Sherlock Holmes and Captain Jack Sparrow Save Spacetime from Infinite Chronological Paradoxes
I
Alone in his study, Sherlock Holmes bowed his head over his books. He felt that at last, despite the finest education and an already remarkable mind, he had exhausted his intellect. He struggled to reconcile himself with this revelation. There was no accounting for it. It was impossible that the perpetrator of these crimes could have such a peerless understanding of the universe that not even he could determine its motives. As a general rule, his habitual egoism would never indulge in this kind of self criticism. But he felt humbled by the situation. These crimes puzzled him in a way that guaranteed no eventual resolution.
"Don't be daft," he said to himself. "If there's something to be known here, then you must already know what it is." He dropped his face to the crease between the pages of his book as if daring it to swallow him whole.
The rapping at the study door was predictable, but not impossible to ignore. "Mr. Holmes," shouted Mrs. Hudson. "It's time for tea. I've called you four times already."
It's the sixth time, he thought, that I'm waiting for. He continued to sit with his face in the book. What was the use of cleverness if its highest possible achievement was recognizing its own uselessness? Of course he would have liked to have been able to agree with Scotland Yard that these murders had been perpetrated by a madman and his pliable subordinates. But there was something predictable and curiously harmonious about the crimes. They were as predictable as Mrs. Hudson, whose fourth call was always accompanied by a rap on the door, the fifth by an attempt to knock it down, and finally the sixth by a successful appeal to explosives. At times he imagined himself her tutor in principles of Machiavellian governance. He supposed that eventually he would succeed in teaching her that an appeal to force was perhaps the only reliable method to extract what was necessary from an uncooperative resource.
In this instance, he realized, the uncooperative resource was his mind. Ashamed of its uselessness, it balked to address the particulars of the crimes. Once again, he recalled the naïve conclusions of the police. They supposed that Pythagoras was a madman, though they granted that he was a mastermind with an able and active body of accomplices. But Sherlock was incapable of disregarding the deliberateness of the murders. First there had been two, then four, and then sixteen—all indicating their purposeful correspondence to the ascending squares of the Pythagorean Theorem. It was evident that these deaths would precede a kind of ritualistic massacre, the deaths of 16*16. Yet he was reluctant to credit the murders to the absurd notion of a mystical brotherhood, or to the sinister and unpredictable schemes of the occult. After all, not all the victims had been easy to isolate and murder. To Sherlock, it seemed that the plan was not only mathematical, but also political.
The inscrutable figure of Pythagoras, whoever he was, had recalled an ancient fraternity only in order to mystify the public and manipulate his followers. But Sherlock doubted that Pythagoras himself had been seduced by the beautiful symmetry of numbers. His use of geometry was crude and contrived at best—as forced as the blunt, quasi-right triangles carved into the faces of the first twenty-two victims.
He could hear that Mrs. Hudson had resumed beating on the study door with one of his umbrellas, or perhaps with one of the canes that he liked to take with him on his more fashionable outings. He decided that with time—optimistically under a year—she would come to the intelligent conclusion that the use of gunpowder ought to become her first and only method to extract him from his study in time for afternoon tea. It was probably only due to his inconsistency as a teacher that she had not already come to this conclusion. In fact, most days he arrived at the living room with surprising punctuality. It was only when he felt personally challenged by a case that his study became his prison and his nightmare.
In the meantime, he would wait for the explosion to rouse him from his stupor. What could all of these triangles mean? Their allusive purpose was obvious: the villain Pythagoras hoped to connect his crimes to the legacy of the mathematician Pythagoras. But what political agenda was disguised by the pretense of mystical mathematics?
The beating on the door stopped abruptly, and the silence was foreboding. He could hear her footsteps on the first floor, and though he knew that a monosyllabic response was all that was necessary to spare the destruction of yet another door, he could not muster the courage to speak. It was much easier to resign himself to the interruption of a well-meaning intruder, but to break his own concentration would doom him to abandon it forever. He braced himself for the explosion.
A bit later.
Sherlock Holmes was not surprised to find his longsuffering associate, John H. Watson, waiting for him in the living room. The tea on the table had not yet gone cold, but Watson had awaited his arrival with enough patience to have allowed his own cup to cool. He drained it quickly and served himself another.
"Hudson says you're giving her trouble again."
"So I am," admitted Sherlock. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the mantle. The evidence of his obsessive behavior was much more apparent than he would have preferred.
"I can only assume it's to do with the Triangle Murders."
"The Pythagorean murders, my dear Watson. It's tragically unprofessional that you've resorted to the layman's term so early in the case. At least in a month or two you'd have the press to blame," said Sherlock.
"Well in any case, you know how I feel about it. But just because you're onto something doesn't mean you have any personal investment in the comings and goings of this killer. Besides, it's all prostitutes and drunkards is all."
"That's a hideous misconception, Watson. Two politicians and a lord among those killed—that's a farther reach than your mere Jack-the-Ripper, not including his unique interest in numbers."
"That's fine then. But you still ought to look after yourself." Watson straightened his collar as he spoke, and Holmes recognized the cue to adjust his own cravat, which he had loosened immodestly over the course of the previous evening. "As I was saying," continued Watson, "you have no personal investment in the outcome of the case. And meanwhile, I've come to tell you that The Landlord's Daughter sank on its way from Bermuda. The investors are in a fix, and that puts you and me among them, friend."
"The Landlord's Daughter? Was that its name? Well, it's nothing we can't recover from. Ships are always coming and going and sinking and rising again. Where Bermuda's concerned, it's the norm."
"You'll find it's not as easy as all that. But frankly, I'm not surprised you find the news so unmoving. When you get like this, really, where does your mind go?"
"Higher places, Watson, than many have ever traversed. And anyway, I was hoping you would accompany me to the mortuary today. I'm graphing the subtle divergence in the dimensions of these triangles. With luck, there'll be a method to it."
"Who's the latest stiff?"
"The second of the politicians to which I was just referring," said Holmes. He withdrew a measuring stick from his vest pocket and compulsively began to measure the items of the tea service. "As far as I've yet to determine, he was the most inaccessible of those killed by the so-called 'brotherhood'."
"And I suppose you believe this detail will narrow your list of suspects?"
"Considerably, though not enough. Murder is a nasty business; and when the motives are so chillingly absent, you can imagine where that leaves the detective."
Watson watched him for a few moments, smirking at the pedantic fastidiousness of the measuring process. But before long, he reached to take the measuring stick from his hand. Holmes relinquished it with the humble compliance of a naughty schoolboy, not unwilling to recognize his lamentable tendency to fidget and obsess. He rested his elbow beside his teacup and seated his chin on his fist (his foot tapped nervously below the table). The mantle clock continued to tick. It was only a matter of time before Pythagoras would execute the mass murder to which these twenty-two killings would serve as a mere prelude; and if all he could do was ponder endless questions, measuring triangles carved onto the foreheads of cadavers, there would be no one else to intervene.