflexes, and I am free from the constraints of so-called civility.”
“Then why do you torment us with your presence?” My voice was ragged with fatigue and desperation.
She said, “I want Sherlock Holmes to save my life, not by finding a cure, but by bringing Beamish to justice. Otherwise Beamish must kill Sherlock Holmes too, like he will me and the others. Beamish thought he could manage all of his patients, but now we threaten to expose his devilish meddling.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” I asked.
“His other patients that became victims of experimentation. We are united and in hiding.”
“How do you think Holmes can help you?”
“Prove Beamish’s guilt and send him to jail for the rest of his days.”
“And if Holmes refuses?”
“Before Beamish destroys us, we must silence him instead. Doing so would force us into permanent hiding as fugitives, but we intend to survive by any means.”
With that promise, she burst out the open window. I gasped. When I ran to the window, I saw that she had slid down a rope to the foot pavement below.
Against the yellow brick of the buildings across the street, her figure was a silhouette, shaded from behind by a streetlamp. As soon as she vanished into the dark, I opened the door then I started to intervene as best I could for my dear friend. My night was spent rousing him to spot signs of illness and urging him to take various cure-alls. When Holmes woke in the morning, I retired to my bed.
* * * *
After napping most of the morning away, Holmes woke me. We dressed and took a cab to the home of Elizabeth Dayton. Along the ride, Holmes drifted between drowsing and mindless wakefulness. “Tell me again,” he said, “what happened?”
I recounted the incident then explained, “I contacted Scotland Yard, but Lestrade wouldn’t search the doctor’s office. He said the doctor wasn’t the one who assaulted you.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “My bedroom looked like a surgical theatre. Did you already say who visited me?”
“The best doctors I could get on a moment’s notice, and your brother.”
He snorted. “My brother? He must have left before I woke. What did Mycroft say?”
“He wanted the full force of the British Medical Society brought to bear, while I hoped for the best of Harley Street to visit us. Meanwhile Lestrade claims that Doctor Beamish could not be arrested, but would be questioned.”
“He may be the key source of information, Watson. It would be best to leave him untouched.” With these words, Holmes slumped into the corner and closed his eyes.
Noticing pustules of a rash growing on his cheekbone, I said, “How are you feeling?”
Holmes opened his eyes again, but they were bloodshot. “Strange.”
We arrived at Dayton’s home, a mews house over empty stables. It was unremarkable from the other buildings that lined the cobblestone street. The air was quiet on a sunny morning. Quercitron drapery fading to blue-green decorated the home’s windows. When we knocked, an elderly woman opened the door. “Yes? Can I help you?”
Holmes stared at her with unblinking eyes. Widened pupils caught her reflection.
“We’re looking for Elizabeth Dayton,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sirs. She disappeared last week—” Cutting off her remark, she stepped back as Holmes walked through the threshold and trespassed into the house.
I said, “Please excuse us, madam. Serious danger is afoot and we must locate her.”
Turning around and gazing down at the woman, Holmes’s grey eyes fixed on her figure, then her face. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, close enough to smell her perspiration and any soaps and perfumes.
“Where does she sleep?” I asked.
She pointed toward a doorway beyond the kitchen. “Through that door, but we have not heard her return for days.”
We crossed through the kitchen. A faint haze of smoke still hung in the air from the morning’s breakfast. Raw pork offal lay on a cutting board. Holmes grabbed at it with a gloved hand as if to drop a fistful into his mouth.
The woman stepped back toward the door, a hand to her lips.
Holmes stopped himself. “Forgive me. Your stare tells me all I need to know. Watson, the transformation is affecting me.”
I nodded to him and said to her, “My friend has the same affliction as your daughter. It is imperative that we find her.”
“Who are you?”
Should I reveal our names? Did I want people to question the mind of Sherlock Holmes? What about the reputation of his loyal friend, a medical doctor? I asked, “Do you know Doctor Beamish?”
“You are from the hospital?” she responded.
“No, but we are in Beamish’s employ. Please, show us to Elizabeth’s room.”
The room was little more than a bed-closet beside the kitchen. Although the home had plenty of light, her space was a dark hole. Holmes lit a lamp and stepped inside.
“A hybrid of order and chaos,” I said.
Blankets were swaddled into a nest in the corner, and it was filled by a mound of children’s dolls. They were decorated in velvet outfits and satin dresses, their hair carefully combed. As I drew nearer, I realised more detail. The dolls were brutally maimed. Torsos were decapitated. Dolls with heads intact were strangled by ribbons, or were blindfolded and bound.
“Heaven help her,” I whispered.
Holmes said, “A symptom of the disease, no doubt. The veneer of self-control scrapes away and we see evidence of what lay beneath. It is childhood, and whatever it is a child finds through dolls: love, belonging, companionship.”
“Whatever it is, it has been perverted,” I said.
“Violence is a symptom,” he said and pointed at the door frame. A bloodied handprint stained the wood.
I said, “Dear God, she’s already harmed someone.”
“On the contrary, Watson. This violence isn’t directed outward,” he explained as he waved a hand at the dolls. “It’s a hatred aimed at her own heart, hating not who or what she loves, but that she loves at all. The disease is fighting for control of her soul, against her civilised humanity. She was probably overwhelmed by the battle within her, so she tried to take her own life.”
Breath escaped my lungs. I noted a pooling of dried blood on the floor and said, “Just one palm print, and it’s a left one. She tried to cut open a vein, clearly failing, but drawing a significant amount of blood, anyway.”
What would happen to Holmes, I wondered, if the condition progressed to this point?
As if in reaction, he said, “I ask myself the self-same question. What happens when you chip away at the patina decorating my mind? What lies beneath?” The pox that speckled his cheekbone now dotted around his eye, poised to cross his face.
Rather than call attention to it, I turned to the mass of blankets. Under the layers stood a doll’s house. I asked, “Mo
re fixation with childhood, Holmes?”
He extended a hand into the small space under the roof and I thought his hand looked surprisingly matted with hair. Holmes said, “There’s something here in the attic.”
“What is it?” I asked, watching him pull his hand out.
“Because it’s addressed to me, we can deduce that she slipped in and out during the night without anyone’s knowledge.” He turned an envelope over in his hands, showing his fingernails now were nearly as long as claws. After cutting the wax seal, he slid a folded card from the envelope. He held the card close to his eye, tracing the writing with his gaze, then examining the corners, the edges, and the surfaces as he angled it in the air. “It’s an invitation to a lunatics’s ball.”
A lunatics’s ball is a fund-raising party sponsored by an insane asylum. Holmes was not known to be a patron of charitable institutions. I asked, “When is it?”
“Tonight, Watson.”
“Which asylum?”
He handed me the invitation. I read it and asked, “Isn’t this a public house?”
“Yes, and it’s a masquerade ball.” When he spoke, Holmes’s voice was barely recognizable. Had his gums suddenly receded behind his lips? No, his teeth were growing into long fangs.
“Holmes…” I began.
“I know, Watson. Our only hope is to solve this matter quickly and finally.”
* * * *
After a lengthy discussion with Holmes, I agreed to go the rendezvous myself, alone. Trelawny was as quiet as it was when we visited the Daytons’s home. The public house was on a dark street. Inside, the light was dim and conversations murmured in the air. I walked up to the bar and ordered a libation. The bar-tender had bushy eyebrows under a bald head. A Piccadilly weepers mustache swept his cheeks.
“I have good reason to believe you are in grave peril. May I offer you two hundred shillings to close up early?” I withdrew a sheaf of notes from inside my jacket, showed them, then returned them to their inner pocket.
Looking like he’d been slapped, the man said, “I don’t know who you are, sir, but you—”
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10 Page 15