Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu

by Lois H. Gresh

  “This is where we build Eshockers,” Jacobs said. “This is where evil is done.”

  Wooden boxes and Eshocker chairs in various states of construction were scattered about the room. A couple of tables were strewn with saws and chisels, cables and wires.

  Holmes sniffed the air, prompting me to do the same.

  “The black smoke,” I commented.

  “Yes,” Holmes said, “it’s in this room, but not in a concentrated manner, and even less so than in Dr. Sinclair’s outer office. Somebody opened the wall and slipped in here, then closed the wall again before much smoke could get inside. Who did that? Who hid in here and then made his escape—and when did he run away?”

  “When the door’s closed, there ain’t no way out,” Jacobs said. “Dr. Sinclair, ’e locked us in to build the Eshockers.”

  “The murderer must have left the wall slightly ajar,” Holmes said. “Tell us the truth, Mr. Braithwaite. When Miss Klune found Dr. Sinclair’s body, were you hiding in this room?”

  The man refused to answer. He didn’t deny the murder, nor did he confess to it.

  With a frustrated huff, Holmes searched the walls and floors, even the ceiling. He poked everywhere, and he peered long and hard at everything through the powerful convex lens he habitually carried.

  “Nothing,” he concluded, “no more hidden doors, no hidden levers opening any of the walls, no trap doors. The only way in and out of this room is via the examination room.”

  We returned to the room where the dead man with his head blown off and his limbs shattered to gore, with his chest sliced and mangled, with his organs burned, waited for his final resting place.

  “Surely, Holmes,” I said, nodding at Willie Jacobs, still draped in my arms, and at Bligh Braithwaite, held upright by Inspector Lestrade, “these two are patients, and exhausted ones, at that. How much more do you expect them to endure?”

  Holmes pointed to the clean Eshocker across the room.

  “Put them over there and stay with them, doctor, and let me ponder in peace such that I may concentrate and conclude this matter, once and for all.”

  Lestrade eased Braithwaite to the floor behind the other Eshocker and then refused to leave Holmes’s side. As for me, I was as exhausted as poor Willie Jacobs, and I sat next to him on the floor near Braithwaite. Jacobs’s head fell forward, and he started snoring, lightly at first, but the volume increased as it hissed through his exposed phossy jaw and mangled nostrils. Braithwaite remained awake but highly agitated, jerking and twisting constantly, eyes fixed on Holmes.

  My friend spoke as if lecturing Inspector Lestrade on a case study he’d already solved and was teaching to a class. The Inspector appeared annoyed but kept quiet, having long experience with Holmes and his solving of cases for which Scotland Yard received the credit.

  “Miss Amy Switzer most likely murdered Caroline Brown while she slept,” Holmes said. “She administered a dose of medicine, enough to kill her, but we’ll never know for sure. I believe Willie Jacobs, who has never lied to me and has proven himself both loyal and faithful. Remember, Watson,” he added, “how Mr. Jacobs stood guard and almost lost his life protecting Mary and Samuel? Mr. Jacobs tells the truth, that Miss Switzer attempted to inject him with lethal drugs. He fought her off, and the administered dose didn’t suffice to kill him. Switzer, however, did not kill Dr. Sinclair. She was not in the locked room, nor did she have access to it.”

  “Holmes,” I finally interrupted, “why must we discuss all of this here, in this particular room, where Dr. Sinclair is—?”

  “Where he’s dead?” Holmes whirled, and with a grand flourish, waved at the corpse in the right Eshocker.

  “Because,” he said, “Willie Jacobs and Bligh Braithwaite are going to demonstrate exactly how this Eshocker killed him!”

  39

  “I suggest we employ the vacant Eshocker,” I said drily.

  “Ha! I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Holmes said, pinching his nose as he walked past Dr. Sinclair, whose head had ceased emitting smoke.

  By now, I was accustomed to the stench in the room, and if anything, felt that I might never get the odor of the dead Dr. Sinclair off me.

  “I’ve always wondered how these den machines work,” Lestrade said. “How they make a person so intoxicated, simply with the use of a bit of electricity. Evil stuff,” he added, “work of the devil. Feh. Electricity, indeed. Gas is good enough, if you ask me, as are candles.”

  “Wake up, Mr. Jacobs.” Gently, I shook the man until he snorted one final bit of sleep out of him. His bleary eyes popped open, and he squinted.

  “We’re still ’ere,” he said, as if not believing his sore luck.

  Lestrade propped up Bligh Braithwaite.

  “And you, sir, come along. It’s time to show us how you killed the doctor.”

  Braithwaite resisted, blubbering that the Eshockers were “brilliant devices” and “could not possibly murder” and that, even with “extreme treatment,” neither he nor Willie Jacobs had come close to dying.

  Jacobs agreed.

  “It ain’t like the beast, which killed me father. I was electrified by Sinclair enough to know. Extreme treatment, ’e called it. Cannot kill, Mr. ’olmes.”

  “The sooner you show Mr. Holmes how these machines work, the sooner we can all leave the treatment room,” I told both patients.

  With Lestrade holding onto Braithwaite and me holding onto Jacobs, we stood with Holmes before the vacant Eshocker.

  “You sit in the chair, an’ I’ll show ’em ’ow it works,” Jacobs suggested to Braithwaite.

  “N-nooo, you sit in the chair, and I’ll… I’ll show them how it works,” Braithwaite stuttered. “Th-this is my machine, not yours.”

  “N-no! No Eshockin’!”

  “Gentlemen, we do not mean to actually switch the machine on. This is purely a theoretical demonstration. Mr. Jacobs, you need to rest. Please, sit in the chair.” I eased Willie Jacobs into the Eshocker.

  He looked doubtful, but sat down without further complaint. For what they claimed was such a harmless machine, neither man had much desire to mount that chair and subject himself to the “pleasures” of den electrotherapy.

  Braithwaite fumbled with the top of the coffin-sized box and finally gave up, stuttering at Holmes to unscrew it. Holmes did as requested and removed the four twist-off screws, lifting the lid and setting it aside.

  I huddled beside Holmes, Braithwaite, and Lestrade, all of us staring at the array of components, wires, and cables in the box. Behind me, Jacobs cried out, and I turned to see him on the floor. He’d fallen from the Eshocker chair.

  “S-strap him in,” Braithwaite said, and with Jacobs struggling and begging me not to do it, I tied his wrists to the armrests and his ankles to the chair legs.

  “A-a cloth… put a-a cloth in his mouth,” Braithwaite choked out.

  “No!” Jacobs shrieked, thrashing against his restraints.

  I assured him that we would not gag him, nor would we turn the machine on. He struggled until his strength gave out, and then he settled down with his head slumped forward.

  “Dr. Watson, do take notes,” Holmes commanded without looking at me, intent on studying the internal workings of the Eshocker.

  Braithwaite, with an air of pride I thought misplaced, mumbled his way through an explanation of the Eshockers. Lestrade held him upright the whole time, with Holmes pointing to components, nodding, and asking follow-up questions. And I scribbled:

  Four metal plates are attached to the outside left of the box, and four screws attach each plate to the box itself. On the outside of the box and attached to the top two plates in the upper left, is a dynamo that, in turn, is attached to a DC power wall socket mechanism.

  “Th-this dynamo charges th-the Eshocker battery,” Braithwaite explained. “Usually, it… it is unplugged from… from the wall.”

  I continued scribbling, though my knowledge of electric mechanisms was limited and what Braithwaite described wa
s well beyond my understanding.

  I hoped that Holmes either understood everything Braithwaite spoke of or that my notes would elucidate details that escaped him.

  Beneath the plates attached to the dynamo, a knife switch with a wooden handle and a copper contact turns the Eshocker ON or OFF. A U-shaped holder secures the knife switch when the machine is not in use. With the knife flipped to the ON position, the two-volt rechargeable battery sitting inside the box sends two volts of electricity.

  “Holmes?” I said. “Do you understand what he’s talking about?”

  Braithwaite glowed with pride, while my friend explained in common terms.

  “Dr. Sinclair invented a way to keep his machines running on stored electricity in the form of these rechargeable batteries. The mechanisms for all of these things we see in the box are available, but nobody has yet put them together in this manner. This might be one of the first rechargeable batteries, and if I’m not mistaken, over here to the right, this is a DC-to-AC chopper used with a transformer and a series of resistors…”

  He’d already lost me, so I let Braithwaite continue while I scribbled notes as verbatim as I could manage to catch the stuttered words.

  A rotating rod connects the DC motor to a DC-to-AC chopper. The motor sends DC current into the chopper. Two volts of AC current flow from the chopper into a transformer unit.

  “AC, AC, a miracle,” Willie Jacobs rasped from the Eshocker chair. “Me father would ’ave loved to see it.”

  “Newfangled nonsense,” Lestrade said bitterly. “These newfangled devices will kill us all, Mr. Holmes.”

  “Pray continue,” Holmes told Braithwaite, ignoring the Inspector. “I need to know exactly how this works.”

  “R-right,” Braithwaite stuttered, and then he continued explaining the machinery with the pride a father has of a newborn son. I wondered, did I sound like this after Samuel was born?

  Again, without much comprehension, I documented what Braithwaite told Holmes.

  The transformer unit is an iron core with five winding copper coils on the left and forty winding copper coils on the right. Approximately nine inches by nine inches in size, the transformer unit takes the two-volt AC and multiplies it by eight, yielding sixteen volts of AC power.

  Holmes interrupted.

  “Clarification, sir,” he said, pointing into the box. “These two wires coming out of the right side of the transformer unit carry sixteen volts of AC power?”

  Braithwaite nodded.

  “Yes, AC power, flippin’ positive an’ negative, positive an’ negative!” Willie Jacobs said giddily. “I ain’t never seen such machines, not even in the beast!”

  I’d always considered Holmes and myself to be hungry for science. I’d always considered this hunger to be the source of my great affection for Holmes and my need to be with him, even when Mary objected. The excitement of using science to solve crimes was a thrill beyond most anything in life. Holmes felt the same, of this I was certain.

  Now here we both were, learning about electric mechanisms that we’d never dreamed possible, yet these wires and devices existed in a London lunatic asylum. And stranger still, who was explaining all of this to us? Two patients of the lunatic asylum! It was humbling, to say the least.

  “I see that there’s a lot of room back here,” Holmes said, pointing again, “between this wire behind the two rightmost units and the back of the wooden box.”

  “N-n-n-n-not much,” Braithwaite stuttered.

  “But enough,” Holmes said. “Now, tell me about these final two units on the right.”

  Lestrade complained that his arms were growing tired from holding up Braithwaite, that we knew enough about the infernal machine and it was time to get on with it.

  “This one goes to jail,” he said, nodding at Braithwaite, “and that one—” he nodded at Jacobs—“goes to a proper hospital, I’d say.”

  “A few more moments, I promise, Inspector. The details are important,” Holmes said, gesturing at Braithwaite to continue.

  “I-I will s-say nothing more if you s-send me to jail,” Braithwaite insisted.

  With Lestrade spluttering and objecting, Holmes reassured Braithwaite that he could remain in the Whitechapel Asylum—at least, for now—and delay any concerns about jail.

  “V-very well,” Braithwaite said after long consideration, “I’ll tell you, and b-being an intelligent man, Mr. Holmes—” he shot a disparaging look at Lestrade—“y-you will see that I-I could not have killed anyone with this… this Eshocker.

  “That… that wire,” he began to explain, and Holmes pointed to the wire coming out of the transformer and spanning the backs of both of the final two units on the right of the Eshocker box, “y-yes, yes, that wire… it is for den, hospital, and ex—”

  “Extreme treatment,” Jacobs rasped.

  “Y-yes, extreme treatment,” the other agreed.

  With questions flying back and forth, I simply kept my mouth shut and wrote everything down that seemed pertinent.

  The second AC wire comes out of the transformer and attaches to the variable resistor unit, which provides from four to zero kiloohms of resistance, or in other terms, resulting in between 1.7 and 3.3 milliamperes of current. The resistor unit is very narrow and sits close to the front of the Eshocker box, and protruding from the front of the box is a wooden handle that slides along a contact switch.

  “When in the far left position, the ’andle ’elps the doctor use maximum resistance of four kiloohms an’ minimum current,” Jacobs explained. “When in the far right position, it gives zero kiloohms of resistance an’ maximum current.”

  I stared at Jacobs. His technical skill shocked me. While he continued his explanation, I scribbled further notes.

  The final unit, a fixed resistor, supplies one kiloohm of resistance. It is used for hospital and extreme treatment modes.

  “What’s this?” Holmes asked, pointing inside the box near the front.

  Braithwaite said it was a metal plate, to which both the variable and fixed resistors were wired. In addition, another metal plate on the front of the box had one wire attached to the fixed resistor and another wire—a long one—dangling from the front of the box.

  “And this?” Holmes said, gesturing toward one that had caught his eye.

  “The blue wire—” this time, it was Jacobs who answered—“is attached to each metal plate in front of the fixed resistor, but only when Dr. Sinclair wants to short out the four kiloohms of fixed resistance down to zero. It’s for ex-ex—”

  “Extreme treatment?” Lestrade asked.

  “Only for ex-ex—” Jacobs answered.

  “Understood,” Holmes said.

  He turned to me and told me to write down what Jacobs had said.

  “The first wire off the transformer, Watson, goes out through a hole in the side of the box. At its end is the first electrode that Dr. Sinclair attached to his patient’s head. A person’s head has—what, Doctor?—approximately one kiloohm of resistance?”

  I shrugged, not having the answer, and he shot me an annoyed look and then continued.

  “The second electrode is hanging here in front of the box. This long wire, Watson. It supplies either zero or four kiloohms of resistance, depending on how Dr. Sinclair slid this wooden handle along the variable resistor and whether he attached the blue wire shorting the fixed resistor.”

  “Damn it all,” Lestrade exclaimed, dragging Bligh Braithwaite away from the Eshocker and dumping him by the wall again. “What the deuce does any of this mean, Holmes, and why should we care? Braithwaite killed Dr. Sinclair. That’s all that matters. He was in the room. He knows how to use the damn box.”

  “It matters,” Willie Jacobs said.

  “But why?” the Inspector demanded.

  “Because,” Jacobs rasped weakly, “the Eshocker don’t kill. Dr. Sinclair used ex-ex… used it on me an’ Bligh many times for long times. We survived the worst Eshockin’.”

  “In its largest doses, can
extreme treatment kill a man?” I pressed.

  “No,” Jacobs said.

  “No,” Braithwaite said.

  Finally, to the great relief of all present, Holmes dismissed us from Dr. Sinclair’s treatment room. Inspector Lestrade hurried off to get help with Sinclair’s corpse, and as for both Bligh Braithwaite and Willie Jacobs, we had no choice— at least, for the moment—but to return them to the care of Miss Klune. Holmes instructed her to pay particular attention to Willie Jacobs and to ensure that Miss Switzer was never alone with him.

  Later, after Holmes and I returned to the Diogenes Club, he tugged me into the Stranger’s Room, where we could talk. I was anxious to get home to 221B, dine with Mrs. Hudson, and get some sleep. But Holmes insisted that I write a series of equations in my notepad before allowing me to leave.

  “That Eshocker killed Dr. Sinclair,” he said, “and Lestrade is right that Bligh Braithwaite did it. And I know how he did it, Watson.”

  40

  Per Holmes’s instructions, I sketched a drawing of the Eshocker wiring in my notepad and supplemented it with equations. As always, his grasp of complex details amazed me. Had he wanted to sell Eshockers to Moriarty’s dens as well as to hospitals across England, he could have built the machines himself.

  DEN MODE

  where: • 0 is the minimum resistance from the variable resistor

  • 4 is the resistance from the fixed resistor

  • 1 is the resistance of the forehead

  where: • 4 is the maximum resistance from the variable resistor

  • 4 is the resistance from the fixed resistor

  • 1 is the resistance of the forehead

  HOSPITAL MODE

  Make sure the blue wire is detached.

  Note that in hospital and extreme treatment modes, the second 4 kiloohm resistor is replaced by a 1 kiloohm fixed resistor.

  where: • 0 is the maximum resistance from the variable resistor