Free Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) by Ralph Vaughan

issue of the three consecutive numbers of the journal in which it was published, I would gladly do so.  As you surmised, Mr Holmes, it was a thin fictionalisation of rumours circulating about Maddoc when we were at the Normal School of Science (now the Royal College), mixed in with liberal doses of Professor Charles Hinton’s highly imaginative views on the fairyland of higher geometry.”
    “Professor Hinton suggested we speak to you,” Holmes said.
    “I had no idea the old boy was back in London,” Wells said.  “We all had something of a falling out after the publication of ‘The Chronic Argonauts,’ but Maddoc was quicker to forgive my literary foolishness than was Hinton.”
    “If you wrote up Maddoc’s work years ago,” Kent said, “what are you working on now?”
    “A grander vision of the theme explored as a social commentary on the class war that will one day split society if we cannot create a truly egalitarian world,” Wells explained.  “I have also abandoned the somewhat obtuse, almost jocular title of my youth in favour of the more descriptive, though melodramatic, designation of  The Time Machine . But I fail to see how an imaginative novel of scientific philosophy could at all be of interest to Scotland Yard.”
    “In itself, it is not,” Kent admitted, “but we are looking for Maddoc.  Have you seen him of late?  Do you know where we might find him?”
    “I last saw Maddoc not long ago, at his house in Richmond, near Cholmondeley Walk overlooking the Green, and he was in quite a frightful state,” Wells said.  “It was on the occasion of a dinner party given for a few wide-minded acquaintances.  In fact, gentlemen, the revelations made that night are what prompted me to gather together my notes upon the subject and re-examine ideas that have been fermenting within my mind almost a decade, and set them into a coherent narrative.”
    “What revelations, Mr Wells?” Kent asked.
    “Maddoc’s machine,” Wells replied, a hint of exasperation creeping into his voice.  “Moesen Maddoc has constructed a working Time Machine and has used it to visit humanity’s future.  Permit me to explain…”

Chapter VIII
    The Phantom of Richmond
     
    Inspector Charles Kent and Sherlock Holmes sat across from each other in the railway car, waiting for the penultimate train to Richmond to pull out of mazey Waterloo Station.  They were alone in the car, and Holmes was as silent as he had been all the way down from St Pancras after leaving Wells; his chin rested upon his breast, his eyes were half closed, a clay pipe was gripped tightly between his teeth, and he puffed furiously.
    He was an odd duck, this Sherlock Holmes, Kent reflected as he gazed out the compartment window, and at the reflection of his companion in the window.  He had no idea what to make of the fantastic story related by Wells regarding either the working model of the Time Machine, or of the incredible future period related by Maddoc to Wells and the others.  While Kent did not automatically dismiss the possibility, no matter how remote its likelihood, of a machine to navigate the unknown reaches of time – after all, they were living in an age of scientific marvels such as the electric telephone and Cayley’s steam aeroplane – he could not bring himself to give any credence to the development of two separate races from present humanity, a Darwinian evolution, or devolution, as the case may be.  Charles Darwin had been dead just twelve years, but his shadow still loomed large over society, and his damnable theories continued to challenge the common sense of man and the basic religious principles that were the foundation of civilisation.  In Darwin’s Blasphemous Gospel, humanity owed its superior position in creation not to endowments from a beneficent Creator but to accidents of birth, deformations that decried the veracity of Biblical Genesis.  The idea that the same biological processes which had raised man to the