Holmes: Creation-Insanity

You walk into a room. This room has a cushioned armchair, an acoustic guitar, and a wind up gramophone next to a line of book cases filled with a plethora of books of varying subjects, ranging from Aviation to books on the practice of Zucchini growing. You notice that the door you walked in from has a lock on it. You look closer, and you find this lock to be unlocked. Muddy footprints are tracked across the floor, and the guitar has a crack in it's fret board, as well as several broken strings. Surveying the room again you notice that several books are on the floor and on the top of the bookcase nearest to the gramophone there is a red liquid dripping lazily onto the spine of a wrecked book entitled Arboreal animals of the Amazon Rainforest, which was sticking out slightly from the bookcase. You look on top of the bookcase with the aid of a footrest which had been placed in front of the armchair to find a little finger, slightly emaciated, and hacked off using a knife which you find behind the gramophone, bloodied. You pick this up and put it into a plastic, zip lock bag, and place that by the door.

The room also has a light on a stand, the cord of the light cut off near the base, the rest still plugged into the wall. You look around the rest of the room and see that the footprints lead up to the chair, and then stop. The room has alternating light and dark green wallpaper and a cream roof. The floor is made of wooden panels, scuffed in some places with black, presumably from leather shoes. You decide that you've looked around the room enough, and you leave. You find the nearest phone, pick up the part you hold, and dial 443-973-220 and wait for it to pickup. A person answers and says to you, "Hello, Sherlock Holmes speaking."

***

Holmes put the phone back on the receiver and picked up his coat. "Watson!" He yelled to the other side of the room.

"Yes?" Watson called back, his head under his desk. He was looking around on the floor as if he had dropped something.

"Have you ordered me my fruit flies yet?" Holmes asked.

"For the fourth and final time, your fruit flies arrived last week. You took the lid off and they all flew away." Watson replied, his head still under the desk.

"Ah. I was wondering what those things were on my apples." Holmes muttered, stroking his goatee. "Oh right, forgot to mention; there's been another murder."

There was a thump as Watson hit his head on the bottom of his desk. He emerged with his hand on his head, and a scowl on his face. "Rats." He said, massaging his hurting forehead.

"No, a murder. It's under the same circumstances as the last one, little finger cut off and no sign of the victim otherwise, knife has been left at the scene." Holmes said, his hand still stroking his goatee.

"Should we go and see the crime scene then?" Watson said, his hand still nursing his pained forehead.

"Quite right we should." Holmes said, as he leaped off of his chair and walked out the door. Watson picked up his own bag, then picked up Holmes's bag, and then raced after him.

The murder was the fourth this month, all in the same circumstances, only all at different locations. Each time the little finger from the victims left hand had been cut off and left behind, the knife which had cut it also left behind, the murderers prints always rubbed off. Each attack had happened at different points across the city, and there was no motive for why each attack had taken place.

Holmes and Watson arrived at the site of the latest attack, a vast mansion which took up the majority of the landscape. It belonged to one Dr Pendragon, a renowned physician whose works has led to large jumps in the medical field. This attack could have had a motive to it; each of the other attacks had been mere civilians, people who went to work and came home, people who you wouldn't cast a second glance at when they walked past you in the street.

Holmes and Watson walked through the main hallway of the mansion to the reading room where the murder had taken place, Holmes's eyes darting around and taking in all the minor details along the hallway.

The reading room, the room of the murder, had only one door in it, no windows, and a light on the roof which had been turned on, casting a baleful light underneath it. The armchair faced the door, and the standing light was behind the chair, allowing for light to be cast directly onto the book the seated person was reading without blinding them in the process.

Holmes took a look around the room, then he walked around it, inspecting the books on the floor around the room.

He then went to the bookcase next to the gramophone and saw the hacked off finger, and then to the gramophone itself, where he took a look at the record on top, and then to the muddy tracks on the floor.

"I've seen everything I need." he said, exiting the room.

"Holmes!" Watson cried, and then he followed after at a slight run.

"Watson, did you see what I saw?" Holmes asked when Watson had caught up to him.

"I probably did, but not in the way you did." Watson replied, handing Holmes his bag. Holmes fished his hand into his bag and came out with a notepad, onto which he scrawled some notes. He put his notepad back into the bag and then kept walking.

"Holmes? You haven't told me what you saw." Watson said.

"Oh right." He replied, and continued walking. Watson sighed and followed after him.

They arrived back at the office and Holmes sat back at his desk. Watson did the same and pulled out a map of the city.

About 40 minutes later, Holmes stepped back and his chair slid along the ground, crashing into the wall with a loud bang.

"I've solved it!" He exclaimed, his face rather impassive in his claim. He grabbed his coat and ran out of his office. Watson inspected what was on Holmes's desk. A badly drawn doodle of a tabby cat.

Watson sighed and followed Holmes out.

They caught a coach to the other side of town, to a quaint house on the waterfront.

Holmes kicked the door in and ran down a staircase to a basement. Watson followed after him and he came down the stairs to find Holmes  holding down another man, his arms pinned behind his back. A small boy stood in the corner of the room, hunched in fear.

"Holmes, who is this man?" Watson asked, fixing a set of heavy metal manacles onto him.

"This man is Dr Aubridge." Holmes said.

"What's he got to do with anything?"

"He's the one that killed the 4 people."

"How do you know this?!"

"Well, I first suspected at the second house we went to, when I found books on monkeys scattered around the floor. The third house we went to, there was again books on monkeys, and at the last house, more books on monkeys."

"Holmes, monkeys are a very closed subject. Maybe it's just coincidence!"

"Ah, but it's not. At each house we went to, I found pens near the books, and ink, but no sign of the paper that had been written on. Each time a finger had been cut off, it was always cut off at the last joint, between the last join. Only a doctor could know where to cut to prevent hitting a bone. And the papers, well, they're all here." Holmes pointed to a stack of papers on a table.

"But how do you know it was him?"

"See, Dr Aubridge and Dr Pendragon were friends. When we went to Dr Pendragon's house, his butler didn't know what happened. Yet there was no sign of a struggle, nor was there any blood. There was no way the butler could have not heard anything. So I looked, and saw the the lock on the window closest to the reading room was broken. The muddy tracks came from the flowerbed under the window, and the reason that Dr Pantus didn't put up a struggle was because he and Dr Aubridge were friends. The armchair faced the door, and the light wasn't turned on., which means that Pantus turned off his light to address his friend, and he was showing him what was on the papers, which is why Pendragon didn't react when Aubridge cut the cord to the lamp. Aubridge killed Pendragon by electrocution, delivered by the lamp cord to his neck, which is why there was no blood on the ground."

"And the motive?"

"Aubridge is a Christian. He believes that God made humans based on the bible, and Pendragon believes that we're descended from monkeys. Aubridge thought Pendragon was insane, so he killed him and took his works. The other three killings were because they were helping Pendragon with his work."

Watson was stunned. He didn't work out half of that himself.

"You, in the corner, what's your name?" Holmes asked.

"D-D-D-Darwin Sir. Charles D-D-Darwin." Darwin replied.

"Go and dispose of those papers."

"Okay Sir."

Holmes and Watson turned Aubridge into the police. The police locked him up in the maximum security cell under the police station. He was later sentenced to death.

Ten years later, a man named Charles Darwin released a groundbreaking paper entitled On the Origin of Species.