Scott Pearson | The Shadows Under Mariana Base

John H. Watson’s life hasn’t turned out the way he intended; expelled unfairly from medical school under mysterious circumstances, he shifted his caring instincts into becoming a veterinary surgeon. Although he has a successful practice, he leads a lonely and unfulfilling life, haunted by past injustices and dark memories. But he is forced to face his troubling secrets when a strange man shows up on his doorstep in the middle of a cold London night and introduces himself as Sherlock Holmes.

Multiverse of Mystery is the third anthology from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, following in the footsteps of Turning the Tied—which includes my H. G. Wells mash-up “In the Time of the Martians”—and Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups. All three feature iconic characters that have passed into public domain, allowing any author to step up and write a story featuring Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, Sherlock Holmes, and so many more. While the first two anthologies featured a wide variety of characters, the latest focuses on Holmes and Watson, but with a twist: the authors were given free rein to do whatever they wanted with the characters, make them robots, or aliens, or dinosaurs, place them in Earth’s prehistory, or the far future, or on another planet. Swap their race, their gender, their species—the only rule (other than the word count limit) was to make sure they still have that Holmes and Watson vibe! I wanted to keep the Victorian setting which I love but, for my spin, injected Lovecraftian elements and a changed Watson. The excerpt below is from the opening scene.

A Study in Alchemy

“I apologize for the hour,” the stranger said, speaking loudly over the barking in the background, “but needs must. You are Doctor Watson?”
       “Mister Watson,” Watson said sharply. It was right there on the sign beside the door: MILE END INFIRMARY FOR HORSES, DOGS, &C, MR JOHN H WATSON, VETERINARY SURGEON. “Practitioners of veterinary medicine are not accorded that title.” It was a sore point and a reminder of his difficult past. “What do you want?” He purposefully left off sir. The man actually seemed to smirk, however fleetingly, at Watson’s anger, further incensing him. Watson pulled his dressing gown tighter against the chill, damp London air.
       “Again, I apologize for waking you, especially after you’ve already been up with a nervous Corgi. However—”
       “How could you possibly know that?” Watson interrupted, angrier still at the possibility that this man had somehow been watching him in his duties.
       That needling glimmer of amusement returned briefly to the man’s thin face and was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “Quite simple, actually. I discern the distinctive yipping of the breed among the canine chorus within; a Pembroke, I’d wager, due to the timbre of the bark suggesting the smaller breed. Also, Corgis are well-known for shedding, and your dressing gown is rather covered with white and fawn fur. From those points of fact, it’s elementary to deduce that you were already up at least once trying to quiet the little beast. That you were asleep already, and not just in your nightclothes before bed, I surmised simply by the—how to describe it?—riotous state of your hair.”
       “Well, I . . . erm.” His anger slightly abated by his astonishment at the man’s clever reasoning, Watson found himself uncertain what to say. . . .