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

by Ralph Vaughan

  “We must stay to our course, Inspector.”

  “But what about Maddoc?” Kent protested.

  “He will fail in his efforts,” Holmes assured his companion.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he told us himself.”

  “When did he tell us that, Mr Holmes?”

  Moesen Maddoc followed the course of the Thames, or what remained of it after so many centuries. Although the land had changed vastly from what it had been in the Nineteenth Century, enough remained to guide Maddoc to his goal. When he saw the Winged Sphinx hove into view across the verdant expanse he knew that he and attained his goal in space, and a careful watch of the instruments, as crude and as alien as they were, ensured that he had attained his goal in time as well.

  Or close to it.

  He came to ground under cover of shrubbery. His original machine had already been taken inside the pedestal of the Winged Sphinx. He doubted he could move back in time with enough precision to keep the machine from being stolen in the first place, given the grossness of the calibrations used by the Morlocks. He destroyed the Morlock Time Machine – if he succeeded, it would no longer be needed; if he failed, it would not matter.

  Nothing would matter, for the cycle would begin anew.

  Cycles within cycles.

  Wheels within wheels.

  Paradoxes.

  He understood the contradictions inherent in his plans, but only one outcome seemed less than vague to him – he would stop the Morlocks. Any other consideration seemed muddled in his mind, almost inconsequential, no matter how many lives were devastated, no matter how many creations uncreated.

  Using knowledge gathered since his first visit – weeks, months years since then…he no longer knew – he penetrated the labyrinthine burrows of the Morlocks and stealthily made his way through their mechanistic hives into the pedestal of the Winged Sphinx. There in the middle of the area was his Time Machine, surrounded by Morlocks who had just finished reassembling it.

  He pulled from his pocket the revolver he had reloaded before departing 1894 and put a bullet through the brain of the nearest artificer. He had arrived too late to keep them from learning the secrets of the Time Machine, but he could make sure that knowledge died with them. Abruptly they swarmed toward him, more than he could handle with his revolver. He had no option but to turn and run, firing blindly behind him as he ran. They chased him, but eventually he gave them the slip, and he made his way back to the chamber in the pedestal.

  He had failed to keep the Morlocks for learning the secrets of time travel, but there yet remained one hope.

  When he came unto the chamber, he found it flooded with sunlight, and he was long moments seeing past the glare.

  A form was silhouetted against the light, his own form. He stood dumbfounded at seeing himself. How young he looked, how naïve, how unconscious of the enormity of his crime against humanity.

  Memory flooded back, of coming upon the Winged Sphinx after his escape from the Eloi, of finding the bronze door opened. He remembered the hope that leaped in his heart at the sight of his once-lost machine. And he also recalled that it had been a trap.

  Maddoc cried out to his younger self, but his warning was lost in the clang of the great bronze door slamming down. Morlocks streamed murderously into the darkness, attacking the Time Traveller as he attempted to reconnect the levers he had removed from the control panel.

  Maddoc fought his way to the machine. There was still time to warn himself, and it was even possible that the two of them could escape. It would be a tight fit, the two of them on one machine, but they could cling like brothers. Safe in the past, they could then plan a proper attack, refine the controls of the machine to come back the moment before the future had been destroyed.

  He approached the frantic Time Traveller, started to climb onto the machine. A Morlock pulled at him. He kicked back and would have dislodged the creature from him had not the man on the machine lashed out blindly with a bar of metal, striking him against the head.

  Maddoc crashed against the wall, dazed and almost insensible from the blow. Through flashes of red pain he watched the Time Machine and its occupant shimmer and vanish into the past.

  The Morlock horde fell ravenously upon the helpless man left behind.

  “He said it himself when he told us of the battle in the pedestal of the Winged Sphinx, did he not?” Holmes said.

  “Yes, he blindly fought off everything that came near him,” Kent said. His eyes went round. “He will fail because he has already failed. And the poor devil has killed himself, or helped the Morlocks to do it, hasn’t he?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Holmes replied.

  “Paradox or irony, Mr Holmes?”

  “I begin to get a glimmer of some kind of logic inherent in time travelling,” Holmes mused. “But only the barest of glimmers.”

  “Then you’re a better man than me, Mr Holmes.”

  Once the Mother-Thing had attained its own century it made for the area of Richmond, for the swamps surrounding the village that had once been London were in the hands of the Eloi.

  “What can we do against these Morlocks of the future?” Kent asked. “It’s a sure bet that they have by now learned enough of Maddoc’s machine to construct the one used to travel back to our own time.”

  “And we must permit them to do so,” Holmes countered.

  “You can’t be serious, Holmes!”

  “Quite serious, Inspector,” Holmes replied. “We must let them build the one machine for the same reason Maddoc could not stop himself from returning to the past.”

  “To avoid a paradox that would undo our efforts.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I’ll risk any number of paradoxes, and even my own existence, to avoid the Morlock infestation,” Kent averred. “Have you forgotten the prisoners, or what happened to those we could not save? We can keep young Dunning and all the others from being captured in the first place.”

  “I cannot argue with your intent, but I know that we must not tamper with events that have already occurred,” Holmes said. “I do not have the faith you possess in abundance, not enough to unquestioningly believe in an omniscient God, but I realise we have neither the wisdom nor the knowledge to play the parts of gods.”

  Kent started to argue, then sighed and shook his head. “All right, Holmes, then what must we do?”

  “Second, we must kill the creature or scare it back into time,” Holmes said. “Under no circumstances must it be allowed to make contact with its own race in this time period.”

  “Make it too hot here?”

  “Right.”

  “Second? What do we do first then?”

  “After the Morlocks have started their invasion of our time,” Holmes replied, “we must utterly destroy their ability to fabricate any other machines. To the best of our abilities, we must utterly destroy the subterranean empire of the Morlocks.”

  “But if we chase off that Mother-Thing,” Kent protested, “how can we follow it and stay behind to do what needs to be done?”

  “The logic of time travel is a different kind of logic than that to which we are accustomed in the mundane world, but it is a logic nonetheless.” Holmes pointed out two figures moving swiftly toward the Mother-thing.

  “Good Lord, Holmes,” Kent breathed. “Is that…”

  “Yes,” Holmes replied. “It is us.”

  “But how…”

  “We must now move forward in time to attack the Morlock complex.”

  “What about the Mother-Thing?”

  “That will wait until we become them,” Holmes said, gesturing toward himself and Kent. “Come now.”

  The two men shifted forward in time, all the while watching the activities about the Winged Sphinx. The Mother-thing and the other versions of themselves vanished so quickly there was no way of discerning what had happened. The Morlocks created their Time Machine, and took it out of the pedestal by the light of the leprous moon looming apo
calyptically huge. After it shimmered and vanished, bound for England of 1894, Holmes and Kent began their attack.

  After making their way deep into the Morlock tunnels, among miles of enigmatic machinery, they loosed hundreds of gallons of the volatile chemicals used by the creatures in their various manufactories. They ignited the mixture, and fled into the past, escaping the purifying flames that swept through the complex, burning alike the guilty and the innocent, the knowledgeable and the ignorant, for no other reason than necessity. Ages away, they did not feel the massive blast, nor see the surface of the earth collapse into the cavern.

  The two men returned to the past they had just departed in time to see the arrival of the Mother-Thing at the Winged Sphinx.

  “If we can kill it here, we must,” Holmes said. “If we cannot, we must chase it back into time.”

  “Time, then, to pick up where we started,” Kent quipped, urging his machine forward.

  “I do believe you are beginning to grasp the logic of our situation, Inspector,” Holmes said, following after.

  Kent laughed as he pulled out his revolver. “In a nightmare there is no logic, Mr Holmes; you just act.”

  Holmes aimed his revolver as Kent aimed his.

  “There we go, Holmes,” Kent said, jerking his head in the direction of two familiar figures some distance away, which promptly shimmered and vanished. “Almost like déjà vu, all over again.”

  Holmes and Kent both fired their weapons almost simultaneously, but neither struck the creature due to distance and motion. Their bullets impacted the body of the Time Machine, throwing a shower of sparks over the creature, neither injuring it nor disabling the mechanism. The beast leaped back onto the machine and fled into time.

  “It now has no future, so its only avenue of escape is into the past,” Holmes said.

  They activated their own machines and vanished from the future, pursuing their elusive and frantic quarry down the long corridors of time.

  Chapter XV

  A Fly in the Primordial Soup

  Holmes and Kent pushed their machines to the limit as they followed after the luminous temporal wake of the Morlock Mother-Thing, keeping it in view within the illusion of space that existed in the timestream. With them in such close pursuit, the creature could neither escape to some earlier period of history nor pause in its desperate flight.

  Down the long ages of time they sped.

  History rewound around them, the age of steam and coal giving way to less technological times, when the epitome of science was the catapult and the well-tempered sword. London shrank before their eyes, becoming a raw-boned port upon a river of trade, then a Roman outpost beside a river of exploration; it became a camp for hunters and fishers upon the sluggish river’s swampy banks, one of the dark places of the Earth where men chanted to umbrous gods and painted themselves blue.

  Down the long dark centuries they flew, into the age of unpolished stone and into that distant realm where human foot had not yet tread that blessed green isle. Great beasts no longer extant flashed across their vision, mastodons and giant sloths, then the magnificent and terrible lizards of yore, dinosaurs of the land and leather-winged pterosaurs of the upper airs. Even these strange beasts of legend, however, gave way to other, more remarkable beasts, whose fossil remains were only now being wrested from the chalk cliffs of England.

  Inspector Kent had no eyes for the primeval pageant unfolding around them, no desire to see a creation that was not always constant and complete. He kept his attention focused solely upon the fleeing creature.

  They entered a region of time where the land was devoid of life, even the least insect or moss, and then kept on even further.

  The creature finally halted in a grey, lifeless world, seeking haven among some jagged cliffs jutting from a waveless sea at low tide. Holmes and Kent paused and surveyed the beast’s refuge. There was no sound in that primal world, the silence pressing harshly against their ears, and when they spoke their voices sounded unnatural and grating.

  “It stopped here. Why?” Kent asked.

  “It knows it cannot throw us off by fleeing through time,” Holmes answered. “Its only hope is to stop us here, then move on.”

  “You mean, to kill us.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I suspect, also, Holmes, that it can retreat no further in time,” Kent mused. “How can it go farther back than the first day of Creation?”

  Holmes held silent.

  “Yes, Holmes, look about you,” Kent continued. “Before this moment, the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. The waters have been separated from the land, and God has said, ‘Fiat Lux!’, but has not yet created the beasts of the Earth, each to reproduce its own kind. None of that evolutionary nonsense going on here!”

  “Inspector Kent,” Holmes said, softly.

  Kent uttered a deep sigh and nodded his head. “Yes, I know what we must do, Holmes, but, still…” He glanced around a half-formed world in the throes of creation. “Can you see this land that is clay for the Creator’s will, and still not believe?”

  “We have a task to perform,” Holmes reminded him.

  Kent looked around, then at the revolver in his hand. “We have the advantage in weapons.”

  “I hope it will be enough of an advantage,” Holmes remarked. “It has great cunning and is desperate beyond belief, which may make it more than a match for us.”

  “God is on our side,” Kent announced, with conviction.

  “I will approach from the right while you make your way toward the cliffs by way of the shore,” Holmes said. “Be very cautious.”

  “It’s just a beast, Holmes.”

  “Many hunters, I am sure, have said something similar,” the detective said, “just before becoming the hunted themselves.”

  “Very well,” Kent admitted. “The point is taken.”

  The two men made their way toward the cliffs where the fugitive Morlock had taken refuge. Inspector Kent had at various times tramped across wood and dell, shotgun in arm, but in those instances his quarries had been nothing more dangerous than a grouse or woodcock. The anxiety inherent in hunting something that could strike back, however, was not a new experience to him, for was that not the essential nature of his chosen profession, the stalking of society’s predators through London’s dark streets? In all those years, he had prevailed against the criminals of London, but, sooner or later, he knew, every run came to an end, one way or another. He glanced across at Holmes and realised in that instant they were more alike than not, separated by methods but not by goals, by authority but not by heart, each in his own way a protector of London, and now strange circumstances had set them both as protectors of humanity.

  “There it is!” Kent cried, pointing.

  The Morlock scrambled along the cliff-face like a pale noxious spider.

  Before either man could draw a bead to fire, it had again vanished from sight.

  “It’s on the run now!”

  Holmes frowned doubtfully. “There is more cunning than desperation in its movements. It seems to have abandoned its machine. Why?”

  “If we can find its machine, we can destroy it, strand it,” Kent pointed out. “If it cannot escape, we can hunt it down without haste, even return to the future for reinforcements.”

  Kent moved forward.

  “Kent!” Holmes yelled. “Stop.”

  Too late did Inspector Charles Kent realise what Holmes had seen moments earlier, that the Mother-Thing had not fled far, had not abandoned its Time Machine at all. Something bright and silvery flashed through the dead air of the primal world, striking Kent full on. He stopped, staggered back and fell to his knees, then pitched onto his side. The ornate, curiously fashioned knife thrown by the Morlock was buried deep in his chest.

  Holmes rushed immediately to the man’s side, but he was beyond help or hope.

  “Forget me, go for the Morlock.” Blood trickled from Kent’s mouth, and he coughed more
red. “I was such a fool.”

  “If I can get you back to…” Holmes started to say.

  Kent shook his head, a faint movement that seem to sap almost all his strength. “After you kill the Morlock, destroy its machine…and mine…leave me…in the beginning…with God…I wish you…”

  Inspector Kent sighed his last breath.

  Holmes heard a high whining sound and knew he had failed to stop the Morlock, that it had taken advantage of its attack upon Kent to return to its machine and escape back into time, back into the future. He destroyed the Time Machine which had carried the Scotland Yard inspector to the dawn, back to the world he believed had often read of in the first book of the Hebrew Bible.

  Holmes had to resume the pursuit, that he knew beyond doubt, but there was yet time for necessities.

  He was tempted for a moment to try to take Kent’s body back. The man deserved a decent internment in some pleasant churchyard, with sincere words spoken by a man who believed almost as fervently as had Kent.

  But Kent had asked to be left here, on this lifeless shore, and in the end, Holmes acceded to that wish. He had not known the man long, but he respected him.

  Holmes started for the Time Machine, then looked back.

  The tide would eventually flow up the rocky shore and cover Kent’s body, perhaps pull it into the soundless deeps. And there, in the watery darkness, the processes of decay would begin, life emerging from death.

  The anti-evolutionist, Holmes reflected as he turned away, might become the basis of all life on Earth.

  Holmes returned to his machine, stirred its enigmatic engines to life, and resumed the pursuit.

  Chapter XVI

  The End of Time

  Unable to flee any deeper into the past (Holmes wondered if Kent might possibly have been correct) the Morlock fled forward, deeper into an unknown future.

  And Holmes pursued relentlessly.

  So great was their temporal velocity, Holmes received only the fleetest of impressions regarding events outside the rapids of time. Mountains rose and fell as if the very planet were alive and breathing, and the oceans flowed like rivers. The heavenly bodies whirled along their courses, the planets and all the stars seeming to merge into one vast and shimmering canopy.