Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu

by Lois H. Gresh

  “Not me, my dear fellow!” he cried.

  I didn’t yet understand how the den devices presented more danger than Holmes’s two belts.

  A knock at the door announced Mrs. Hudson, carrying a tray of tea and biscuits. As she put it on the table, her eyes were on the belt I had dropped.

  “Mr. Holmes,” she said, “I hope you are not using those electrical gewgaws on my premises.” As we hastened to assure her that was not the case, she added, “You look a sight, Mr. Holmes, since your swim in the Thames, and, Doctor, you’ve never looked so weary and ill, not since I’ve known you. All those cuts and bruises. I worry about the both of you, I do. Those monsters in the river are in all the papers. Creatures from another world, the Daily News says.”

  “The Daily News doesn’t know what it’s talking about,” Holmes said, as he poured a cup of tea and handed it to me along with a small dish of sweet biscuits. “We won’t be here for supper, Mrs. Hudson. My brother Mycroft has asked us to dine with him at the Diogenes Club. Watson, en route we shall stop at the Thrawl Street Eshocker den.”

  “I must object!” My cup jittered on its saucer. “There will be no Eshocker dens, Holmes, not for you and certainly not for me!”

  Holmes gestured at the electrotherapy belts, one now draped across his desk, the other still on the floor by my feet. “You need to see for yourself what transpires in those Eshocker dens before we go to the Diogenes Club. And I’ve chosen the Thrawl Street den for a reason.”

  Mrs. Hudson’s face went from mottled red to bright pink.

  “Willie Jacobs…” she whispered, barely disguising her disdain for our former client. “That tramp. You’re going to visit him, aren’t you?”

  Holmes and I both felt more than obligated to help Willie Jacobs in any way we could. We hadn’t been able to save him from total mental collapse caused by the phosphorus pit and the tram machine. He’d saved the lives of Mary and Samuel. I’d grown very fond of him, as had Holmes. He was a good man.

  And yet…

  Willie Jacobs had indeed gone mad.

  He’d been committed to the asylum with a diagnosis of neural psychosis and was under Dr. Sinclair’s direct care.

  Mrs. Hudson didn’t approve of our involvement with Willie Jacobs.

  “No good will come of this,” she said, “no good at all. That tramp may have saved your family, Dr. Watson, but it was his fault they almost lost their lives to begin with. In fact, it’s his fault that you and Mr. Holmes almost died, as well—numerous times, as I recall. And now, the tramp is insane. Who knows how dangerous he is? Who knows what he will do?”

  Slipping into my coat, I took my cane and hat from the stand by the door, then placed a reassuring hand on Mrs. Hudson’s arm.

  “Don’t worry. Mr. Jacobs is ill, yes, but underneath the illness is a very fine and decent man who wants to do what’s best by others. I’m certain that Willie Jacobs is no threat to either me or to Mr. Holmes. He may very well be able to help us fight these creatures and pry loose the citizens of London from these nefarious dens.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed my own little speech, and I certainly had no idea what Holmes had in mind regarding Willie Jacobs.

  Mrs. Hudson didn’t look entirely convinced that Willie Jacobs might be able to help us.

  “Whatever you say, Doctor,” she said, frowning and wringing her hands.

  In the meantime, Holmes had slipped past both of us and raced down the stairs to the front door.

  Not wanting to get into a prolonged conversation with Mrs. Hudson, I bounded down the stairs after him, just catching the front door before it slammed shut.

  Holmes was already hailing a cab.

  “Thrawl Street,” he instructed the driver, “and make it as fast as you can!”

  9

  DR. REGINALD SINCLAIR

  Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum

  My master carpenter, Mr. Norris, the lunatic who saw specters with his left eye and heard demons with his left ear, crouched by the coffin-sized mahogany box. The wood was raw, not yet sanded, stained, and polished. Yet to me, it was a vision of glowing beauty straight from the heavens. This box would save lives. It would restore sanity to the lost—men like Mr. Norris, who had gone insane after witnessing the murder of his wife one balmy evening while sailboats bobbed across the water beneath a soft lemony moon.

  Mr. Norris hated yellow. He hated boats. He hated water and refused it when taking his medicine or even bathing. It took both of my nurses, Clara Klune and Amy Switzer, to pin him down—after tranquilizing him into a stupor—in order to lather him with soap. They washed Mr. Norris only once every third week. I didn’t raise the issue out of fear that my nurses would leave my employment—and who would I find to replace them?

  But here he was, Mr. Norris: eyes focused on the rim of the mahogany box, a slight smile upon his lips. With perfect control, he held the chisel in one hand and the mallet in the other. Wood flakes chipped off the box, dusting his knees and drifting to the floor as he shifted his weight.

  Gas lamps set high on the walls cast wavering slips of light through the windowless room. It was a miracle, I thought, that Mr. Norris didn’t hallucinate in this environment. But I’d been careful with the set-up of the workshop, aiming to keep my patient calm while he chiseled the boxes. Mr. Norris’s own equipment filled this room. I’d sent for it when I signed the papers committing him to the asylum.

  I surveyed the equipment: rebate saws, one flat and with a large hole, another with an adjustable fence, and yet another with a pistol-grip handle that I knew to be quite rare. Mr. Norris used these saws to overlap and join wood.

  He had planes of all types: sun-planes to level barrel tops, toothing planes to scratch surfaces before applying glues, scooper planes. He also had jointers of all sizes and dimensions, as well as chair-maker’s saws, bow saws, felloe saws. He had hooks, clubs, augers, axes, glue pots, nail tools, gimlets, even an ancient grindstone. I could not imagine where Mr. Norris had procured such an item.

  Not wanting to frighten him, I walked as quietly as I could, and when I spoke, my voice was soft.

  “How is the work, Mr. Norris? I must say, your craftsmanship is the most excellent I have ever seen.”

  When he turned his head and nodded, I placed a hand on his shoulder and gently squeezed it. His eyes glowed, and his smile widened.

  “Thank you, sir. It gives me great pleasure to build these devices for you. I almost feel alive again, as if I matter.”

  “You do matter, Mr. Norris,” I reassured him. “You matter more than you know. In fact, I wish that I had another two or three men as capable as you are at fashioning wood for my Eshockers.”

  A bit of drool slipped from his lips. He wouldn’t be able to work much longer before the visions and voices gripped him again.

  “I’ll let you get back to work,” I said. “I need as many boxes as you can carve this week.”

  “I can only do what I can. A proper job requires a week, given my… illness.”

  “I know, but demand is high, and to obtain food for you and the others, I need to deliver more of the Eshockers.”

  He returned to his chisel and mallet. Wood flaked to his knees. His hands shook. His fingers trembled. The mallet hit the chisel off-center, and a small wedge of wood fell off the Eshocker box.

  I grimaced. He would ruin the box.

  “Perhaps that’s enough for today.” I lifted his emaciated frame to a standing position.

  He dropped his tools. His eyes fogged.

  “I-I don’t like being in the Eshocker!” he cried. “Th-they are not for pleasure! Th-they are for hell!”

  “Now, Mr. Norris, settle down. Come and sit down while I call for the nurse.”

  He beat his head with both fists. Grabbing his wrists, I lowered his arms to his sides.

  “F-floating heads!” he cried. “The voices! Why won’t they go away? Why won’t they leave me alone?”

  I held his wrists with one hand and looped my other arm around h
is waist. I dragged him from the workshop, kicked shut the door behind me—it automatically locked—and helped Mr. Norris onto the examination table, where I strapped him across the ankles, wrists, neck, and torso. He struggled, but to no avail. Struggling never worked on the examination table.

  “I’m going to get Miss Klune,” I said in my most gentle and soothing tone. “She’ll take care of you, calm you, and help you rest again.”

  “No Eshocker!” he shrieked, then burst out weeping.

  “I promise, Mr. Norris, no Eshocker. Not today.”

  But tomorrow, I thought, you will have a long session in hospital mode, and if you can’t calm down sufficiently, I’ll have to apply extreme treatment.

  How ironic that the very man who helped me build the Eshockers needed their treatment just to function rationally for any length of time at all.

  Mr. Norris screamed and wept as I hurried off to find Miss Klune. I had asked her to look in on Willie Jacobs not long before, and so I sought her in the closet just off the day room where I’d stuffed him. Well, it wasn’t really a closet, just a tiny room that could accommodate nothing more than a small bed. It was all I had been able to offer at such a busy time—all the beds in the larger rooms were taken.

  Miss Klune’s muscular body barely fitted between the bed and the stone wall. She straightened as I opened the door, and she lifted a dripping needle from Jacobs’s neck, her usually neat hair misaligned after the struggle of holding him still. She set the needle back in its box and pushed her hair back in place. Jacobs emitted a stream of gibberish, his usual nonsense about giant snakes, “the beast,” and so forth. Miss Klune shook her head, exchanging a glance with me.

  “Hurry off and take care of Mr. Norris, would you, nurse? He needs sedation.”

  “I assume he’s strapped onto the examination table?” She certainly knew my treatment methods.

  I nodded.

  As she bustled down the hall, I sank against the wall, contemplating my choices for woodworkers and machinists. Among the inmates, who could work a twelve-hour shift without collapsing into the ravings of a lunatic?

  My work was important.

  My work was critical to the health of those with brain maladies. My breakthroughs could cure countless patients in future generations.

  I needed to sell those den Eshockers to Moriarty, needed funds to run the asylum and to complete my clinical trials of hospital mode and extreme treatment mode. I needed to file the patents.

  I broke into a sweat.

  “Me crinoline an’ bustle, they’re too tight! Do you like me bustle, sir?”

  She burst into giggles. It was Mrs. van der Kolk, my undergarments-obsessed lunatic.

  I jerked myself from my problems. A patient required my help. Quickly wiping the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, I rushed over to Mrs. van der Kolk, who huddled on the floor by Mr. Robertson’s chair. Slumped as usual, eyes shut, slobber glistening upon his chin and dripping to his night shirt, Mr. Robertson didn’t notice me or his constant companion, Mrs. van der Kolk.

  After I helped her stand, Mrs. van der Kolk leaned on me and shuffled across the room to a chair by the boarded-up window. Spring poked from the cushion, which was covered in a coarse, decades-old fabric. I eased her down. She giggled and said something regarding her private anatomy. I’d heard it all before… many times. Not only was she obsessed with her undergarments, she was also obsessed with what they covered.

  Clasping her hands in mine, I tried to catch her attention with my gaze, but her eyes roamed around the room.

  “I want to die,” she said. “Nobody wants what I ’ave to offer. Me charms, they’re gone.”

  “Mrs. van der Kolk, look at me, dear,” I said, coaxing her by placing a hand on her cheek and swiveling her head toward me. “You have much to live for, dear. Your husband, great man that he was, has gone to the greater heavens, where he awaits you. He is still faithful—”

  “Faithful?” Her head swung toward me, and her eyes bored into mine. “’E’s faithful? To me?”

  “Yes, dear.” I had come to believe that my patient’s obsessions were all bound up in a fear that this was not the case, though my reassurances had not so far brought any relief from her symptoms.

  “No, ’e’s never been faithful, not to me! An’ ’e’s not faithful in ’eaven, neither, if ’e be there at all! Me ’usband’s in ’ell, ’e is, I tell you, in ’ell!”

  “Wherever he is, I can assure you that he is indeed faithful to you. He is with no other woman, not in the ways that matter to you. I promise you this, I promise it.”

  “No other woman? No more? ’E was with so many. ’E said I weren’t young no more, nor pretty to ’im. ’E said I were good now only for cleanin’ ’is house and feedin’ ’im.”

  “You’re worth much, much more than that, I assure you,” I said.

  “I were with ’im forty years. ’E was with another woman on me weddin’ night… and many more ever since.”

  The problem was, I had no methods of amusing my patients to divert them from their inner turmoil. They remained lost in their heads, all day, every day, and all night, every night.

  Suddenly, she wrenched her hands from mine and clawed at her eyes. I wasn’t fast enough to grab her hands and stop her. Blood oozed from both of her eyes, and she shrieked.

  “Let me kill meself, let me die, let me go to ’im and show ’im what ’e’s done to me!”

  Miss Switzer emerged from the hall leading to my office and rushed to my aid. The nurse eased Mrs. van der Kolk from her chair and led her toward the room she shared with Caroline Brown, only seventeen yet already as insane as Mrs. van der Kolk. Just in another way, of course. They all differed in their illnesses. Caroline Brown swore she was Joan of Arc.

  “Thank you, nurse.” I smoothed my jacket and tweaked my collar.

  Amy Switzer cast a brief smile my way, but her focus was on the patient, who was weeping that she wanted “death, nothin’ but death.”

  “Would you like the comfort of the Eshocker, Mrs. van der Kolk?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened, and for a moment, the weeping ceased. She turned toward me, clutched at my arms.

  “Oh, yes, praise you, sir! Shock me, please! Shock me so I think no more!”

  How this warmed my heart, how it brought me the deepest joy.

  “Miss Switzer, please bring Mrs. van der Kolk to the treatment room in two hours. I have a few more patients who need my help first, and in the meantime, you may give Mrs. van der Kolk a sedative.”

  “Yes, Dr. Sinclair, right away.”

  Did I imagine it, or did Amy Switzer look at me just now with adoring eyes? Did she admire, perhaps lust for me? What did I see in her eyes, she who was always angry and scowling, typically so discontent I wondered if she was the right woman for the job? Had I misjudged her? Was her irritation due to female frustration? Did she want me as a woman wants a man?

  I could barely imagine it, and as quickly as the thought occurred to me, I shrugged it off.

  I had two patients to process before dealing with Mrs. van der Kolk. Both might also be of use to me in building enough den Eshockers to satisfy Moriarty’s procurement agent. Each in his own way, of course.

  If sufficiently subdued, Bligh Braithwaite had the brains to handle some of the more elaborate wiring that I always did myself.

  As for Willie Jacobs, he’d helped his father build and run the infamous tram machine that no authority or scientist had been able to fully shut down. Nobody knew how that machine worked. Rumor had it that even Mr. Sherlock Holmes, considered a genius, had only been able to put the machine on “simmer,” meaning it could erupt again, to my way of thinking. Surely, Willie Jacobs could put together den Eshockers for me. Transformers, wiring, resistors: it was all quite simple, really, though few had my knowledge of alternating current and rechargeable batteries.

  I could teach Willie Jacobs.

  In return, I wondered if he could teach me something about the esoteric tra
m machine and its inner workings. I might gain useful knowledge that would help me build even better Eshockers with which to treat my patients.

  Excited, I hurried down the hall to my office and to the treatment room, where I knew Bligh Braithwaite would be waiting, strapped into the left Eshocker, the ball-gag in his mouth, the restraints biting into his wrists and ankles.

  10

  “Ah, my old friend. Bligh Braithwaite.”

  He gurgled behind the ball lodged between his teeth.

  Apparently, Miss Klune had tranquilized Mr. Norris and returned the poor fellow to his room. The examination table was wiped clean of slobber and blood.

  I turned my attention to Braithwaite. As I looked at him, he squirmed and a muffled howl escaped his lips.

  “I see that my nurses attempted to give you a shave,” I said, gesturing at his right cheek, which bore razor cuts, and at the left cheek, which remained dense with spiky growths of black hair.

  He strained against the wrist and ankle bindings, his face red and his eyes watering.

  “So you escaped from Kandinsky and came to me for help. Or did you come here to help with the clinical trials of the extreme treatment Eshocker?” I asked, moving closer to the box that held the mechanisms of the left Eshocker.

  I twisted off the screws from the top of the box and peered inside at the electric mechanisms.

  “M-mmmrrrrrr!”

  “My dear fellow. Relax, would you? After all, you know how this works. I’m going to help you. It may be that you will soon be able to help me, too.”

  He answered with another muffled scream.

  “You were always so testy,” I complained, “never satisfied with anything. Tell me, what would you do in my place? I’ve thought long and hard about your problem, Braithwaite. Obviously, Kandinsky couldn’t help you, and that’s why you escaped and came here. So I’m not going to send you back. Instead, I’m going to treat your illness to the best of my ability.”

  I’d made the decision in a flash. It was brilliant, really. He would help me wire the Eshockers for Moriarty’s dens. I would sedate him, keep him calm using extreme treatment. Nobody had ever paid any attention to Bligh Braithwaite but me, and I had no reason to think that anyone would pay attention to him now.