Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

“I believe he may try to take his own life,” Holmes told him.

The guard snorted. “It’d save us the trouble.”

My friend flashed the guard a look of distaste. “Watson, let us take our leave of this place…”

As we walked out of the prison, and as I was attempting to match Holmes’ stride, I commented, “You cannot blame the guard. Miss Cartwright’s cousin offers no defence.”

“Watson,” Holmes said, suddenly rounding on me, “did you not see it in the man’s eyes? That man is an innocent.”

“But how can he be?” I argued. “You’ve heard all the—”

He held up a finger. “And yet he is still innocent. I cannot explain it, but I do believe it. He has no recollection of committing these acts, but I am certain he saw them being committed.”

I rubbed my chin. “He’s definitely a troubled man, but guilt can block out memories. Or are you perhaps suggesting a split personality?”

Holmes pursed his lips. “You have the medical knowledge, Watson…”

“Well, I’d need to study him more to—” I was interrupted this second time by the blowing of whistles and policemen running past us. There was something afoot, a crime in progress, and even though we were already committed to this first investigation Holmes is never one to let an opportunity for observation — or to lend assistance — pass him by.

We followed the police to a house but a few streets away. Holmes completely ignored Lestrade’s warnings to stay back until they could ascertain what had happened and, dashing after my friend, I too witnessed the tail end of what occurred.

Later, we would learn that the house belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. William Thorndyke. An ordinary couple in every single way — Mr. Thorndyke being a retired schoolteacher.

Screams had been heard bursting from their home; a woman’s screams. As we entered the dining room, Lestrade still trying to keep us back, we saw that these screams had indeed come from Mrs. Thorndyke, but not because she was being assaulted in any way. No, these were the screams of a woman holding a dinner-knife in her hand, standing, staring at the body of her husband, sprawled across the dining table. From what I could see, confirmed by later examination, I can tell you that he had been stabbed repeatedly by the instrument clutched in his wife’s hand. It had been a frenzied attack; gore covered the table and dripped from the tablecloth. It would not be the final such scene we would witness in the course of this investigation.

As the police moved in closer, Mrs. Thorndyke stopped screaming and looked over in our direction. She wore that same lost expression that had so recently adorned the face of Miss Cartwright’s cousin.

One of sheer and utter disbelief.

“Lestrade!” cried Holmes, but his warning came too late. Mrs. Thorndyke looked at the body of her husband, looked down at the bloodied knife in her hand, then before anyone could move to stop her she swiftly drew the blade across her own throat. A thick jet of blood sprayed across the room.

The police let me through then, but there was nothing that could be done for the poor woman. She had made a very thorough job of cutting through both the jugular vein and carotid arteries. My attempts to stem the tide of blood were in vain. As Holmes joined me we both heard her final gurgling gasp. “I … I didn’t…”

Though we were fresh to the scene of this incident — able to examine it before, as Holmes would say, Lestrade and his men could contaminate it — we found nothing amiss … save for the brutal murder of Mr. Thorndyke.

As you know, I have long been a student of Holmes and his methods, so it was with a heavy heart that I watched him pace the room, sniffing the air, taking out his glass to pay close scrutiny to a piece of carpet here, the edge of a table there, only for him to concede that — as she must have done — Mrs. Thorndyke had plunged the knife into her husband during the meal. Holmes pressed a gloved finger to his lips. “Ah, but it is the way it happened that is the most curious, Watson,” said he. “Note the way the plates are scattered on the table. The look of shock and surprise on Mr. Thorndyke’s face. This happened quickly. As if something unimaginable came over the woman. One moment they sat eating dinner together, the next…” His sentence trailed off.

I nodded. “But what could have come over her?”

“Once again, you are the physician, Watson. I would suggest that you examine the body of not only Mr. Thorndyke,” he encouraged, “but his wife as well. We shall also be needing access to the body of Miss Judith Hatten.” Holmes looked over at Lestrade as he said this.

“I beg your pardon? What has the one to do with the other?” the policeman asked.

“Oh, come now, Inspector. Surely you can see the connection here?” The man could not, but I could. Two people murdered by their partners, both surviving halves — though Mrs. Thorndyke did not survive for long, I grant you — claiming that they did not commit the crime, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Lestrade allowed us to examine the body of Miss Hatten anyway, along with the others. But even as Holmes watched my explorations from a distance down in the icy morgue I could offer him no new leads.

“The causes of death are accurate,” said I, “a head injury in the case of Miss Hatten and repeated stab wounds in the case of Mr. Thorndyke.”

Holmes looked past me to the grey bodies on the tables, breathing in deeply — something I would not readily advise in such a situation. “But what of Mrs. Thorndyke?”

I shook my head. “Nothing that I could see, at any rate. Perhaps an examination of her blood…”

However not even that afforded us an explanation; no abnormalities that would have accounted for sudden changes in personality. Nor did Holmes’ trip to the Hatten residence uncover a thing, largely because Judith’s father would not grant us permission to view the crime scene once he learned who had enlisted our help.

“No matter,” Holmes said as we climbed back into the cab, heading towards Baker Street once more. “After so long, I doubt whether it would have yielded anything of interest.”

While Holmes attempted to make some kind of sense of the incidents thus far — littering his room with everything from articles on insanity to reports alleging bodily possession by demons (“You cannot seriously be considering that?” I said to him when I discovered his notes, but he just waved me away with his hand), playing his violin into the small hours of the morning — more incidents occurred.

In Kentish Town an antiques dealer named Falconbridge used an ornamental sword to disembowel his housekeeper then turned the weapon on himself. At Westminster Hospital a middle-aged builder’s merchant called Robertson took it upon himself to secrete a hypodermic needle about his person and inject his elderly mother with an overdose of morphine … a mercy killing, you might assume, but the woman was actually recovering from her malaise and was expected to be discharged within a matter of days. Colleagues of mine who were present informed me that the son, in a state of confusion and remorse, ran away. His body was later found in the Thames. Finally, passengers on a train bound for Waterloo described hearing piercing screams, only to witness a woman backing out of a carriage covered in blood and holding a fire axe. According to the ticket inspector her hands were trembling, as she looked left and right, then she dropped the axe and fled, eventually flinging herself from the moving vehicle. Inside the carriage were found the dismembered bodies of her husband and their twelve year old daughter.

It was the latter, I fear, that had the most telling effect upon Holmes. As we stepped onto that train, Lestrade now very glad of any assistance, my friend wavered, almost turning back. But he forced himself to look upon those remains. And I swear to you now, that in all my years and service in Afghanistan I had never seen the likes of it before — nor would I care to again.

“I should have been able to prevent this,” Holmes said, under his breath, his gaze fixed upon the contents of that carriage.

“How?” I asked him, my own mouth dry as sandpaper.

“There is a pattern to these events… I simply cannot see it yet.”

When we returned to Baker Street that evening, silence prevailing in the cab along the way, Miss Cartwright was waiting for us. She said nothing as Holmes stepped into the room, but merely strode towards him and slapped his face; before departing without a word.

We discovered not long afterwards that Simon had committed suicide in his cell by swallowing his own tongue. Lestrade said that there was nothing that could have been done, but I knew Holmes disagreed.

I did not see him for some time after that. On the single occasion I did knock and enter his chambers, I found the room empty apart from the usual detritus of the case. However, on the table I spied the means by which he was administering his seven percent solution; a habit from which I never did manage to free him.

Holmes staggered from his bedroom then, unkempt and wearing a dressing gown. He looked drawn and pale,