A Holmesian Solstice

Title: A Case of Identities
Recipient: starfishstar
Author: graycardinal

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“I admit,” said Professor James Moriarty, “to a certain degree of concern. My associates are aware that I require the strictest privacy in which to conduct certain of my affairs, and they will not hesitate to take...let us say, irrevocable measures on my behalf to preserve that state. Moreover, to date their loyalty and skill in such matters has been unimpeachable.”

His visitor smiled faintly, an expression that took on a distinctly Satanic quality given his appearance – a lean figure in formal black attire, with a perfectly trimmed mustache and goatee, also raven-black, framing a sharp-featured face. “I am sure it has, my dear professor,” he said. “Do not worry yourself. I do not waste my allies’ assets, and it is alliance that I wish to discuss with you this morning.”

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“My dear Watson! I must congratulate you on the extraordinary timing of your visit.” Such was the greeting as I let myself into the suite of rooms I had long shared with Mr. Sherlock Holmes early on a dreary morning in March of 1889.

“It is the purest coincidence, I assure you,” I said, divesting myself of hat, coat, and gloves. “One of my patients brought a son into the world late last night – or more accurately, early this morning – in a manner which required no small effort on both our parts. I had thought to stop for a little while here before troubling Mary with my presence.”

“A wise plan indeed. A few moments spent with washbasin and razor will easily repair your appearance, and in that time the good Mrs. Hudson can surely conjure up tea and a sufficient breakfast to restore your inner energy.”

My protest that I did not require a meal was soundly rejected, and by the time I had completed my ablutions a steaming platter of eggs and kippers awaited me upon Holmes’ table. As I consumed the fruits of Mrs. Hudson’s labor, I returned to the matter of the earlier greeting.

“Do I deduce,” I inquired, “from your remark about my timing that you are expecting a client this morning, or perhaps a visit from Inspector Lestrade?”

“Not precisely,” was the reply, “as I cannot properly count my brother Mycroft as a client, and it is on his behalf that I have been...invited to look into a small matter. You are not, I imagine, familiar with the work of Professor Simeon Radcliffe?”

I blinked. “I am not; the name is wholly unfamiliar.”

“That is not surprising. He is an American of Dutch extraction who has been living in London for the past two years, and an acknowledged expert in several disciplines – chiefly metallurgy, chemistry, spectrographic analysis, and physics. I am given to understand that if his current research is successful, England’s industrial and military capacity might be increased no less than tenfold at only the most minimal financial cost, while the environmental harm inflicted by current methods of energy production would be almost entirely mitigated.”

“That sounds,” I said, “like something out of one of Mr. Verne’s or Mr. Wells’ novels, and too good to be true besides.”

A bark of laughter sounded from Holmes’ armchair. “I quite agree, at least with the latter observation. But as you yourself have observed, my scientific expertise is uneven in the extreme, and intersects only in part with Dr. Radcliffe’s. Mycroft, however, is wholly convinced that the man’s theories are sound, and has seen to it that his work is both undisturbed and unremarked upon. Just now, though, he believes that the man’s home may have been infiltrated by an unknown agent, and it is for that reason that I have been recruited to pay him a visit this afternoon. If you are amenable – and sufficiently recovered from your night’s labours – I would welcome your companionship on that errand.”

“Are you sure your brother will not object?” I asked. “If it is a matter of state secrets....”

“He will not, I am certain. Your discretion is assured, and your insight may be invaluable.”

The remark was casually delivered, but it had the desired effect. “I would be honored,” I said. “Let me just send notes to Mary and to Anstruther.”

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The house in which Dr. Simeon Radcliffe was conducting his research was situated in St. Albans, surrounded by an imposing hedge which made it resemble nothing so much as a castle out of a tale from the Grimms. A taciturn gatekeeper approached us as we alit from our hansom cab.

“I am Sherlock Holmes,” my companion said, producing a visiting card with a flick of his agile fingers. “I am expected. This is Doctor John Watson, my trusted associate.”

“Aye, then,” replied the gatekeeper, studying both Holmes’ card and my own before handing them back. He proceeded to unlock the tall iron-work gate and swung it open; to my surprise, the enormous hinges moved silently and smoothly with not so much as a squeak. “Just go on up the drive,” the gatekeeper told us, turning as he did so toward a small, neatly constructed wooden shed just inside the entrance. “I’ll let them know ye’re coming.”

“A private telephone system? How efficient,” my friend observed as we strode toward the house.

“Indeed,” I replied, amused. “Yet there is still no telephone at 221B.”

In return, I received an unexpectedly sharp glance. “True enough. I shall have a word with Mrs. Hudson about it.”

The surface on which we walked was smoothly paved and more than wide enough for a cab or a motorcar. We reached the manor house – for such it was – in a few short minutes, and were met by another uniformed attendant. “Come with me,” that gentleman said upon examining our credentials, and led us within.

Simeon Radcliffe proved to be a wiry, excitable man with unruly white hair, narrow rectangular spectacles, and a brown leather vest covered with small crooked pockets. “Hello!” he said, once we had been escorted into an enormous laboratory on the mansion’s second floor. “I’m not sure what-all to tell you, but I’ll answer anything you like.”

“For my part,” I replied frankly, “I am not certain what we should ask. It seems entirely incredible that the revolution your work evidently promises can be accomplished by a single breakthrough.”

“Exactly so,” Radcliffe said at once. “That’s just it; I’ve got about four experiments going at once. There’s a brand-new kind of battery, an automated manufacturing process, a kind of magnetic engine, and a gadget for transmitting energy by way of a light beam. It’s not what any one of those does by itself, it’s how they fold together that will do the real trick.”

I shook my head, trying to absorb the rush of ideas, but as usual, I was far behind everyone else in the room, my companion included. “Ah, that will be it. You say ‘gadget for transmitting energy’, and the government hears ‘death ray’. No wonder Mycroft was nervous.”

“No wonder, indeed,” said a new voice from the room’s entrance. “Kindly step away from the apparatus – all of them.”

All our eyes turned to focus on this latest arrival, and mine widened in total astonishment. From his hawkish, angular features to the cut of his sturdy brown jacket, the new intruder appeared to be none other than Sherlock Holmes himself! Yet this Holmes held the ends of what appeared to be a half-drawn sword cane in his agile hands, and his tone was at once both sharper and more measured than that of the Holmes with whom I had breakfasted and traveled to St. Albans. Yet in every other way, the two men appeared virtually identical, save for minor differences in their clothing.

“Holmes!” The single word was all that escaped my lips, addressed to both and neither, yet both their gazes turned toward me.

“My dear Dr. Watson,” said the newcomer, “please don’t tell me you’ve been deceived by this mountebank. Unless I am very much mistaken, that man is the most dangerous individual in all England. If you have your revolver with you, I would strongly advise aiming it at him at once.”

The Holmes from Baker Street merely smiled and spoke directly to his doppelganger. “Mountebank, indeed! Watson, that is not an ordinary cane. It is, however, the deadliest object in this room with the possible exception of Professor Radcliffe’s energy beam. If you aim your revolver at anything, that should be its first target.”

I met the gaze of each Holmes in turn, taking in each one’s particular appearance and mannerisms, as I very slowly – and without calling attention to the act – slid my hand into my coat pocket. “As it happens, nowadays I keep my revolver locked in the desk in my study in Paddington, and as you know,” I told the Holmes from 221B, “I have not been in Paddington since yesterday.

“As for your concern,” I went on, addressing the Holmes at the laboratory entrance, “you will be pleased to know that I have not been deceived by your seeming twin. That gentleman has certainly not spent the last ten years injecting himself with cocaine; his left arm is entirely unmarked.” As I uttered the last two words, I drew my hand from my pocket and threw the scalpel it contained as deftly as I could manage, aiming for the thing that was evidently not a cane in the second impostor’s hand.

Against all odds – a medical scalpel is emphatically not designed to serve as a missile – my weapon struck true. Though the false Holmes managed to extract the business half of his own weapon from its sheath, the scalpel’s blade struck the silver-and-black surface of the device with a sharp cracking sound. Both the scalpel and a small piece of the other device fell to the floor, and the second impostor leapt backward sharply as a wide, flat arc of white light pulsed outward from the half of the not-cane still in his hand. The first impostor ducked under the wave of energy, diving for the second; I merely dropped to the floor and rolled sideways out of the arc’s path.

It took only a few seconds for the flare to dissipate, and when it did a cry of furious anguish resounded throughout the room. It came from the second impostor, who was shaking his head and struggling in the grip of the first, who held him in a fashion reminiscent of a baritsu hold the genuine Holmes had once shown me.

“Ruined! Everything is ruined!” railed the broken cane’s owner. I turned toward the other side of the laboratory, and confronted an astonishing sight. Where fully two-thirds of the room had been filled with tables and cabinets holding all manner of complicated half-assembled equipment, what now lay on the floor was what appeared to be that same tangle of scientific components reduced to a twentieth of their former dimensions.

His opponent gave a quick, sharp shake of his head, causing a thick brown-haired wig to fly off as a full, round burst of white curls sprang free. “It’s just as well,” he said, in what I presumed was his own voice, mellower and more casual than that of Sherlock Holmes. “None of this was meant to be invented yet – as you very well know,” he added, eyeing his prisoner sternly. “Not that that’s ever stopped you, of course.”

I stared at the two of them. “Both of you,” I said, “have a great deal of explaining to do.”

“Not really,” said the white-haired impostor, who had somehow grown six inches taller in the process of resuming his own identity. “Explanations are highly overrated – and the less you know about the Master here, the better. Neither one of us is actually supposed to be here, you know.”

“Oh, come now, Doctor,” said the newly-named Master. “Admit it, you’re enjoying this little visit as much as I am. Although I confess to a certain disappointment; I had hoped to cross swords with the genuine Sherlock Holmes, not merely a second-rate impersonator.”

The Doctor bristled. “Second-rate?”

I shook my head in unwilling amusement. “In fact, you were both quite convincing, apart from the matters of an unscarred arm and the most dangerous man in all England.”[1]

The Master frowned, then nodded. “A fair point. Properly, the Doctor is the most annoying man in all England, not the most dangerous.”

“Second-most annoying, at best,” the Doctor retorted. “Possibly third-most, depending on how stubborn Alastair is at any given moment. But now that I think of it – if neither you nor I encountered the real Sherlock Holmes in the course of this debacle, where can he have been?”

“And now that I think of it,” I put in, “what’s happened to Professor Radcliffe? Could he have been shrunk along with all his hardware?”

The answer to that question came at once from a few feet behind me. “He could not,” said a familiar and welcome voice, “because he was not here.”

As he spoke, Sherlock Holmes strode briskly around me, removing “Professor Radcliffe’s” spectacles and false hair as he walked. “The Doctor here spoke truly on one point. Mycroft did, in fact, ask me to look into possible threats to Radcliffe’s safety – and I found one, in the form of this individual.” He gestured sharply at the Master. “At that point I advised Mycroft to sequester the professor temporarily. I then observed the Master’s assumption of my appearance, but returned to Baker Street too late to prevent the Doctor from pursuing the same tactic. In the circumstance, I deemed it simplest to take on Professor Radcliffe’s part in hopes of drawing both impersonators out – and trusted you, Watson, to correctly deduce that neither one was the genuine article. I need not add that you passed that test with flying colors.”

I allowed myself the barest moment to bask in Holmes’ rare words of outright praise, then asked the next question. “What are we to do with these two rogues now?”

Holmes took several moments to study the pair, the Master still squirming in the Doctor’s martial-arts grip. “If I read all of the evidence correctly,” he said at last, “both these gentlemen are from a time and place far removed from our own. I note particularly that each of you has two distinct pulses. One instance of such a condition might be mutation; two – combined with various other small points – place you outside the province of present-day Earthly biology. In such circumstances, and based on their actions toward one another, I fear we must trust the Doctor to deliver up the Master to whatever justice may await him outside our human jurisdiction.”

I drew a deep, worried breath. “Are you certain?”

“Bluntly, no,” Holmes replied, “but I see no other practical choice. I am confident that no facility now existing on Earth is sufficient to confine the Master against his will.”

“Agreed,” said both the Doctor and the Master at once. “Nor will there ever be one,” the Master added.

“We’ll just see,” said the Doctor. “Unfortunately, I can’t really lug him back to my...vessel like this. Would you happen to have about forty feet of good-quality steel cable and a welding-torch somewhere?”

“You cannot be serious,” the Master said. “Surely ordinary rope or a straitjacket would be simpler.”

“You forget, I’ve met you,” the Doctor responded. “You’d be out of those faster than I could say Harry Houdini.”

Holmes and I looked at one another. “I’ll watch them,” said Holmes. “Use the house telephone to call Mycroft. The sooner these two are on their way, the better.”

#

Mycroft’s response exceeded even the Doctor’s expectations. Rather than a spool of cable, he sent a submarine torpedo casing and an oxygen tank. Two and a half hours after its arrival, a highly indignant Master had been sealed inside the torpedo, and a decidedly amused Doctor went on his way.

To the best of my knowledge, neither one has ever returned. But Holmes had a long conversation with them before their departure, in which the words “Time Lords” and “regeneration” were mentioned more than once. As for Professor Radcliffe’s experiments, none of the shrunken equipment proved even slightly recoverable, and the entire project was abandoned.

Or at least, Mycroft Holmes has never said anything which would suggest otherwise.

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