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

by Ralph Vaughan

  “I shan’t tell you,” Holmes replied. “You have made it all too clear that I shall not save my life by cooperating.”

  “I could have my servitors kill you now, where you stand.”

  “In which case, you would still not have the answers to your questions.”

  “You can be made to answer.”

  Holmes laughed. “Torture? Really, Colonel Moran, I had rather expected something more from gods.”

  “Do not mock me!”

  “You mock yourself” Holmes snapped back. “Despite all your grandiose claims, you are still nothing more than the card cheat who murdered a young man to keep from being found out.”

  Colonel Sebastian Moran roared with rage and started to dismount the dais, but stopped as a complex trilling noise filled the chamber. All the Martians quivered, and even Moran trembled. At the same time, the metal band upon his head was covered with coruscating scintillations.

  Holmes smiled as he received more straw for his bricks.

  “So, even gods have masters,” Holmes murmured.

  Moran came down from the platform and walked toward Holmes, but his movements were awkward and jerky. He thrust his grotesque face close to Holmes.

  “By the time we finish with you, you will pray for torture,” the human turncoat said. “You will pray for death.’

  Perhaps, Holmes thought as he considered his fate. But not till it is too late for all of us.

  The large, tentacled Martian servitors grabbed Holmes harshly, and it was by his own actions that he kept his arms from being yanked free of their sockets. They forced Holmes to enter an adjoining chamber, Moran in accompaniment, and secured the human interloper to a black table from which extended crystalline rods and varicoloured spheres.

  The room itself was filled with crystals of every shape and hue. Many huge flat crystals pulsed with inner lights, some showing vistas unearthly, others filled with shifting inhuman forms.

  “Some sort of telephonoscope, along the lines of the German Nipkow’s optical scanning device?” Holmes ventured.

  “Compare to human science, you might as well say magic.” Moran sneered. “Their superior technology shall win the day.”

  “I would expect better of you, Colonel Moran.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As a veteran of Her Majesty’s Indian Army, you, of all people, should realise the weapon is not the gun, but the soldier who wields it,” Holmes pointed out. “Even though I have never served England in a military capacity, I know that…”

  “Enough!” Colonel Moran screamed. “You’re stalling, but why? A hope of rescue?”

  Holmes held silent.

  Moran gestured, but the servitors did not move until the metal band clinging to Moran’s head crackled with electrical energy. The crystalline rods and the spheres began to pulse with light. What shot through Holmes’ lean frame was the most intense pain he had ever felt, raw energy flowing like a river, engulfing him so he could barely breathe. Crushing weight was applied to various internal organs, and it felt as if hands were reaching within him to churn and slash. He was bombarded with a fury of sounds that were at once incomprehensible and understandable, asking questions and demanding answers. It was all, he quickly realised, a psychic invasion rather than physical, which fitted in very well with the way the fighting-machines were controlled, and servitors as well.

  Since the attack was mental, Holmes fought it with every bit of his considerable intellect and will. Although he was not aware of the exact passage of time, he did realise that time was passing, that it was taking precious minutes for the Martian machines to break through his force of will, and though he understood that he could not maintain a barrier forever, he must do so long enough for Watson to bring the wrath of human civilisation upon this place.

  Even if Holmes did not survive – and he had started out for the East India Docks knowing full well he would likely perish – the human race might, by the loss of his life, achieve something of a victory. And the loss of a man’s life, he thought, was a small enough price to pay for the possibility of so much gain. If nothing else, Holmes reflected ruefully, it was a logical transaction.

  Holmes suddenly felt a shudder that was neither part of the Martians’ mental machinations nor an action of the spheres and crystals surrounding the examination table. He did not realise the physicality of the motion or its pervasiveness until she saw Colonel Moran and the Martians about him stagger, then stagger again and nearly fall as another deep shudder coursed through the building.

  “What have you done?” Colonel Moran roared.

  Colonel Sebastian Moran twisted about and regarded Sherlock Holmes with an expression of savage hate. He flung himself upon the captive man, but Holmes, who immediately noticed a sharp drop in the intensity of the psychic attack and a lessening of the bonds which held him, met Moran’s attack with a vigorous defence that caught the traitor by surprise.

  They rolled off the table, shattering crystals and sending the deadly spheres crashing to the floor. Despite his augmented strength and the strange limbs and mechanisms that were now part of his being, Colonel Moran found himself at a great disadvantage, for Holmes possessed the might that stems from inner righteousness and the will to survive.

  All around the two men was smoke and fire and disorder, but neither man paid heed. There existed between them the enmity of a fight left unfinished and justice delayed. For Moran, there was still the matter of revenge for Professor Moriarty; for Holmes, there was the noose that should have been Moran’s.

  “You think you’ve put an end to this, Holmes?”

  “I know we have, but it has nothing to do with the impending destruction of this complex,” Holmes replied. “This will cripple the Martian war effort for the moment, keep them from making any other gains, perhaps even make them lose what they have taken already, but the true defeat of your allies was written the moment they breathed our air and imbibed human blood.”

  “What do you mean, Holmes?” Moran demanded. “What game are you playing at?”

  “You boasted of the skills of the Martian surgeons, but look at your own seams,” Holmes said. “I may not have the medical skills of my friend, Doctor Watson, but even I recognise symptoms of advanced bacterial infection. You said the Martians engineered their own bodies and evolution, like machines, I suppose, but consider that even the mightiest machine can be brought low by the tiniest grains of sand in the gears.”

  “You’ll not outlive me, Holmes!”

  Moran rushed at him.

  Holmes struck at him with the weighted crop from the pocket of his coat.

  Moran staggered back and fell, heavily stunned.

  “Adequate invaders of planets, but dullards in so many ways,” Holmes remarked coolly. “Even a rookie copper would have searched me.”

  Holmes turned and ran, pushing and threading his way through the hordes of panicked Martians. Above the sound of the building collapsing around him, Holmes heard the laughter and mocking voice of Colonel Sebastian Moran.

  “You’ll die with us, Holmes! You’ve outsmarted yourself this time Mr Sherlock Holmes, you damned jackanapes!”

  As Holmes made is way toward the entrance he dodged a deadly rain of crystals and stone. Flames soared both around him and within the televisor crystals; when he saw the stricken beings within the crystals, he realised they were not merely windows onto another world, but doorways as well – the world of the invaders, wherever amongst the stars it may actually be, was experiencing not just the destruction brought by artillery shells and bombs, but that of Earth’s bacteria-laden air.

  Miraculously, Holmes escaped the temple as it collapsed, but there was nowhere to go which was not thronged by Martians. The booms of guns were followed by the shrill whines of shells, which landed with deadly accuracy, blasting the flying machines and the tripods. Explosions towered around Holmes, and the water, which might have otherwise offered an avenue of escape, was layered with flaming fluids.

  Holmes he
aded upward, climbing the scaffolding that had once been the masts of ships, heading vaguely in the direction of what Colonel Moran had termed the Outer Ring, from where he had signaled Watson, apparently with great success. Other explosions shook the Docks, but these were not from artillery fire, but from dropped bombs. Holmes gazed upward and saw five great airships soaring into view.

  Holmes finally attained the wall above the platform where he had stood when he had passed for a Martian. He had though of jumping into the water, swimming for safety, but here, too, the water was a sheet of fire. And the flames were licking their way upward, consuming the Docks.

  Abruptly, one of the airships broke away from its flight and dropped low. A ladder unrolled, and Holmes grabbed it as it flew past, clinging tightly in near disbelief at his salvation before he started the long climb upward.

  “Holmes!” a voice shouted from above. “Are you all right.”

  Holmes gazed upward into the relieved face of Doctor John Watson, and gratefully accepted a hand-up from his friend and an aerial navvy for the last few feet.

  Sherlock Holmes rolled onto the floor of the airship’s gondola, then sat up and looked to his friend. “I do not believe I have ever been so glad to see you, old fellow.”

  They gazed out the windows at the smoke and flames where the East India Docks had stood. Martian fighting-machines tried to destroy the ships that had come up the Thames, but, for once, they were outgunned, and there was nothing the Martians could do against the artillery batteries in the great metropolis or the airships raining ordinance upon them.

  “There’s no escape for those poor devils,” said a new voice. “Devils they may be, but poor devils they are now.”

  “Holmes, this is Captain Ernest Willows,” Watson said, introducing a young man with sharp features and deep eyes.

  “Ah, the Welsh aviator,” Holmes said, smiling as he shook his hand.

  “Aviator, thank to the Martians,” Willows explained. “Without them, I would still be an inventor looking for financial backing.”

  “Somehow, I do not think you will have to beg from now on,” Holmes said. “This near invasion of Earth will likely cause a florescence of science and technology.”

  “You think, then, Mr Holmes, that this is a death-blow,” asked Captain Willows.

  Holmes looked down at the annihilated Docks, at the shattered fighting machines, at the masses of Martians breathing their last, breathing in their own deaths.

  “Yes, a death-blow,” Holmes agreed. “But not one to which any mortal man may lay claim.”

  The Dog Who Loved Sherlock Holmes

  They had no idea what to do with the confused Guatemalan Spider Monkey, the Claw Masters had been spooked out an alliance with the Feral Gang, and Little Kitty refused to stop calling herself Slash Face – it had been quite an eventful Halloween night for the Three Dog Detective Agency.

  Levi was sorely in need of some peace and quiet.

  He finally got it shortly after midnight, when everyone else was at last bedded down and a deep silence settled over the neighborhood. Alone in the living room, he ambled over to one of the bookcases, gripped the fifth book from the left on the second shelf with his teeth, and pulled it out; he carried it into the circle of light spilling down from the Tiffany-shaded lamp, placing it carefully on the floor so that the book fell open to the leather bookmark indicating where he had left off the night before.

  He lay with a paw resting on each page-edge. In moments he was totally immersed in a world of yellowish fogs softly illuminated by hissing gaslamps, of mysterious visitors mounting the stairs at 221B Baker Street, and of insidious villainies to be thwarted. Once again, the game was afoot…all four of them as Levi imagined himself trotting alongside a familiar figure in a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape.

  Bump.

  Levi looked up sharply from the open book, the columned pages of which were adorned with replicas of the original Paget drawings, and listened intently. Just as he was on the verge of dismissing the sound as nothing more than a stray night-noise or perhaps a product of his overwrought mind, it came again, more distinct, slightly louder.

  Bump!

  It came from the walkway in front of the house, and now the soft bumping sounds were accompanied by the slow tread of large paws upon concrete, and of something being dragged. He stood and warily made his way to the side door, where he stood and listened to the ebb and flow of the night, where he quizzically sniffed at the cool air wafting in under the door.

  Levi was a short-haired Dachshund-mix, mostly black, but not nearly as inky as he had once been, not now that the years were beginning to catch up with him. Of his Dachshund ancestry there was no doubt – no denying the evidence of his long, long body and that barrel chest; it was the mix, however, that engendered the greatest speculation, and the guesses ranged from the seriously proffered Black Labrador (the shape of his head) to the much less seriously suggested giraffe (those legs!), but, in the final analysis, Levi defined himself by what he did, not how he looked, and he was, like all of us, greater than the sum of his parts, no matter what those parts were.

  There was no doubt someone, or something, was loitering in front of the house, moving up and down the walkway, pausing now and then by the gnarled pepper tree between the walkway and the street. Whoever, or whatever, it was, its attempts at stealthiness, if that was its goal, could not deceive either Levi’s ears or, most especially, his nose.

  He smelled matted fur, a loamy earthiness, and a brackish taint; there was also a strange mixture of must and spice, a faint smell, well below the range of most dogs, but not Levi.

  Given the recent tensions in the neighborhood, it was something demanding an investigation. Briefly, he considered waking his fellow detectives, Sunny the Golden Retriever and Yoda the Pomeranian, but dismissed the thought almost as soon as it entered his mind. They deserved a good night’s rest.

  Just a quick look, Levi thought. Observation, deduction, evaluation and resolution – it’s what Sherlock Holmes would do.

  It was not an easy task, opening the side door without any assistance, but he managed to do so while not making a betraying sound. He started to slip through the narrow opening.

  “Where are you going?”

  Levi whipped around and saw Little Kitty sitting atop the back of the sofa.

  “I’m just going outside for a moment,” Levi answered, keeping his voice very low. “Go back to sleep, Little Kitty”

  “The name is Slash Face,” she said, glaring at Levi with her eye that still worked, sort of. She yet wore the black leather jacket and cap she had donned when she sneaked out of the house earlier in the evening, but had ditched the rubber squeaky mouse.

  “Fine,” Levi said. “Whatever you want to call yourself, go back to bed.”

  “I’m going out with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Then I’m waking everyone up so we can all go out.”

  Levi sighed.

  In the hierarchy of the 3DDA, Little Kitty’s official role was assistant to Kim, the Torby who acted as Office Manager and Information Coordinator. While Little Kitty could at times be recalcitrant, even a bit rebellious, she had mad-crazy computer skills and could manipulate a mouse with all the dexterity of…well, a cat. When the Calico had first come to them years earlier, rescued from an outdoors for which she was totally unsuited, her name was quite appropriate, but over the years the name had become less descriptive and more ironic.

  “Very well,” he finally growled, knowing the cat had him treed. “You can come along, but be quiet and keep back.”

  “Why, what’s out there?” she asked, now looking a bit nervous. She leaped down from the sofa, landing noiselessly. “What does your sniffer tell you?”

  “That you should stay indoors,” Levi snapped. “I should look into this alone.”

  Little Kitty moseyed over to where Levi had left his book in the cone of light, glanced at what the Dachshund-mix had been reading. She gazed closel
y at the illustration Sidney Paget had drawn for Silver Blaze showing the railway journey to Dartmoor.

  “I suppose you would have told Doctor Watson to stay in London?” Little Kitty asked.

  Levi uttered a small snort of annoyance. “Come on then.”

  They slipped out the door and onto the patio, pulling it to, but not shutting it behind them. The moon was bright, and silvery light streamed down upon the dog and cat, dappled through the trees and the lattice walls that closed off the patio. Through the glass doorway facing the street they saw a dark and indistinct form lurking around the pepper tree.

  “Who is it?” Little Kitty asked softly. “What is it? I can’t quite make it out.”

  Levi peered intently, and lifted his muzzle, sniffing the odor-freighted breeze out of the west. He smelled the mysterious deeps of the Pacific Ocean, the crystalline beach sands, the swampy wetlands that lay between sea and city, the sharp tang rising from I-5 a quarter-mile off…but, again, there were also smells that were not of the neighborhood, the dank smell of a fur that seemed neither canine nor feline, the earthiness of the unburied; then there was the inexplicable scent of an exotic mix of must and spices.

  He climbed into the planter and made his way through the luxurious vegetation to the space between the corner column and first panel. Two boards had been nailed in place, one above the other, but it was no real obstacle to escape, not to a dog with legs like Levi’s or to a cat born to leap, even if her vision was a little wonky. They landed soundlessly in the long brick planter beyond the panel and settled amongst the dense growth of ferns, agapanthuses, penstemons and hyacinths; they simultaneously raised their heads till they could just see over the bricks.

  At first they saw nothing but shadows among shadows, patterns of clouds scudding through the moonlight that transformed a mundane street scene into a shimmering dreamland; abruptly, that world of dream was transformed into something out of a nightmare. From behind the decades-old gnarled pepper tree there shambled into view a large four-legged creature that had odd limbs extending from its sides and possibly two heads, with a tangle of horns rising from one of the heads.