His face was wet with tears. He flailed, trying desperately to get free, and the chair wobbled. It wouldn’t fall over. It was much too steady for that. I’d designed it with neural psychotics in mind.
I dabbed his head with a wet sponge and then put the two electrodes on his forehead.
“I don’t need to remind you that the skin resistance for alternating current is approximately one kiloohm, or one thousand ohms,” I said. “The DC-to-AC chopped pulse works beautifully in this set-up. I can control how much electrotherapy you receive. You might be interested in the wiring. You used to dabble with electric mechanisms, as I recall.”
I stood back and surveyed him.
The eyes beseeched me again. I could almost hear the poor, babbling idiot beg me: Please, oh please, Dr. Sinclair, don’t give me the electrotherapy; please, oh please, let me scream and bash my forehead against the walls and floor, let me twist like a pretzel, drape myself like a monkey over the nurses; please, oh please, Dr. Sinclair, let me make your life a living hell.
The poor creature.
His body trembled.
So did mine, but for a different reason. I was excited about my clinical trials.
Perhaps, I thought, it was easier for some men to remain insane: irrational, lost in their thoughts, avoiding reality. The world was a hard place. To survive, a man had to be rational, rooted in reality, and determined to make his own way. Sinking into fantasies and visions was the easy way out. Nurses gave you tranquilizers and other medications to blot your brain back into fantasyland. You were fed, washed, given a bed.
Pathetic.
“You’re going to have to help me,” I said.
He shook his head, no, and thrashed more wildly.
“I’m afraid you have no choice.” I controlled my anger. With a frozen smile, I sweetened the deal. “If you help me build Eshockers, I’ll give you more liberties here in the asylum. Would you like a bigger room?”
A muffled shriek, and still, the head shaking: No, no, no!
“There are others who would force you to build these Eshockers, Braithwaite, but they aren’t reasonable men, not like me. I won’t force you. I won’t torture you, won’t hurt you. I’m a medical doctor. I want what’s best for my patients. I want to help them so they don’t suffer as you do. In fact, I don’t want you to suffer. So help me. In return, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you.”
“Ehhhhhh? Glurrrrr?” he whined. His eyes sharpened slightly.
I had his attention.
Good.
“I’ll make sure the staff provides you with three excellent meals every day. As good as the food I eat myself. I can’t offer you anything better than that.”
For a moment, he was quiet, considering his options.
Then his shoulders drooped.
He had realized what I already knew, that he really had no choice. He would do as I wanted, and it would be either with better food or with the greasy slop and watered-down soup that my nurses shoveled into the faces of my patients.
He caught my eye, then looked at his lap.
He nodded.
The answer was yes.
“Good man!” My frozen smile warmed into a genuine smile. I was truly delighted.
I touched his shoulder.
He shrank back.
My smile fell.
“All right, Braithwaite, let’s get you treated and out of here. Back to your room for rest followed by a good meal. Then later tonight, I’ll show you what needs to be done to build those Eshockers I need.”
My fingers rested on the wooden handle protruding from the front of the box. My mind flitted through the numbers: sixteen-volt output from the transformer to the resistors in den and hospital modes—along with sliding the variable resistor switch—yielded everything from mild pleasure to euphoria, depending on the person hooked up to the electrodes. Ah, but when I had that little wire in place, the one that shorted the fixed resistor, and when I pushed the variable resistor switch all the way to the right for zero resistance…
Excitement raced through me. My teeth began to chatter. Ah yes, with the switch all the way to the right, maximum current would surge into the fixed resistor with an ultimate yield of 16 milliamperes of alternating current. The impact on the brain would be equivalent to the application of sixty volts of direct current.
“Zap!” I hissed, snapping my fingers.
The door banged open. Miss Klune’s key hung on a cord around her neck. Her left shoulder slammed against the door, and she stumbled into the examination room. Her arms were wrapped around Willie Jacobs from behind. Her hands were clasped tightly across his chest. She half-dragged him, while he elbowed her ribs and tried to kick her.
Thankfully, she’d muffled him with a ball and a strip of cloth. But I could hear him, nonetheless, just as I could still hear Bligh Braithwaite’s screams beneath his gag.
Now there were two of them at the same time.
Miss Klune shoved Willie Jacobs into the right Eshocker chair, strapped him in tightly and stood back. She was breathing heavily, moisture trickling down her face. She put her hands on her hips and glared at Jacobs.
“Why do they always have to be so difficult?”
“If they accepted treatment and wanted to rid themselves of mental disease, then they would be cured,” I answered. “As long as they fight us, as long as they fight treatment, then this means they are still mentally diseased.”
She tugged at her uniform. Jacobs had ripped the bodice. Blood dribbled from scratches he’d raked down her arms and across her right cheek.
“I gave him a minute dose. I should have given him more,” she said, “but sedation costs and we’re short on funds.” She opened a cabinet behind the examination table, removed a towel, and mopped her face and arms.
Willie Jacobs moaned.
He stared across the room at Bligh Braithwaite.
“Grrrrummmm!” Braithwaite’s arms struggled beneath the straps. Even from where I stood by Jacobs, I could see that Braithwaite’s arms were both bruised heavily, and yet still, despite the pain he was visibly suffering, he continued to struggle.
Let’s get this over with, I thought.
I jerked my head at the door, and Miss Klune scurried out. She knew to leave me alone during Eshocker treatments.
*
Willie Jacobs, master machinist, squirmed in the right Eshocker. Bligh Braithwaite, master electrician, squirmed in the left Eshocker. I had attached two electrodes to each man’s forehead.
“Are you ready, gentlemen?”
Neither could respond. They could only gurgle and scream behind their gag balls.
I stepped to the right unit, the one closest to me. I slid the wooden handle all the way to the right: to zero for minimum resistance and maximum current. I lifted the blue wire from where it hung off the metal plate between the variable resistor and the fixed resistor, then attached the free end of the wire to the metal plate on the right. A simple turn of the twist screw, and I finished. No tools required.
I repeated the procedure on the left unit, the one that would service Braithwaite. He screamed and strained against the straps holding him in place.
Willie Jacobs, on the other hand, neither thrashed nor screamed. His body slackened. His voice left him. Jacobs seemed resigned to his fate.
Carefully, I grasped the wooden handle attached directly to the copper knife switch on the left side of Jacobs’s Eshocker box. I did not want to touch the copper part of the knife that extended all the way from the wood to the copper hinge. The design was brilliant, flawless. DC power flowed from the wall socket into a standalone dynamo used to recharge the batteries. While not charging, such as when I was using the Eshocker, the two-volt rechargeable battery inside the box would surge DC power into a motor, and from there, via a set of rotating rods, into the DC-to-AC chopper. As soon as I pulled the copper knife from its upright position, where it was secured into a copper U on an upper metal plate, and attached it securely into the copper U on the lower m
etal plate, extreme treatment would commence.
Two volts of current would surge from the rechargeable battery through the upper metal plate, down the copper part of the knife, through the copper U on the lower metal plate, and from there, directly into the DC motor.
“Get ready,” I said.
Jacobs squeezed his eyes shut, and sweat dripped from his balding head over his eyebrows and lids, and off the tip of his nose. Braithwaite’s eyes remained wide open and bloodshot, trained upon me with a look of such horror and dread that I had to turn away.
My own hand was sweating. I wiped it on my trousers and then grasped the handle again. This time, I immediately tugged the handle down and latched the copper knife into the lower U.
Buzzzzzzz!
Zzzzzzzzap!
Electricity surged.
Jacobs’s back straightened, hard, against the back of his chair. His neck arched. He shrieked behind his gag ball.
I raced across the room and flipped the other copper switch on Braithwaite’s Eshocker.
Again:
Buzzzzzzz!
Zzzzzzzzap!
The sound filled the treatment room. I stood between the two men, my body quivering, my mind inflamed with the possibilities of my creation. I envisioned a huge room filled with these machines, the treatment of hundreds of patients at once, the calming of mankind, the treatment of all sorts of ailments instantly, the happiness of all men, women, and even children as they hugged me and thanked me profusely for the medical gift I had bestowed upon them.
Happiness for everyone.
Peace and harmony.
Yes!
Current equals volts divided by resistance.
I = V ÷ R.
I = sixteen volts divided by zero (variable resistor slid all the way to the right) plus one kiloohm (head resistance) = sixteen milliamperes of alternating current to the head.
A stunning value.
Buzzzzzzz!
Zzzzzzzzap!
The smell of feces. I snapped from my calculations and my daydreaming, and the excitement rushed out of me. Willie Jacobs—my patient—spasmed violently and then collapsed in his chair, chin on his chest, body vibrating.
He had passed out.
Rushing to his Eshocker, I yanked the wooden handle up, securing the copper knife to the upper U. This stopped the flow of current through the DC motor and the DC-to-AC chopper, stopping all current through the transformer and the two resistors.
He shuddered violently, but only once, and then remained still. His body had ceased vibrating.
To my right, Bligh Braithwaite continued his struggling and muffled screaming. For the moment, I ignored him, as I checked Willie Jacobs’s vital signs: heart beating, still breathing, good. Then I hurried to Braithwaite’s Eshocker and also flipped it off.
I yanked open the door between the treatment room and my office, and screamed for Miss Klune.
It took several minutes, longer than usual, for her to heed my summons. When she appeared I saw she’d washed the blood off herself and changed her uniform.
“Yes, Dr. Sinclair? You need my help?”
She looked from Braithwaite to Jacobs, and I thought I noticed concern on her face but it quickly passed. Nothing shocked my nurse. She was the most professional nurse in all of England, I was sure of it.
“Doctor?” she pressed, hurrying across my office and grabbing my elbow.
Gently, I removed my elbow from her grasp. I straightened myself, remained calm.
“Return Willie Jacobs to his bed,” I said, “and keep an eye on him.” I sniffed. “You might also want to clean him up a little.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
She began moving toward Willie Jacobs, and this time, it was I who grabbed her elbow. She swiveled, the ice-blue eyes calmly meeting mine.
“You’ll have to drug Bligh Braithwaite,” I said. “Even extreme treatment hasn’t helped him, not yet, anyway. Drug him.”
She nodded.
“I’ll drug him. Of course, Dr. Sinclair. Anything else?”
“Yes. One more thing,” I said, remembering my promise to Bligh Braithwaite. “When he awakens, give him a hot meal, something good, something that the cook makes for you. In fact, don’t ever give this man the usual food prepared for patients. From now on, only give him the best.”
Her forehead creased ever so slightly, then smoothed again. Her eyes never wavered.
Perfectly calm and sane: that was Miss Clara Klune.
Everyone else at the Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum?
The total opposite.
11
DR. JOHN WATSON
London
Holmes and I turned the corner and faced Thrawl Street for the first time since he’d figured out how to subdue the murderous tram machine built by Willie Jacobs and his father. The first thing I noticed was the stench of unwashed bodies and cigarette smoke. The second thing I noticed was the shadow, the swathe of gloom, cast over the street by the tram machine building.
The buildings were as bent and tattered as the people hobbling along the street. Several men slumped—sleeping or dead, I knew not which—in the gutter. A child of two or three years old wailed in the arms of a woman who lay unmoving before a dirt-brown building that leaked the telltale smoke of an opium den. Several children scampered from building to building, their laughter much too hysterical by any standards.
I turned my head away, and my gaze fell upon a horseshoe that had fallen from a nearby door—not two months ago, the inhabitants of this street had been hanging them up to ward off the evil of the tram machine. I suspected that nobody was salting their windowsills anymore.
I remembered Holmes’s words: “Superstitions, as if salt and horseshoes will help cure what ails this street. There is only one cure, and that is to turn off Willie Jacobs’s machine.”
But Holmes had not turned off the machine. Instead, with his insights into chemistry and matter, he’d attempted a scientific experiment—one that had thankfully worked—and in doing so, had switched the machine from violent operations to a slow simmer.
Holmes stared at the scene before us, looking very out of place in the shabby street. Like me, he was dressed for dinner at the Diogenes Club, in a top hat, black coat with tails, and white shirt with silk tie held in place at his neck by a gold button. He tapped his cane once, sharply, and turned to me.
“Since our last visit here, things have grown worse. This street is no longer home to anyone,” he said. “It is an encampment, Watson, a vile strip of opium dens and Eshocker dens, where wretches seek hallucinations, elevated thoughts, and any escape from reality. They no longer fear the tram machine building, nor devils, nor demons. They are no longer participants in this world, but in a fantasy brought about by opium and electric shocks.”
The scene before us was appalling, but how different were the abuses he spoke of, I wondered, from Holmes’s own cocaine habit, and his experiments with electricity belts?
“You think me hypocritical, Watson.”
“That is no great deduction.”
“The occasional use of cocaine by a bored mind is nothing compared to what is happening in the Eshocker dens.” He waved a hand that took in the still bodies, the wailing child. “These dens must be shut down, Watson.” He spoke softly, and when I looked at him again, his eyes were drinking in the scene. His face sharpened, and he raised his cane to point. “We go there,” he said.
He marched down the street over the rubble and past the bodies toward the tram machine building. I hurried after him, hoping that the tram machine building was not our destination. If we never opened the door to that building again, if we never saw those drooping cables and the steel limbs, if we never smelled the stink of the phosphorus pit—never was an understatement for the length of time in which I hoped to avoid that foul building with its foul machine.
A rusty iron fence encircled the tram machine building, and inside the fence, ten or more policemen stood guard. A lot of good they would do, I thought, if anyon
e truly wanted to break into the building and re-infuse it with life: phosphorus, chemical energy, deadly energy. Ropes hung from the fence, dangling warning signs decorated with skulls and crossbones: DANGER OF DEATH! DO NOT ENTER.
So fixed was I upon the signs that I neglected to track the whereabouts of Sherlock Holmes.
He had apparently ducked into one of the many side buildings, one of the dens. I had no idea how I would find him other than tramping from one to the next, seeking his tall, gaunt frame in the dim haze that no doubt suffused these places of suffering and lunacy.
Feeling rather light-headed myself, I stumbled over a body, and a man muttered at me in his sleep. I leaned against the wall of a building, and from inside, the sad cried and the hysterical screamed. Painful shrieks rang out.
The door beside me banged open, and in a cloud of smoke, a man stumbled from a house—whether opium or Eshocker den, I could not be sure. He lost his footing and fell across the body that I had so recently tripped over.
A young boy raced out, and the door slammed shut. I placed him at approximately eight years old. He wore filthy clothes, though that was not unusual in these parts. His face appeared more blood and dirt than flesh. His eyes, large and round, held no innocence. Indeed, they were also the color of blood and dirt, and as cold as the Thames in the dead of winter.
“You be off, worm!” the boy yelled.
To my horror, he lashed a steel chain across the back of the man who had fallen over the body by my feet. I jumped back. The chain came down three times, and each time the man winced but did not cry out. After the third blow, the man clambered up, and screaming, grabbed the boy’s neck with both hands.
“No, you be off! Let me go!” The boy’s small hands tried to pry the man’s fists from his neck.
The boy was Timmy Dorsey, Jr. Why was he in the dens?
I didn’t have time to think about it. Light-headed though I was, I shook my head, trying—unsuccessfully—to clear my mind, while I dove for the hands around Timmy’s neck.
Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu Page 6
