Fic: The Adventure of the Mad Scientist
Title: The Adventure of the Mad Scientist
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD canon)
Characters: Holmes, Watson, Lestrade
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: dead bodies and some violence, but not in graphic detail
Words: 2550
Summary: A mad scientist threatens London's citizens with all the dangers electricity can hold, and for once, Holmes may not be able to solve the case entirely on his own...
Notes: Originally written for the summer 2012 round of holmestice for arwen-kenobi. Huge thanks go to garonne for excellent beta-reading!
Comments and criticism are always very welcome! Enjoy! :)
Is it not peculiar how some people can turn a chain of perfectly logical circumstances into a gothic novel? I always find it highly amusing that the lesser mind can interpret the purest logic and science as events suitable for a magazine full of adventure stories. Of course accounts like this cannot even begin to grasp the beauty of the art of detection. I invite you to draw your own conclusions from the following story.
+++
The Adventure of the Mad Scientist
by Dr. John Watson
published in the Strand Magazine
It was a dark and stormy night, on the 10th of November 1888. Holmes and I had just returned to Baker Street after a particularly unpleasant case involving a gruesome serial killer. In fact, Holmes had solved the case almost entirely on his own, but I liked to think that I had been at least of some assistance, even if Holmes would never admit to that out loud. I had retired to my chair in front of the fireplace to chase away the cold unpleasantness while Holmes - obviously still deep in thought - paced back and forth across the room, when a rapping at the front door made me jump. Holmes paused, but remained unfazed.
“Come in, Inspector,” he called and true enough it was Lestrade who came hurrying up the stairs.
“There has been another woman found dead,” he gasped when he entered the sitting room. “Whitechapel, again. I thought you had taken care of him, Holmes!”
Holmes frowned. “I have. Show us the victim and I will see whether she does indeed fall into the same category as the other unfortunate women this last month.”
Lestrade took us to Whitechapel High Street in his police cab. From there we walked down increasingly narrow and shabby streets, watched suspiciously by equally shabbily dressed residents, until we arrived at the scene of crime. Some of Lestrade’s officers were forming a circle in the cobbled street, in the middle of which lay a body.
Holmes motioned for me to examine it, so, eager to help, I knelt down next to what I now saw had been a very young lady indeed. She was pretty and her clothing fitted her well, although it was of cheap material. Lestrade’s men had identified her as Jane Thompson, one of the unfortunate females who worked the streets in that neighbourhood. For a moment I had the most unpleasant feeling of déjà-vu when I saw that her blouse had been ripped open. But in contrast to the victims of our last case, all her organs were still safely inside her body. Another curious thing caught my eye, though, and as I bent closer to examine the two circular wounds on her stomach, I saw that the skin inside these circles had been burned.
Upon closer examination, I could confirm them to be burns from an electrical source. Holmes, who had been talking to some residents from the houses next to the scene of crime, whistled when I told him of my findings.
“Wonderful! A murderer who uses electricity to kill his victims - I have not met one of those yet! He must be a perfectly educated and intelligent fellow and tracking him down will be quite a game.”
At that I interrupted him, for I had found something new. “There are pressure marks on her neck, clearly indicating that the cause of her death was strangulation rather than electrocution.”
Lestrade gave me a surprised look. “What about the time of her death?”
I told them she had been killed just over two hours ago. Holmes smiled again.
“And yet the residents swear she has not been here for more than an hour. They could have missed her before, of course, but with so many people living this close by, surely no step anyone makes goes unnoticed. Annoyingly, however, no one seems to recall the murderer himself. What do you deduce from that, Lestrade?”
“She was killed elsewhere and for some reason the murderer decided to dispose of the body here.”
“Excellent!” Holmes told him with a smile while taking a look at the body himself. “And indeed the good people did remember a hansom cab driving through the street right before the body was found. Doubtless the murderer had heard of our last case, but not yet of its closure and was trying to deposit the body here in the same style.”
That sounded reasonable. “So we are looking for someone with access to electricity, not necessarily enough to kill a person, but to hurt them a great deal nevertheless. Probably a scientist of one kind or another, who does not necessarily live in this area, but anywhere that can be reached by an hour’s drive in a cab?” I summarised. Holmes nodded, then added: “Apparently whatever caused her those electric burns must have happened after she was already dead.”
“But why would anyone do such a thing?” I cried, not understanding to what strange place Holmes’ thoughts were going and slightly annoyed for having missed this clue in my own examination. He considered me with a pensive look. “Why, indeed, Watson?”
But he did not answer the question that evening nor during the following day. In fact, Holmes spent the following day going out in various disguises (I spotted a young lady with a questionable profession, a tradesman selling mechanical instruments and a wealthy gentleman among others), leaving me alone at Baker Street. I busied myself with medical paperwork, but I could not suppress the unpleasant thought that apparently Holmes did not think it necessary for me accompany him. In the evening an engineer in oil-stained working clothes went into Holmes’ room and seconds later my friend emerged, wiping the last bit of oil from his face with a handkerchief. He looked very pleased.
“That went more smoothly than expected. Not even a day and I believe I have found our killer. James Clerk Clifford is his name and physicist his profession.”
“That explains the electrocution!” I interjected and Holmes smiled, evidently satisfied with my deduction. Immediately, my spirits rose again.
“I have found out where his laboratory is,” he went on. “Officially the location is a secret, but it is always astonishing how much people will tell you if they think you work in the same business. And once I had narrowed down the location to a particular part of town, it was easy to find the cabbie who remembered driving Miss Thompson from Mayfair to Whitechapel yesterday evening, in the company of a dubious looking man. He even remembers that she was passed out. Now all that remains is to confront Mr Clifford.” He looked at me over clasped hands. ”I have already telegraphed Lestrade to meet me at the laboratory. Will you be busy this evening or would you care for some excitement, too?”
I was glad to be asked and I could not think of anything that would have provided as much entertainment as an adventure with Holmes, so we got our coats and Holmes hailed a hansom cab to Mayfair. We left the cab at Old Bond Street to walk the last stretch, in order to attract less attention. The buildings were pompous and the other passers-by we saw were clad in expensive and elegant attire. All in all it did not look like a neighbourhood in which one would expect to find evil scientific experiments. I turned to Holmes.
“Did you find out why on earth Clifford would electrocute Miss Thompson after her death?”
“Apparently he is working on a method of bringing people back to life. A noble quest in itself but not tolerable if it includes people being murdered in the process. Only two month ago he was evicted from the Royal Society due to inappropriate experiments on his assistant, who has not been seen since. Nothing could be proven, though.”
I nodded. In recent years, morally dubious experiments with electricity had become increasingly popular. Ever since the success of Frankenstein, some scientists were obsessed by the idea that the same current that had been shown to kill living beings could also be used to revive them. While - as Holmes has pointed out - not a bad idea in itself, of course the downside was that in order to revive someone you had to kill him first. There had been many cases of scientists out of control in London and apparently Mr Clifford was one of them.
Suddenly Holmes stopped in front of a very respectable looking town house. It did not at all resemble the lair of a criminal mastermind - one would rather expect to be invited in for a pleasant afternoon tea. But Lestrade was already waiting in front of the building and when I looked around, I could see several of his officers hidden in various locations around the place. The inspector greeted us with a nod. “There was nothing in our records about a laboratory here, Holmes. I hope you are right as always.”
Holmes did not even deign to respond to that, so Lestrade went on: “We don’t know if that madman has any other people in there he experiments on, so we have to be careful. Also, try not to kill the man. He may prove valuable in interrogation.”
After we had made all these procedures clear, Holmes produced a lock pick from the depth of his coat and quietly fumbled around the door until it sprang open with a squeaking sound. We entered quietly. The inside of the house was just as splendidly decorated as the outside, with an enormous chandelier and exquisite tapestries. It seemed like a normal enough town house, with no signs of scientific instruments or, come to that, of the suspicious scientist.
Holmes, however, seemed to know exactly where to look and went straight into the library. And indeed, after he had shifted several volumes, he did find a metal lever hidden behind a transcript of Tesla’s famous New York Lecture from earlier that year. I probably should not have been surprised, but for a moment I stood dumbstruck as Holmes activated the switch and a whole bookshelf rotated sideways to reveal a secret passage.
It was lit by a cold electric light and when we carefully entered the passage, we heard a curious buzzing surrounding us. I half expected electric flames to strike us after entering, but nothing happened. We stood quietly for a second, then Holmes motioned for us to move forward. Silently we snuck down the passage, which was leading downwards until we must have been well below the house itself. After a while, another noise drowned out the electric buzzing. It was someone talking, but we could not make out any of the words yet. It was enough to alert us, though, since apparently Clifford was wherever we were heading to.
Abruptly, the passage opened into a larger hall. From the machinery and apparatus standing around, it was immediately clear that this had to be Clifford’s laboratory. I could make out a Wimshurst influence machine producing a large amount of electric sparks among many other different machines and spare mechanical parts. Great was my shock and horror when my eyes fell upon a crude work-bench upon which lay a young woman. Her hands and feet were bound to the bench and electric cables were attached to various parts of her body. Clifford was bent over her. Obviously she was to be his next victim and judging from the smell of burnt flesh, he had already performed some of his perverted experiments on her. She seemed to be still alive, though.
I had drawn my gun and was getting ready to shoot the mad and dangerous scientist, when without a warning Holmes stepped into the laboratory. Instantly, Clifford abandoned his work on the woman and turned towards Holmes. Holmes nodded and said in an excessively polite tone: “Good evening, Mr Clifford. Please, do not be disturbed. I am merely interested in your exceedingly modern and state-of-the-art apparatus. I heard you were looking for an electrical resurrection method? I do believe I have read an article of yours in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, although I do not recall whether it was on this subject.”
Clifford eyed Holmes suspiciously. “If you were a fellow researcher, why would you sneak into my laboratory in the middle of the night and not simply request a proper meeting?”
He took a step in the direction of one of the bigger pieces of machinery, which seemed to contain an electrical generator. Lestrade and I shared a look, aware of the mortal danger Holmes had put himself in. It was fortunate that we had already worked together so often, for now we did not need words to communicate our plan. When Holmes answered and Clifford was sufficiently distracted by our friend, Lestrade snuck into the laboratory while I readied my gun again in case anything should go off.
“Oh, it seems you have misunderstood me there,” Holmes continued. “As much as I am interested in your apparatus, I am by no means a fellow researcher. I have a scientific curiosity as to whether your method works, that is true. But regardless of my interest, I cannot allow you to continue killing innocent people in the process. That is no longer science; it is the work of a mad man. I am here to stop you.”
Clifford gave a terrifying hollow laugh. “And how would you propose to do that? You seem to be a man who hinders scientific progress rather than anyone who could dare to speak in the name of science. And you are alone and unarmed while I am surrounded by the most sophisticated machines that exist today. Do you truly think you can compete with them? So you see that there is no chance someone like you could stop me.”
Luckily, just at that moment Lestrade crept up behind Clifford. He raised his stick and before Clifford could reach out to his generator, Lestrade struck him on the head and Clifford sank to the floor. In less than a second Holmes was by their side to confirm that the scientist was still alive.
I breathed a sigh of relief and put away my gun. Then, remembering the young woman, I rushed to the horrifying work-bench to undo her ties. She was too weak to get up on her own, so I supported her. Luckily she still was mostly unharmed apart from some bruises and minor burns, as the more fatal experiments were yet to begin. While I treated her most serious injuries, I believe I heard Holmes very quietly praise Lestrade for his job well done. I smiled to myself. It seemed that, at least on some occasions, Holmes did need our help after all.
+++
I think you have read enough now to have made up your mind. I must duly correct this record of events, though: At no time was I in ‘mortal danger’, for as always Watson has severely played down his own importance in this case. For all the flaws they each have, I’ve always known I can thoroughly rely on Watson and Lestrade should any dangerous situation arise. I would be a fool not to include their strengths in my plans.
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD canon)
Characters: Holmes, Watson, Lestrade
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: dead bodies and some violence, but not in graphic detail
Words: 2550
Summary: A mad scientist threatens London's citizens with all the dangers electricity can hold, and for once, Holmes may not be able to solve the case entirely on his own...
Notes: Originally written for the summer 2012 round of holmestice for arwen-kenobi. Huge thanks go to garonne for excellent beta-reading!
Comments and criticism are always very welcome! Enjoy! :)
Is it not peculiar how some people can turn a chain of perfectly logical circumstances into a gothic novel? I always find it highly amusing that the lesser mind can interpret the purest logic and science as events suitable for a magazine full of adventure stories. Of course accounts like this cannot even begin to grasp the beauty of the art of detection. I invite you to draw your own conclusions from the following story.
+++
The Adventure of the Mad Scientist
by Dr. John Watson
published in the Strand Magazine
It was a dark and stormy night, on the 10th of November 1888. Holmes and I had just returned to Baker Street after a particularly unpleasant case involving a gruesome serial killer. In fact, Holmes had solved the case almost entirely on his own, but I liked to think that I had been at least of some assistance, even if Holmes would never admit to that out loud. I had retired to my chair in front of the fireplace to chase away the cold unpleasantness while Holmes - obviously still deep in thought - paced back and forth across the room, when a rapping at the front door made me jump. Holmes paused, but remained unfazed.
“Come in, Inspector,” he called and true enough it was Lestrade who came hurrying up the stairs.
“There has been another woman found dead,” he gasped when he entered the sitting room. “Whitechapel, again. I thought you had taken care of him, Holmes!”
Holmes frowned. “I have. Show us the victim and I will see whether she does indeed fall into the same category as the other unfortunate women this last month.”
Lestrade took us to Whitechapel High Street in his police cab. From there we walked down increasingly narrow and shabby streets, watched suspiciously by equally shabbily dressed residents, until we arrived at the scene of crime. Some of Lestrade’s officers were forming a circle in the cobbled street, in the middle of which lay a body.
Holmes motioned for me to examine it, so, eager to help, I knelt down next to what I now saw had been a very young lady indeed. She was pretty and her clothing fitted her well, although it was of cheap material. Lestrade’s men had identified her as Jane Thompson, one of the unfortunate females who worked the streets in that neighbourhood. For a moment I had the most unpleasant feeling of déjà-vu when I saw that her blouse had been ripped open. But in contrast to the victims of our last case, all her organs were still safely inside her body. Another curious thing caught my eye, though, and as I bent closer to examine the two circular wounds on her stomach, I saw that the skin inside these circles had been burned.
Upon closer examination, I could confirm them to be burns from an electrical source. Holmes, who had been talking to some residents from the houses next to the scene of crime, whistled when I told him of my findings.
“Wonderful! A murderer who uses electricity to kill his victims - I have not met one of those yet! He must be a perfectly educated and intelligent fellow and tracking him down will be quite a game.”
At that I interrupted him, for I had found something new. “There are pressure marks on her neck, clearly indicating that the cause of her death was strangulation rather than electrocution.”
Lestrade gave me a surprised look. “What about the time of her death?”
I told them she had been killed just over two hours ago. Holmes smiled again.
“And yet the residents swear she has not been here for more than an hour. They could have missed her before, of course, but with so many people living this close by, surely no step anyone makes goes unnoticed. Annoyingly, however, no one seems to recall the murderer himself. What do you deduce from that, Lestrade?”
“She was killed elsewhere and for some reason the murderer decided to dispose of the body here.”
“Excellent!” Holmes told him with a smile while taking a look at the body himself. “And indeed the good people did remember a hansom cab driving through the street right before the body was found. Doubtless the murderer had heard of our last case, but not yet of its closure and was trying to deposit the body here in the same style.”
That sounded reasonable. “So we are looking for someone with access to electricity, not necessarily enough to kill a person, but to hurt them a great deal nevertheless. Probably a scientist of one kind or another, who does not necessarily live in this area, but anywhere that can be reached by an hour’s drive in a cab?” I summarised. Holmes nodded, then added: “Apparently whatever caused her those electric burns must have happened after she was already dead.”
“But why would anyone do such a thing?” I cried, not understanding to what strange place Holmes’ thoughts were going and slightly annoyed for having missed this clue in my own examination. He considered me with a pensive look. “Why, indeed, Watson?”
But he did not answer the question that evening nor during the following day. In fact, Holmes spent the following day going out in various disguises (I spotted a young lady with a questionable profession, a tradesman selling mechanical instruments and a wealthy gentleman among others), leaving me alone at Baker Street. I busied myself with medical paperwork, but I could not suppress the unpleasant thought that apparently Holmes did not think it necessary for me accompany him. In the evening an engineer in oil-stained working clothes went into Holmes’ room and seconds later my friend emerged, wiping the last bit of oil from his face with a handkerchief. He looked very pleased.
“That went more smoothly than expected. Not even a day and I believe I have found our killer. James Clerk Clifford is his name and physicist his profession.”
“That explains the electrocution!” I interjected and Holmes smiled, evidently satisfied with my deduction. Immediately, my spirits rose again.
“I have found out where his laboratory is,” he went on. “Officially the location is a secret, but it is always astonishing how much people will tell you if they think you work in the same business. And once I had narrowed down the location to a particular part of town, it was easy to find the cabbie who remembered driving Miss Thompson from Mayfair to Whitechapel yesterday evening, in the company of a dubious looking man. He even remembers that she was passed out. Now all that remains is to confront Mr Clifford.” He looked at me over clasped hands. ”I have already telegraphed Lestrade to meet me at the laboratory. Will you be busy this evening or would you care for some excitement, too?”
I was glad to be asked and I could not think of anything that would have provided as much entertainment as an adventure with Holmes, so we got our coats and Holmes hailed a hansom cab to Mayfair. We left the cab at Old Bond Street to walk the last stretch, in order to attract less attention. The buildings were pompous and the other passers-by we saw were clad in expensive and elegant attire. All in all it did not look like a neighbourhood in which one would expect to find evil scientific experiments. I turned to Holmes.
“Did you find out why on earth Clifford would electrocute Miss Thompson after her death?”
“Apparently he is working on a method of bringing people back to life. A noble quest in itself but not tolerable if it includes people being murdered in the process. Only two month ago he was evicted from the Royal Society due to inappropriate experiments on his assistant, who has not been seen since. Nothing could be proven, though.”
I nodded. In recent years, morally dubious experiments with electricity had become increasingly popular. Ever since the success of Frankenstein, some scientists were obsessed by the idea that the same current that had been shown to kill living beings could also be used to revive them. While - as Holmes has pointed out - not a bad idea in itself, of course the downside was that in order to revive someone you had to kill him first. There had been many cases of scientists out of control in London and apparently Mr Clifford was one of them.
Suddenly Holmes stopped in front of a very respectable looking town house. It did not at all resemble the lair of a criminal mastermind - one would rather expect to be invited in for a pleasant afternoon tea. But Lestrade was already waiting in front of the building and when I looked around, I could see several of his officers hidden in various locations around the place. The inspector greeted us with a nod. “There was nothing in our records about a laboratory here, Holmes. I hope you are right as always.”
Holmes did not even deign to respond to that, so Lestrade went on: “We don’t know if that madman has any other people in there he experiments on, so we have to be careful. Also, try not to kill the man. He may prove valuable in interrogation.”
After we had made all these procedures clear, Holmes produced a lock pick from the depth of his coat and quietly fumbled around the door until it sprang open with a squeaking sound. We entered quietly. The inside of the house was just as splendidly decorated as the outside, with an enormous chandelier and exquisite tapestries. It seemed like a normal enough town house, with no signs of scientific instruments or, come to that, of the suspicious scientist.
Holmes, however, seemed to know exactly where to look and went straight into the library. And indeed, after he had shifted several volumes, he did find a metal lever hidden behind a transcript of Tesla’s famous New York Lecture from earlier that year. I probably should not have been surprised, but for a moment I stood dumbstruck as Holmes activated the switch and a whole bookshelf rotated sideways to reveal a secret passage.
It was lit by a cold electric light and when we carefully entered the passage, we heard a curious buzzing surrounding us. I half expected electric flames to strike us after entering, but nothing happened. We stood quietly for a second, then Holmes motioned for us to move forward. Silently we snuck down the passage, which was leading downwards until we must have been well below the house itself. After a while, another noise drowned out the electric buzzing. It was someone talking, but we could not make out any of the words yet. It was enough to alert us, though, since apparently Clifford was wherever we were heading to.
Abruptly, the passage opened into a larger hall. From the machinery and apparatus standing around, it was immediately clear that this had to be Clifford’s laboratory. I could make out a Wimshurst influence machine producing a large amount of electric sparks among many other different machines and spare mechanical parts. Great was my shock and horror when my eyes fell upon a crude work-bench upon which lay a young woman. Her hands and feet were bound to the bench and electric cables were attached to various parts of her body. Clifford was bent over her. Obviously she was to be his next victim and judging from the smell of burnt flesh, he had already performed some of his perverted experiments on her. She seemed to be still alive, though.
I had drawn my gun and was getting ready to shoot the mad and dangerous scientist, when without a warning Holmes stepped into the laboratory. Instantly, Clifford abandoned his work on the woman and turned towards Holmes. Holmes nodded and said in an excessively polite tone: “Good evening, Mr Clifford. Please, do not be disturbed. I am merely interested in your exceedingly modern and state-of-the-art apparatus. I heard you were looking for an electrical resurrection method? I do believe I have read an article of yours in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, although I do not recall whether it was on this subject.”
Clifford eyed Holmes suspiciously. “If you were a fellow researcher, why would you sneak into my laboratory in the middle of the night and not simply request a proper meeting?”
He took a step in the direction of one of the bigger pieces of machinery, which seemed to contain an electrical generator. Lestrade and I shared a look, aware of the mortal danger Holmes had put himself in. It was fortunate that we had already worked together so often, for now we did not need words to communicate our plan. When Holmes answered and Clifford was sufficiently distracted by our friend, Lestrade snuck into the laboratory while I readied my gun again in case anything should go off.
“Oh, it seems you have misunderstood me there,” Holmes continued. “As much as I am interested in your apparatus, I am by no means a fellow researcher. I have a scientific curiosity as to whether your method works, that is true. But regardless of my interest, I cannot allow you to continue killing innocent people in the process. That is no longer science; it is the work of a mad man. I am here to stop you.”
Clifford gave a terrifying hollow laugh. “And how would you propose to do that? You seem to be a man who hinders scientific progress rather than anyone who could dare to speak in the name of science. And you are alone and unarmed while I am surrounded by the most sophisticated machines that exist today. Do you truly think you can compete with them? So you see that there is no chance someone like you could stop me.”
Luckily, just at that moment Lestrade crept up behind Clifford. He raised his stick and before Clifford could reach out to his generator, Lestrade struck him on the head and Clifford sank to the floor. In less than a second Holmes was by their side to confirm that the scientist was still alive.
I breathed a sigh of relief and put away my gun. Then, remembering the young woman, I rushed to the horrifying work-bench to undo her ties. She was too weak to get up on her own, so I supported her. Luckily she still was mostly unharmed apart from some bruises and minor burns, as the more fatal experiments were yet to begin. While I treated her most serious injuries, I believe I heard Holmes very quietly praise Lestrade for his job well done. I smiled to myself. It seemed that, at least on some occasions, Holmes did need our help after all.
+++
I think you have read enough now to have made up your mind. I must duly correct this record of events, though: At no time was I in ‘mortal danger’, for as always Watson has severely played down his own importance in this case. For all the flaws they each have, I’ve always known I can thoroughly rely on Watson and Lestrade should any dangerous situation arise. I would be a fool not to include their strengths in my plans.