By Abigail Falanga
It was a blustery day in October of 1880 when Sherlock Holmes was summoned to a student tenement near the University of London. The telegram requested my presence as well, which was unusual. I went willingly since I had no other appointments that morning.
Lestrade met us outside in the street, visibly shaken and white as a sheet. “You couldn’t have come soon enough, Mr. Holmes. It’s—well, you’ll see for yourself, but it has us puzzled. And it’s not a pretty sight. Constable Higgins fainted away as soon as he got near and still hasn’t recovered; it’s that bad.”
“It’s a case of the disappearing student, Petrie, I understand?” Holmes inquired as we followed the inspector inside. “I’ve heard of him—he published a monograph on some curious theories in physics not long ago. But a mere missing person is a strange thing to send a constable into a faint!”
“We were called about more than that, Mr. Holmes.” Lestrade was steadier now that he had solid facts to deliver. “This Francis Petrie, studying mechanical engineering and seemingly well-liked by all, hasn’t been seen since yesterday afternoon, when another student heard strange sounds coming from his rooms. He was last seen after a lecture at the university, when he received a letter that appeared to disturb him. After which, he left in a cab, which we are tracing. This morning, we were called in because of a terrible smell coming from his rooms.”
We had reached the third floor and found Constable Higgins propped against the wall in a dingy corridor. The police doctor bending over him looked so ill himself that I would have recommended he lie down under other circumstances. Lestrade led us through an open door at the end of the corridor, then stood to one side as Holmes and I entered.
The bed-sitting room was small and cluttered with open books and mechanical apparatus of various kinds. Shelves on one wall were lined with labeled specimen jars containing mice in varying states of decomposition. A faint hum, like an electrical generator, filled the air. But more noticeable was the pervasive stench of decay, worse than anything I had encountered, even on the battlefield. It was so repulsive that it took me a moment to notice the hideous thing on the floor, near the open window on the other side of the room.
It was the corpse of a very old man, face-down and shriveled to the point of mummification. Even his clothes seemed ancient, and wisps of white hair stirred in the draft. One hand seemed almost normal, while the other was practically skeletal, and stretched across the floor toward a large apparatus with an exposed machination of tubes that glowed, and gears that spun even still.
I recoiled, pressing a handkerchief to my nose. “Who is this? He has clearly lain here a long time. How could Petrie endure such a horrible object in his rooms?”
“That’s what we’d like to know,” said Lestrade. “No one has been able to get close enough to check the pockets before turning sick.”
Holmes turned from the specimen jars and crouched to examine the scene from a different angle. Knowing my duty as a doctor and an investigator, I steeled myself and stepped forward, reaching out toward the corpse.
“No, Watson!” Holmes shouted. “Be wary! The machine is still live.”
He pulled me back with a jerk, then reached his stick forward with his arm fully extended and flipped a small switch on the machine. It powered down with a hum of gears.
“Now we may breathe easier,” he said and turned to Lestrade. “I have only one question before I shall know all: has Petrie any enemies or rivals?”
“Yes.” Lestrade consulted his notebook. “Another student by the name of Graham was known to be a rival for some important fellowship. We were on the point of questioning him when you arrived.”
“Excellent! Have him brought in here, will you?”
Lestrade stepped outside, and Holmes walked swiftly around the corpse, bending to examine it closely. “A dreadful business, Watson. I have never seen the like.”
A scuffle echoed in the hall, and Lestrade came in, along with a constable holding a tall, stocky youth with a shock of red hair by the shoulders.
“I had nothing to do with this, I tell you!” the student said in a broad Scots accent. “I haven’t seen Petrie in days and had no reason to do him any harm.”
“Indeed?” Holmes asked drily. “And why is that?”
“We were both candidates for the Parsons Fellowship,” Graham said. “I received word yesterday morning that I received it. Why would I hurt Petrie or even mock him with something as loathsome as that?”
Holmes looked at him intently, then bent and carefully extracted an aged paper from beneath the corpse. “I believe you. Here is the letter informing Petrie of his loss.”
“But it’s crumbling away!” Lestrade gasped.
“Yes—because it is old. Fifty years old or so, by the looks of it.”
“How can that be if he got it yesterday?” I demanded.
“This machine warps time, does it not, Mr. Graham?”
“Yes, I believe it might.” The student gaped. “Petrie is experimenting with such concepts. It’s all nonsense, of course. Completely unfeasible and dangerous to boot. But how did you know?”
“Because this is Petrie, here, lying at our feet. The mice were clearly early experiments of the same process. He set up a trap intending to catch Graham, his rival, to get him out of the way and secure the Parsons Fellowship for himself as the other viable candidate. The corpse of a very old man would not throw suspicion on him, while the body of Graham might. But he was himself caught in the rapid acceleration of time, dead by the accident of his own machinations.”
“Horrible,” said Graham, shuddering. “I always knew he was ruthless, but this…”
“Count yourself lucky,” Holmes said. “You have had a near escape!”
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