Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu

by Lois H. Gresh

  “Dr. Watson,” Timmy choked out.

  “Get your hands off the boy!” I shouted.

  “Who’re you?” the man snarled from purple lips. Up close, I saw the nightmare that he was: rotting from the inside out, malnourished; bleary eyes, the whites tinged yellow, and jaundiced skin to match. It took little strength to wrench the man’s fists off Timmy’s neck.

  The boy gasped for air, clenching his neck and staggering back against the door to the den.

  “Be off, like the boy said.” I spoke sternly as if to one of my worst patients, those who refused their medicine. “Go! You’ve had enough opium for today, sir.”

  The man’s purple lips split into a nasty smile, revealing black teeth.

  “It’s not opium I’m after,” he said. “It’s the Eshocker. Full blast. Full time. No limit. An’ yes, with Old Ones Serum in me belly an’ me ’ead, there’s no limit at all to me Eshocker ride.”

  “’E’s broke,” Timmy said, his voice still raw from the choking. “’E wants Professor Moriarty’s Eshockin’ for free, ’e does.” The boy puffed out his chest and lifted his chin high. “I’m the Professor’s man an’ I do ’is biddin’. ’E’s like a dad to me. ’E provides for me, same as for me dad.”

  I shooed off Timmy’s attacker. Inching along and clutching at buildings, he maneuvered his way past the other addicts toward Osborn Street.

  “Your father works for Professor Moriarty?” I asked Timmy.

  “’E’s ’is top man, ’e is.”

  “I see. Timmy, have you seen Mr. Holmes?”

  His rusty-brown eyes looked up at mine. I saw the mind calculating behind those eyes, then the brief shrug of the shoulders. Timmy Dorsey, Jr. was following the path of his father just as Willie Jacobs had followed his father’s path: it hadn’t done either boy any good, not so far as I could tell.

  Timmy still wore the same tattered jacket and trousers that he’d worn when he’d scampered from the tram machine building during Holmes’s chemistry experiment. Willie Jacobs had made sure the boy left the building before Holmes directed the experiment, which ultimately slowed the machine. Jacobs had grown up with the senior Timmy Dorsey and knew that he was a scoundrel of the lowest type.

  “Mr. ’olmes is in the den down the way.” Timmy gestured at a clutch of grimy buildings halfway toward Osborn Street.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “They’re all dens. See where the girl’s asleep?”

  Yes, I saw her. No more than eleven or twelve years old, she slept in a heap of rags by a door. Someone had lit a fire in a large barrel by the street in front of that particular building. Soot rose into soot. Eshocked den addicts huddled around the fire, rubbing their hands together for warmth.

  Timmy pulled on my sleeve.

  “I’ll take you to ’im. That girl, she’s for any man who wants ’er. So long as they pay for ’er Eshockin’, she gives ’em whatever they ask. She don’t care.”

  As I followed him to the building where the girl slept, I asked Timmy where he had been living since he’d left the tram machine building, and how he had come to know Moriarty.

  “The Professor controls the space on this street, all but for the tram buildin’. Coppers patrol that—keeping out all who might want the gold. The Professor wants the machine. ’E wants to give it the Jacobs chemicals an’ make it come alive an’ spit out gold again. I think ’e’ll send me dad an’ me dad’s gang in to ’ave it out with the coppers.” Timmy tugged on my sleeve again. “Come on, then. Time is money.” His eyes lit for a moment as he added, “On account of me dad’s service, the Professor hired me to do a man’s job, too.”

  “And what is that job, Timmy?” I asked, as we stepped over the girl and Timmy kicked open the door to the den. As if this were a signal, I saw those huddled by the open fire ungroup and move toward us. Glazed eyes, outstretched arms: they looked already dead to me. Their minds and bodies were gone but for the basics of walking, breathing, and I supposed, eating and drinking.

  I stepped inside after Timmy to the roar of machines cranked to full throttle. The noise was enough to hurt my ears, and I clamped my hands over them and groaned.

  “Shut the door!” Timmy barked, pointing at the addled creatures stumbling toward us.

  As I reached for the door, one of the drugged—or, I presume, Eshocked—men clutched at his stomach, cried out, and doubled over in pain. My medical instincts kicked in.

  “What is it, my man? What ails you?”

  A crooked grin split the bottom of his face. Two eyes jittered in their sockets. He looked over my shoulder and shuddered as if in a state of rapture.

  The man was no more ill than I was—by Jove, he was faking the stomach pain.

  “What’s wrong with you, mister? Shut the door!”

  Hearing Timmy’s command, I quickly slammed the door, and it hit flesh and bone. From the other side, the man cried out in pain again, only this time it was real.

  Scrambling to latch the door, I swung the wooden bar into its metal holder. Fists pounded, and the door shook.

  Timmy laughed.

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Watson. That door is strong. Now, come!”

  A wash of color swept across my vision and snaked up the door. The metal holder melted into what I can only describe as a squid shape, and as I blinked, desperately trying to clear my vision, the wooden bar curved into a toothy grin.

  What had happened to me? What was this hideous infection, this madness, that gripped my mind?

  I hit my head with my right hand, again trying to clear my vision while rapidly blinking.

  Feeling more befuddled by the moment, I swung around to face the small room. Stretched around all four walls were the machines, Professor Moriarty’s Eshockers, and they came in many varieties. The people using the equipment also came in many varieties. A woman with sparse hair tied into a weak bun at the nape of her neck swilled something from a bottle with a medical-style label upon it.

  “Old Ones Serum,” Timmy told me, seeing my eye upon it. “Specially bottled, close to the tram machine as they can get it; the air’s thick with it round ’ere.”

  Thick with what? I wondered. The woman turned the bottle upside down and shook it, cursing. Then she hurled it at a man wearing what appeared to be a metal corset with a matching helmet: all fixed with wires. In each hand, the man held a control, and his thumbs rapidly pressed large buttons on these controls. With each press, his body stiffened, then his back arched, and he let out a long “ooooo” sound. When his thumbs released the buttons, his body went slack, but only for a moment, because he kept pressing and pressing those buttons. I could barely take my eyes off him.

  Luckily, the woman was drugged half out of her mind, and when she hurled the empty bottle at the man, she missed him by a wide margin. The bottle crashed against a large wooden box that rumbled next to another man strapped into a chair with electrodes on his forehead.

  What the deuce was going on?

  There must have been ten such wooden boxes and electrode chairs in this room, and every chair was occupied by a mumbling, weeping, wailing person. Small, tall, fat, thin, young, old: it didn’t matter. All pulled levers on the sides of their boxes, and from the way their bodies shook and their backs arched and their lips drooled, I assumed they were Eshocking themselves. Those not strapped into the chairs writhed on the floor, in a mess of wood shavings coated in vomit and other vile matter. They wore helmets, belts, and mummy-like wraps around their torsos. I saw more Old Ones Serum, bottle after bottle being consumed by these pathetic souls, all deluded by Professor Moriarty’s promises of happiness and good health.

  There was no happiness in the den.

  There was no good health.

  In its place were filth and disease, misery and pain.

  Glancing back at the door, I saw that the metal holder and wooden bar appeared as they should: no squid, no toothy grin. I returned my attention to the room and its inhabitants, acutely aware that what I was seeing was real and not som
e concoction devised by my weakening mind.

  Wedged between the wooden boxes and electrode chairs—the Eshockers—several other devices shook violently, with people strapped into them, their faces red, heads bobbing, eyes rolling, bodies shaking. I knew about these machines. They’d been around for years, some for decades, but only doctors lacking scruples would contemplate using them on patients.

  Timmy lowered his voice.

  “The Professor calls those ones quack machines,” he said, gesturing at a device I recognized as a violet ray electrotreat. “They do no good. Only Eshockers are safe an’ provide the correct buzzin’.”

  I doubted that the Eshockers were much safer, if at all, than the Professor’s quack machines. For example, I thought, as a fat man inserted a long, thin tube into his ear, the violet ray electrotreat was no treat at all, nor did it use violet rays. With an electrotreat, very high voltage pumped into a gas-filled tube—and the tubes came in a wide variety of sizes and dimensions so as to fit into any orifice—sparking a violet-infused tinge to the gas. It looked impressive, and it certainly provided a jolt to its user. But the jolt was dangerous, particularly given that, in the case before me, the tube was in a man’s ear.

  “Everyone gets the amount an’ time of Eshockin’ they want,” Timmy said. “See that girl over there?” He pointed. “She paid at the door for five minutes. Now watch. There, there! See ’ow she slides the ’andle?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “When in pain, she slides the handle to the left, and her face relaxes. And now she wants more, doesn’t she? So she shoves the handle to the right, and her face twists again in pain.”

  “Ain’t no pain. Just pleasure,” Timmy corrected me. “The man at the door will remove ’er after ’er paid-up time. You see, Doctor, it’s the customers what control their Eshockin’. It’s safer pleasure than the quack machines.” He leaned toward me, and when I stooped, he whispered, “The Professor plans to rid ’is dens of the quacks. ’E’s waitin’ for more Eshockers.”

  “What surprises me the most, Timmy—indeed, shocks me—is that your customers come from all aspects of society. Young, old, well dressed, and… not.”

  “Yes, they all come,” the boy said. “They’re all sick in the ’ead. Eshock will be me fortune, Dr. Watson. See that woman there, she’s with child, but she don’t care none. She’s drinkin’ down the Old Ones, an’ she cares for nothin’ else, not even the baby in ’er belly.”

  Indeed, there was a young girl, heavily pregnant, collapsed against a wall with an Old Ones Serum bottle on her lap. She had passed out. I shook my head, trying unsuccessfully again to clear my vision. I felt weak and dizzy. The leg I had injured at the battle of Maiwand ten years before hurt more than usual, and I begged Timmy to find me a chair.

  “No chair ’ere,” he laughed, “except for an Eshocker chair, an’ I don’t think you want that chair, Dr. Watson.”

  The boy helped me to the wall, where I crouched and hung my head, taking long, slow breaths. Nausea rose, and the dizziness washed colors around the room. Everything seemed to pulse with color, in and out, in and out. The ceiling throbbed with geometric shapes, from simple triangles to complex three-dimensional objects.

  My face was hot, and sweat saturated the bandage on my forehead, which still ached.

  “Have… to… have to…” I gagged from the nausea. “Timmy,” I managed to whisper, “get me out of here. Quickly, please.”

  “But your friend, Mr. ’olmes, ’e’s over there in the chair.” Timmy jostled my elbow, nudging me to lift my head and peer through the dim room at an Eshocker.

  Sure enough, Holmes’s gaunt figure hunched in one of the chairs, his head bowed and bobbing slightly in rhythm to the electric pulse of his machine god. His hand clutched a lever on the side of his Eshocker box. He slid the lever all the way to the right, sending his body into violent spasms.

  “Get him,” I hissed at the boy. “It’s time for him to leave this place.”

  Timmy scampered over to Holmes and slid the Eshocker lever all the way to the left. As the boy lifted the wooden handle attached to a knife-like copper strip on the side of the Eshocker box, Holmes slumped forward, held in place by the restraints. The machine clattered to a halt. Timmy unstrapped Holmes’s wrists.

  “No,” the detective cried, “I paid for more!”

  Holmes slapped away the boy’s hands, but Timmy avoided him and unstrapped Holmes’s ankles and torso from the chair. Then he removed the electrodes from Holmes’s forehead.

  “Your ride’s over, Mr. ’olmes,” Timmy said, steering Holmes off the chair and toward me. A girl who had been loitering immediately took Holmes’s place on the chair.

  I took over from Timmy, steering Holmes from the den and back onto Thrawl Street, but first, I made sure to thank Timmy for helping me rescue Holmes.

  “It’s a temporary rescue,” the boy cautioned.

  That I knew. Holmes would return to the dens. He couldn’t resist their allure. His insistence that his den visits were research—well, I’d never felt so ashamed of Holmes as I did in that moment.

  “And you have a bottle of that damnable serum, too, don’t you?” I asked Holmes.

  His eyes unsteady, he reached up and tapped a bottle tucked into his coat pocket, and the liquid sloshed.

  Outside the den, the fire barrel was a whirl of color amidst a fog of smoke.

  Unable to see or think very clearly, it occurred to me that I was, perhaps, misjudging Holmes. Yet I could not escape the fact that he was in a stupor induced by the Eshocker and the Old Ones Serum.

  How would his great brain be damaged from the Eshocking and the serum? Dare I consider such a terrible thought?

  In our current confused states of mind, Holmes and I tottered toward our next destination. We had to make it to the Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum, where I felt sure they would take one look at us and lock us both up.

  12

  “You obviously don’t understand, sir. Mr. Jacobs passed out during treatment. He’s not well. You’ve not come at an opportune time.”

  The woman glaring at Holmes towered over me and possessed a more imposing frame than most men. Straddling her feet with her arms dangling loosely by her sides, she seemed to be preparing for a fight. She had the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen, the sort of blue I’d always associated with an Arctic ice thaw. Her mouth was a sliver of ice set in an angular face. I didn’t remember this woman from our previous visit to the asylum, when we’d had Willie Jacobs admitted. Another attendant had taken care of things for us.

  Thankfully, our walk to the Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum had cleared both of our minds—sufficiently, at least, for us to pass as being of reasonably sound mind.

  Holmes swept off his hat, bowed slightly, and graced the ice woman with a smile.

  “I’m Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and this is my associate, Dr. John Watson. And your name, dear lady?” he asked.

  She shifted position. Her muscles tensed.

  “Clara Klune, head nurse. Don’t try anything with me, sir,” she said. “I don’t care who you are.”

  In the distance, a man shrieked. I heard what sounded like pounding, and then a chorus of wailing rose:

  “No, not me!”

  “Get off, I say, get off!”

  Holmes’s eyes widened.

  “My dear madam,” he said to Miss Klune, “we are here to visit our old friend, but also we’re on government business.”

  That’s a stretch, I thought.

  “You must be aware of the Eshocker dens all along Thrawl Street, only a short distance from here,” Holmes quickly continued. “I’m investigating those dens with their Eshockers, and that means a visit to the Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum is in order.” He studied her expression—or lack thereof—for a moment, then added, “I believe the inventor of the Eshocker runs this asylum, does he not? Dr. Reginald Sinclair?”

  At this, she flinched, but quickly regained her composure. I had the feeling that Miss Klune had ample practice in remaining calm
under any circumstances.

  She addressed me.

  “Dr. Watson, do you specialize in diseases affecting the brain?”

  “I’m a general practitioner,” I said, “but more to your point, I’m not here in my capacity as a doctor. Although,” and following Holmes’s lead, I stretched the truth, “I am helping with the Thames infestation and the resulting diseases, injuries, mental aberrations, and of course, deaths.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but before she could speak, a burly orderly raced into the hall.

  “What do you want, Michael?”

  “We need you in the day room. The new patient is having a terrible reaction to the sedative you gave him. He’s vomiting and attacking anyone who comes near him.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, “there’s always something, isn’t there?” She returned her attention to Holmes and me. “Now, you two go back to the waiting room. I’ll fetch you if Dr. Sinclair becomes available.” She pushed the door open and waved us back into the waiting room. “Remember, I have eyes and ears all over this asylum, and if you dare try entering again without following procedure, I will have you banned from this institution. See that Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson wait for admittance this time.” This last she addressed to the waiting room attendant we had slipped past earlier.

  She closed the door between the waiting room and the hall. I knew that the door locked people in, but it didn’t lock people out—this was how Holmes and I had gained access.

  We turned to see the now-hostile waiting room attendant, another burly man in his late twenties, standing over a decrepit fellow writhing on the floor by the fireplace, which had burned out. The fellow on the floor was chewing the skin off the back of his left hand.

  “Stop it!” The attendant slapped at the man’s hand. “I’ve told you. There’s no bed for you here. We’re full. You’ll have to leave.”

  The man spat his flesh to the floor in a spasm of blood.

  I raced over to him and felt his forehead, which was blazing hot.

  “This man needs medical attention,” I told the attendant.

  “Then you help him,” he retorted.