Prompt: Alien Abduction, from Hades Lord of the Dead
A/N: I definitely took what was probably meant to be a crack prompt and attempted to ground it in reality.
My friend Sherlock Holmes was by 1895 so well known that he had near complete freedom to choose whether he wished to take on a client's case or not based purely on what he termed the "factors of interest." He naturally gravitated toward those cases which had unique features and would challenge his formidable skills, and so my notes from these later years are replete with crimes of the most grotesque nature.
However, Holmes's newfound fame also meant that many people came to seek his services for the most mundane of reasons, and we often found ourselves talking to as many as six potential clients each day without taking on a single one of their cases. It was at these times Holmes would rail against the lack of ambition among the criminal classes. One of these, however, had a very strange start that recommends it for publication despite its inauspicious end.
We had barely finished our breakfast when a young woman was shown up to our rooms by the page. "Oh, Mr. Holmes, you must help me!" she cried. "I have been so frightened!"
"Please, sit down, and tell us your story. I see that you are a typist and yet are not at your post this morning, and that you have come from your boardinghouse in a great hurry," my friend said.
The young woman looked at him in astonishment."That is exactly right. I am indeed a typist and I take rooms in a boardinghouse on St. Martin's Street," she said. "I retire precisely at nine o'clock each night, for I have an early start each morning. Yet, lately I have had my sleep disturbed greatly each night by a bright light that streams into my room. It is nearly blinding, Mr. Holmes! I thought at first it should stop, but after nearly two weeks I am nearly at my wits' end! Oh, Mr. Holmes, I am sure it is Martians coming to abduct us all and I have seen their space ships!"
At this pronouncement, I hastily turned my laugh into a cough, though Holmes's eyebrows had lifted seemingly of their own accord and he stared at our potential client.
"You do not believe me?" the young lady asked.
"Have you been away from home recently?" Holmes asked.
Our young client looked surprised at the question but said, "Why, yes, I had a week's holiday and I spent it with my mother in Newcastle."
"Precisely," Holmes said. "While you were away the lights in your street have been changed from gas to electric, which is considerably brighter. There is the answer to your problem."
The young woman stammered her thanks, though as soon as she had gone, Holmes sank onto the settee in a fit of despondency. "It was very promising to begin with, Watson, but that notion about Martians was utterly ridiculous."
I agreed, and we said no more about it until the next day, when a young man appeared at our door in a most agitated state.
"I cannot explain to anyone what has been happening, yet I must tell someone and then I thought of you, Mr. Holmes," the young man said. "They say you can solve anything."
"They, whoever they may be, are misinformed," Holmes said. "I have failed no fewer than four times, and left a case incomplete in at least ten, though I daresay my successes weigh more in the balance. Come, tell us your story."
"Well, you should know that I am usually a heavy sleeper," the young man said. "Only every night last week I awoke as tired as when I fell asleep. Well, after over a week of this I thought I should go mad! But then I recalled the reason for it. Each night, I feel as if I am being taken out of my bed and into another place. I cannot say where, only it is very bright, and I feel as if there are people looking at me. I could not tell you who these people are. I have tried and tried to remember, but the only thing I am sure of is that they are not - cannot possibly - be human."
Holmes, admirably, maintained a stoic expression throughout this explanation and merely asked, "Why do you say that?"
Our visitor sighed and ran a hand through his sand-colored hair. "They are far too tall and from my memories their skin is a sort of grey color. I know it sounds absurd, Mr. Holmes, but ever since I thought of it I cannot get the idea out of my head!"
"What idea is that?" Holmes asked.
The young man looked a little ashamed, but at last he said, "That each night, I have been taken from my rooms into a space ship, Mr. Holmes. That aliens have taken me, maybe all the way to Mars, experimented on me, I don't know why. Perhaps they are interested in humans."
Holmes sighed, as if the very idea was a trial of his patience. "I see you are a gas worker, for that distinctive clay upon your shoes is only found underneath the streets of London, and a nameplate bearing your gas company's name is just visible from your pocket. Do inform your supervisor there appears to be a leak in the area you are working in, for your experiences are nothing more than hallucinatory dreams brought on by exposure to gas."
The young man left in some shock, though certainly Holmes's explanation was the only sensible response. Holmes shook his head at the absurdity of it and spent the day buried among a cloud of smoke from his chemistry equipment, which, as he said, did not propose outlandish ideas at him in the guise of a case.
Not two days later, yet another potential client arrived, this time an older man who even I could deduce was some sort of banker. "Mr Holmes, I am so glad to find you at home," the man said. "I have been hearing a dreadful sort of noise outside the window of my office and I was at a loss as to what it was, until I became positive it can only be the sound of a space ship from Mars-"
At this, my friend stood up and showed the man out without even waiting to hear the rest. When he had left despondently, Holmes turned to me. "I ought to investigate the reason why so many seemingly sensible people suddenly believe that they are about to be kidnapped by beings from Mars."
"Well, Holmes, even you say that coincidences are not to be ignored," I said. "Do you not think there might be some truth in what they say?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, not you as well, Watson!" Holmes exclaimed. I quickly decided to forgo all discussion of life on other planets, lest Holmes think I was losing my sense of reality.
The next day, as I was finished with my rounds early and stopped off at a bookshop I frequented. I wandered among the shelves, finding little to occupy me, until bright red cover emblazoned with the word "Mars," caught my eye. Picking it up, I turned a few pages until I nearly gasped aloud. Paying for the book quickly, I all but raced back to Baker Street as quickly as I could. "Holmes!" I cried. "Holmes, I have solved it!"
Holmes met me at the top of the stairs, smiling. "Well, Watson, are you solving crimes without me now?"
"No,"I said, panting. "No, Holmes, of course not. But I was in a bookshop-"
"A common occurrence, for you," Holmes said.
"Yes, but then I saw this," I said, showing him the book. "Do you see, Holmes? This is why so many people are convinced that they have been abducted by Martians?"
Holmes took the book and read the first few pages, his forehead furrowed in thought. "This fellow says that he has found evidence of life on Mars," he said.
"Yes," I said. "He has studied the surface of the planet closely, and he is convinced that the channels he sees are, in fact, canals, built by an advanced civilization." I studied the intricate drawings he had included. "It must be a very advanced civilization indeed," I said.
"Why is that, Watson?" Holmes asked, settling into the armchair with a look of enjoyment, the same he always wore when he asked me to deduce something he already knew the answer to.
"Why, because they are visible from Earth," I said. "Can you imagine the engineering ability required to build something so large?"
"So you believe our clients when they say they have been abducted by Martians?" Holmes asked.
"Well, no," I said.
"So you are not completely gone," Holmes said. "Why not?"
"Because such an advanced race would surely have no need to visit us to study us," I said. "If they can dig such deep canals, then sure they have telescopes that would be able to view anything on Earth they would like."
"Admirably deduced, Watson," Holmes said. "Incidentally, I don't think much of this fellow Percival Lowell. He seems to me a very poor investigator. Surely he must know that his theory is not the only explanation for these markings on the planet's surface, and that it hardly explains all the facts."
I thought this pronouncement from a man who was famously unaware of the Sun's central position in the Solar System to be hypocritical indeed, but before I could say so, Holmes began to laugh.
"You think me hypocritical, Watson, for you and I have already discussed the limits of my astronomical knowledge."
"You have no limits in that subject, Holmes, for you told me yourself you know nothing of astronomy," I said.
"Precisely," said he. "Yet I know that the existence of some lines on a drawing done of a planet some millions of miles away, seen through a telescope, is poor proof of an advanced civilization. Why, if there were indeed Martians, Watson, would we not have seen other evidence of them before this? Would they not have attempted contact, if they are so much more advanced than we? No, the whole idea is preposterous."
I fell silent, for he was indeed correct. "Do you believe there is life elsewhere in the universe, Holmes?"
"I am not so constrained by my own limits to discount the possibility," Holmes said. "There are, after all, 'more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy,' are there not, Watson? Yet such things hold no relevance to me, nor do they have any effect on my work here. In the end, I think it hardly matters at all to us whether there is or there is not any other life in the universe."
"No, but it is an interesting question to ponder," I said.
"One planet is more than enough for me, Watson," Holmes said, and with that, we gave up on the subject.
However, on my next visit to that bookshop, I happened to notice a novel by a new author, that seemed to be about a most interesting subject. As I was always interested in new literary works, I took the book home and was engrossed in its tale of Morlocks and Eloi when Holmes at last returned. On seeing what I was reading, he gave an exaggerated sigh. "Oh, Watson, do not tell me you believe in traveling through time as well as Martians?"
A/N: The "Mars canal craze" was a real thing of the late 19th century, begun by the Italian scientist Giovanni Schiaparrelli in 1877, when a combination of new, more powerful telescopes and Mars coming into orbit closer to Earth led him to observe what he called "canali" (channels) on the planet's surface. Percival Lowell, who later became famous as the astronomer who laid the mathematical basis for the eventual discovery of Pluto, was convinced (like many other people) that these channels were actually canals built by an advanced species of Martians. He published three books about why he believed Martians were behind the channels, the first of which was simply called Mars and was published in 1895. Many people became convinced that Martians were real and this craze led directly to H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, and Orson Welles's famous "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. I have no idea if Lowell's book would have been available in Britain at this time, as he was American, but everything else is as accurate as I could get it.
The book Watson is reading at the end is, of course, H.G. Wells's first novel, The Time Machine, which was also published in 1895 (and is why I didn't pick War of the Worlds; that one wasn't published until 1898).