Tyro Vogel

THE GIRL WITH THE SCARAB NECKLACE

Who is Mr. Sherlock Holmes?

In the year 1903 I was honorably discharged from the army, and Uncle Sam sent me back home to rub shoulders with all the other out-of-work boys roaming the streets. I got lucky: a buddy of mine got me a job at the port. Night shifts. Mine was a sad lot: night after night of back-breaking work, only to give half of my $1.50 a week pay for a room uglier than the rats I’d shared it with. The rest of the money I’d wisely spent on whiskey.

One particularly cold November morning I was keeping myself warm with a glass of Jack Daniels when I’d decided my job could burn in hell. I put the glass down and reached out across the self-made table for yesterday’s copy of the Chicago Daily News. It made sense to start with the job ads section. The first ad to catch my eye was printed in the corner of the page. It read,

Needed: Personal Assistant

Must have basic military training, good manners, know how to read and write. Interviews held between 14:00 and 16:00 on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 60620 Dresden Drive 7. Floor 2, Apartment 9. Only apply if your last name is “Smith”. No exceptions.

That last bit was a bit weird, but I’ve had worse reasons for concern in my twenty years of age. My spirits lifted, I celebrated with another swing from the glass. Today was a Wednesday; I wound up my alarm clock to wake me at noon, slid down from the chair, and passed out on the mattress.

* * *

60620 Dresden Drive turned out to be less of a drive and more of a grey urban well. House block seven looked even greyer than its destitute neighbors. I let myself in through the scrawny-looking front door and carefully counted each of the forty two steps as I’d made my way up to the second floor, just in case they’d ask. Feeling deservedly proud of myself, I knocked on door number nine.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice asked.

“My name’s Adam Smith, I’m here about the PA job?”

Shuffling, and then the door opened as far as the chain lock allowed. A redhead woman, a head shorter than me, was looking at me with eyes of emerald green. She was wearing man’s pants and a vest over a crisp white shirt that screamed business first, looks later. A silver scarab amulet hung from a string tied around her neck.

She slid the chain off. The entrance opened to a spacious office. A giant oak desk dominated the room like a locomotive in a horse stable; light shone into the room from two windows on each side of the desk. My host sat down behind it and invited me to sit in the chair opposite. I put my hat on the coat hanger and accepted the invitation.

“Thank you for making the time to come, Mr. Smith,” she said. “My name is Jane Wesson. Would you allow me to ask you a few questions to see if this job is for you? If you have any questions of your own, I’ll be happy to hear them afterwards.”

“Sure thing.”

“Thank you. These are not trick questions. Please answer as honestly as you can. My first question is, have you ever been incarcerated?”

“No ma’am.”

“What rank were you when you left active duty?”

“Specialist, ma’am.”

“Have you ever done any acting?”

“Eh, no ma’am, I can’t say I have.”

“Please stop calling me ma’am, Mr. Smith. One last question, if I may. Where are you currently employed?”

“Mordino’s Shipping Company, ma’am.”

“Mordino’s Shipping? Which port?”

“The South-Eastern one, ma’am. Working night shifts at the moment.”

“You really don’t have to call me ma’am, Jane would be fine. Failing that, Ms. Smith would do as well. You’re hired.”

“Excuse me?”

“You are hired, Mr. Smith. Congratulations. You start tomorrow.”

“And what is it that I’m hired for, exactly?”

“Why, my Personal Assistant, of course.”

“Is this the time I can ask questions?”

“Please go ahead.”

I decided to get the elephant out of the room. “What’s the pay?”

“Five dollars a week plus accommodation.” She nodded towards the Western wall. Two doors closed off the adjoining rooms. “I’ve got space to spare. Just don’t get any ideas. Take it or leave it.”

Five dollars a week! I’ll be rich!

“And what… what exactly is it that I have to do?”

You’ll have to help out, Mr. Smith.”

“Help out with what, Ms. Wesson?”

She opened a drawer and pulled out a small wooden plaque. “You can start with nailing this to the door. The tools are in your room. That’d be the door to the left, by the way.”

I took the plaque and turned it over. The carved letters read, Smith & Wesson: A Detective Agency, as if it explained everything there was to know. Think of the money, I thought, got up, and headed for the room under my new boss’s watchful eye. A hammer and four nails lay by the door. The room itself was at least as big as the rat-infested cellar I’d called home until now, and it apparently came at the very affordable price of free.

Having learnt how to hammer a nail in the army the hard way (my rough estimate was that I’d made half the bunk beds for the entire U.S. Infantry), the job was done in a couple of minutes. I returned to the chair.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why from all the Mr. Smiths who came through my door I’d decided to hire you. A military man with your last name is not hard to find. However, it is only by pure luck that you happen to be the Mr. Smith employed at the Chicago South-Eastern port. What do you know of the Victoria?”

Nobody paid a man five dollars a month without expecting to make a profit. What kind of trouble was I getting myself into?

“That’s a ship,” I said. “They docked at South Eastern the night before yesterday, but the rumor’s that there’s some sort of a quarantine going on. Nobody got off, and the police closed off the entire dock. A plague or somesuch, they say, real nasty business.”

“I want you to get me on that ship. I need to be on it yesterday. Time is of the essence.”

“What? Why?”

She leaned back in her chair and put her metal-tipped cowboy boots on the desk. I raised an eyebrow but had the good sense to remain silent. “There’s someone very special onboard. Someone I have to see.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, straight out of England. He’s here to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, to be awarded to him in secret by President Roosevelt himself. He and his assistant are on that ship.”

Excuse me if I was too busy unloading crates to follow British celebrities, I thought. I’d never seen the name in the Chicago Daily, either, so this Mr. Holmes couldn’t have been too famous. Still, the Congressional Gold Medal was the highest honor United States could bestow on a civilian… and it was awarded by the Congress, not the President. To have the President award it to an Englishman was strange, to say the least.

“Who is Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” I asked.

She gave me a disapproving look.

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes is possibly the greatest detective who ever lived, Mr. Smith. His assistant, Dr. John H. Watson, wrote a number of accounts about the man’s cases. They’re all a bit over-dramatized, of course, but true nonetheless. He is a genius. Though perhaps it’s to be expected that he’s famous in certain circles only… I don’t know which of his many accomplishments granted him this award from our country’s powers that be, but I’m quite positive that they weren’t trivial.”

I gave my new employer a critical look, thinking whether Ms. Wesson really knew things us everyday men didn’t, or if she was just pulling my leg. She returned my stare without flinching and I smiled a little bit inside. Somehow I’d felt a connection, as if she’d seen the things I’d seen, felt the things I’d felt… it made me wonder if she might have been an orphan too.

“I’m still at a loss about what it is that you want with this nontrivial gentleman, Ms. Wesson.”

“Why, business, of course! Have you read the sign you nailed to the door? I run a detective agency. Or, well, trying to, at least. Nobody’d ever trust a woman to do their detecting for them, so that’s where you come in, Mr. Smith – you will act as the public face of our agency, so to speak. But having a proper front isn’t enough to bring in clients, I’m afraid; nobody’d ever trust a detective they haven’t heard of before, either.” She fiddled with her necklace. “Think of it! One of the most famous men in the business is here, in our city, and immediately his ship’s under quarantine! Coincidence? I think not. We go there, we find out what’s going on, and we get involved. And after we get involved, we try our damnedest to let the world know that the Smith & Wesson Detective Agency is worth more than the soles of my boots!”

She put her feet back on the floor and leaned towards me with an inquisitive look.Go there, find out what’s going on, get involved didn’t sound like the most brilliant business plan ever, but what did I know.

“All right,” I said. “All right. I might be able to get us onboard. But if you’re serious about this, I’d appreciate a small advance. Just in case we get arrested or whatnot, I’m sure you understand.”

Jane Wesson understood. She counted out five crisp one-dollar bills on the desk. At the time, I could hardly believe my fortune. In retrospect, had I known what was to happen in the days (nights? weeks? years?) that followed, I would’ve dashed for the door and never looked back.

Just thinking about it hurts my brain even today, but for the sake of my readers’ good fortunes, I will do my best to recount everything as it occurred in the most chronological order possible.

For now, know this, Dear Reader: unlike money, time is a relative thing.

* * *

I’d started my shift at midnight like always. Gas lamps illuminated the Chicago South-Eastern port, and shadows danced on the wooden warehouses as my colleagues hauled crates of grain through the docks. I’d waited until the foreman looked the other way and slipped into the darkness.

My plan was so stupid it was doomed to work. I must have spent at least ten minutes waiting until I’d spotted the man I needed.

“Psst,” I said, “Bratoslaw, got a minute, man?”

“Tak?” he asked me. “Vay are you hiding ozer there, Adam?”

I cringed at his Polglish, the unofficial language of the docks. Couldn’t have been avoided, with more than eighty percent of our jobs taken by the Poles, I supposed. “I need a favor, man.”

“Vat kind of favor? Iz it an illegal favor?”

I took out a dollar bill. “Not at all. Fifteen minutes of your time. Need you help me haul a crate.”

“Haul a crate vor a week’z pay? Iz it a very big crate?”

“Come with me, man.”

We’d walked to where I’d cut a hole through the chainlink fence after my interview with Ms. Wesson, and helped the feminist detective extraordinaire onto the through the opening. Hell, who I was to judge? Five dollars was five dollars.

“Vho iz zis?” Bratoslaw asked.

“She goes in the crate.”

“Not a very big crate, zen.”

My colleague checked his key ring, nodded, and lead us to a warehouse at the edge of the docks, where, with some snickering on Bratoslaw’s part, we helped Ms. Wesson into a crate marked FRAGILE. DO NOT OPEN.

He even threw in a couple of pillows. “Now vat?” he asked.

“Now we get it onto Victoria.”

“Are you joking, Adam? Victoria iz clozed off. Cop on watch, twenty four seven.”

“How many cops?”

“Tell me you are not zeriouz.”

“How many?”

“One.”

“Not a problem.”

“Vot are you going to do?”

“I’ve got another dollar.”

* * *

When I’d told the cop I had a special delivery for Mr. Sherlock Holmes, he refused the bribe and helped me and Bratoslaw get the crate up the swing-bridge and onto the deck. Before I could voice my surprise, Bratolaw nodded and followed the fine policeman off the ship, probably worried I’d ask for my money back.

The deck was empty. No lights. The policeman was out of sight, and I was left alone, the SS Victoria’s two pipes towering above me. Around: only the ship’s masts of folded sails, reaching for the starless sky. My hair stood up on the back of my neck; the ship felt wrong. I blinked, snapping back to the world of the physical and wondered if Ms. Wesson would let me write off the dollar I gave to the Pole as expenses. I knocked thrice on the crate to signal Jane to get out.

The moment she did, a metal door squeaked on its hinges in front of us, and a tall gentleman with a hawkish nose and a lit pipe in his hand stepped out on the deck. His piercing eyes almost shined from under his deerstalker cap, making me think he might have enjoyed pleasures other than piple toboacco. He gave me a brief glance that made me feel like I’d been analized and catologued in less than a second, before he switched his attention to Jane.

A shorter man followed him, a snub-nosed revolver in hand. I froze. “Marvelous, my dear Watson,” the first man said. “Simply marvelous. You can put your gun away now.”

His companion hesitated for a second, then holstered the weapon into his suit.

“Mr. Adam Smith, I presume?” the taller man asked. How did he know my name? “And Ms. Wesson?”

“That’s us,” I said. “And you are?”

“My name is Sherlock Holmes, and this is my good friend and companion, Dr. John Watson. Do you know why you’re here?”

“Em… excuse me for asking, but do we know each other?”

“Not in the least, Mr. Smith. The only few things I know about you is what any trained mind can deduce. Judging by your posture, you’re a military man; not hard to tell, considering Watson here is very much the same.”

Watson crossed his arms, listening to his companion’s monologue with a disapproving frown.

“More over,” Holmes continued, “judging by your youthful looks, you haven’t served your full term… honorably discharged, most likely due to an injury, if your unnaturally rigid posture is any indication. I’d say you suffered from an injury to the –”

“That’s enough! How do you know our names?”

“Ah.” The British detective puffed on his pipe, and said, as if to himself. “More importantly, why do I know your names?”

“Good question!”

“It only made sense. If there is a Mister Adam Smith, then there must have been a Jane Wesson, of the Smith & Wesson Detective Agency… and if we eliminate the impossible and allow only the improbable to remain… then the improbable must be the truth. Watson, would you mind?”

Ms. Wesson pulled out a Browning Number One pistol from her pocket and Dr. Watson trained his revovler on her. She wasn’t pointing the weapon at anyone, but she looked like she was about to. “What the hell is going on?” she said. “Why is Victoria under quarantine?”

“That’s an expensive handgun,” Holmes said. “Browning M.1900 semi-automatic; seven rounds. Undoubdetdly one of Mr. Browning’s crowning achievements in weapons engineering.”

“You don’t say,” Jane replied.

“But I do! There is no need for violence, Ms. Wesson. Show them, Watson,” he said. Dr. Watson checked his pocket watch, his revolver still pointed at Jane, muttered something under his breath, then took a folded parchment from his jacket, and handed it to my employer. She’d skimmed through the document.

“For the recognition of his remarkable services to the American People, the details of which must forever remain a matter of private affairs between two allied states, I, Theodore Roosevelt, with the power delegated to me by the Congress of the United States of America, bestow the Congressional Gold Medal to Mister Sherlock Holmes…” she read. “Good old Teddy Roosevelt, signed and everything. Congratulations, Mr. Holmes. But how does this explain anything? And would you mind asking Dr. Watson to put his gun away?”

“Read the Post Scriptum,” Watson said. “And you first.”

Jane put her small Browning back in her pocket, and Sherlock Holmes’ companion stuck his revovler into a holster under his suit in response. The Confedarcy has capitulated, I thought with a sense of relief.

“P.S. When you will arrive to Chicago aboard the SS Victoria,” Jane continued, “remain on the ship until you meet Adam Smith & Jane Wesson, of the Smith & Wesson Detective Agency. This is our only chance to save the crew and the passengers. Also, there will be a box.

– The Doctor.”

“Save the crew?” I asked, adding to the confusion. “What happened to the people onboard?”

“Gone,” Holmes said. “When we arrived to port, the ship was empty, and I know for a fact that nobody got off. All we have is this letter I’d received over a month ago. Watson helped the local police close the ship off quietly to avoid panic while we waited for you to show up.”

“How’d you know we’d show up?” Jane asked.

Sherlock Holmes gave her a strange look. “Deduction, Ms. Wesson, deduction.”

“Deduction? What about the people on Victoria? Their families? Loved ones? What did you deduce to tell them while you were waiting for us?”

“That’s what’s so fascinating,” Holmes said. “We expected to have every emergency service in Chicago to be here in hours. Nobody showed up. Were I a superstitious man, I’d say Victoria turned to a ghost ship… don’t, don’t mention I said that in one of your journals, Watson, my dear fellow, please.”

“A ghost ship?” asked Jane. “And what about the part about a box?”

“I presume you climbed out of it,” Holmes said, nodding at the crate.

I felt like I was being made the butt of some elaborate inside joke. I was not amused. “Who is this Doctor, anyway?” I asked.

Dr. John Watson shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, not me.

“Yeah,” Jane Wesson said. “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor… Doctor Who?”

A high-pitched, mind-numbing screech erupted around us in a cacophony of sound, like a hundred metallic machines malfunctioning at once, with each mechanic part deciding to voice its own noise of protest, and night turned to day as if caught in the phosphorus flash of a photo camera.

When I could see again, a blue box, roughly two men’s width and one man’s height in size, stood a few feet away from our shocked group of four. A lamp decorated the angular roof. Above the door, a sign, white on black, read, “POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX.”

Sherlock Holmes lowered his pipe. Doctor Watson managed to unholster his revolver while my boss was distracted, and now held it in a trembling hand. It hadn’t seemed like Ms. Wesson even noticed his maneuver, as she stared at the box that materialized out thin air. Great, I thought, this just keeps getting better and better.

The door to the blue box opened.

Meet The Doctor

It wasn’t the crazy sound effects, or the sudden appearance of the blue box, or even the fact that I’d almost been blinded that startled me most… it was the realization that the man who’d stepped out of the box was none other than Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He looked a decade younger, but there could be no mistake: it was him. He wore a blue suit, a hat, and held a walking stick by a silver handle in one hand and a pipe in other. “Fascinating!” he proclaimed, looking across the deck to where we stood.

Dr. Watson lowered his weapon as our Sherlock Holmes took a few steps towards his younger looking self. “Fascinating,” he said. The two men circled each other, pipes in hands. “You’re not an impostor,” he continued. “The chemical burns on your fingers, your face, even the way you walk… you are me. But what is this suit? I never wore anything more outrageous in my life!”

“Then it’s about time you got some sense of style, my esteemed… colleague,” the younger Holmes said. “Hello there, John, my dear fellow. Pray do tell, how is Mrs. Watson doing?”

The doctor shifted uncomfortably. “My wife’s been dead for years, sir.”

The younger man stopped his pacing. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that.”

“Logic dictates that if you are me,” said the Holmes we’d here to find, “or at least a version of me, and we are both on this ship because somebody wants us here, then our meeting has some very specific end in mind. Not only does somebody need the world’s greatest detective…”

“He needs two. The gentleman who got me into this box calls himself the Doctor.”

“Is he a doctor? It must have been very uncomfortable.”

“Hard to say; he’s a doctor like you are a chemist. And don’t worry – the box is bigger on the inside.”

Our Holmes raised an eyebrow.

“Three,” I said. They both turned to me. “They need three detectives, I mean. Three detectives, and my assistant Ms. Wesson. All here by invitation, so it seems.”

“Interesting,” the younger Holmes said. “Why would you lie about the young lady being your assistant?”

“He’s the front and the muscle,” the other replied.

“That he is. Fresh out of the army, too. Must’ve been wounded, right in the… hey, that’s not fair, you’ve had more time with him.” He put his walking stick over his shoulder.

Watson holstered his revolver. “Enough!” he said. “You, man out of the box, do you know what happened to Victoria’s crew?”

“Ah, Watson, straight to the point as always, my friend. From your words I can only deduce Victoria is the name of this fine British steamship, and that its crew is missing under mysterious circumstances. But alas, I do not. Not entirely, at any rate.”

“So why are you here?”

“I know somebody who might.”

“Whoa, gentlemen,” Jane Wesson said. “Hold your horses. First things first. Mr. Holmes, why are there two of you?”

“Time travel,” both said at the same time.

“Time travel?”

“Yes,” the older Holmes said. “He is me, but from a different time. The very fact of him being here and talking to me must have changed his future – my past – and the world around me. In his world, for example, Watson is obviously not widowed and… ah, forgive me, Watson.”

“It’s all right.”

“You are correct, my esteemed colleague,” our time-travelling guest said. “Imagine the crimes one could commit with such a machine!”

The door to the blue box swung open on its own accord. The younger Holmes turned towards the box.

“He would never be caught!” the older one said.

“Indeed he would not,” his colleague replied. “Everyone, get in there! We have a world to save!”

“What’s wrong with the world?” I asked.

“It’s disappearing!” he said, and dived back into the box.

The older Holmes went after him without a moment’s hesitation and we all had little choice but to follow.

Sherlock Holmes had told us the truth: the box was bigger on the inside. I stepped through the door into a circular, spacious room unlike any I’d ever seen before. Exposed wiring and tubes the purpose of which escaped me ran along the metal walls, walls that radiated a warm, inexplicable orange light. A platform made of transparent, glass-like material occupied the center of the room, with four staircases running from it in every direction. In the middle of the platform stood some sort of a circular control panel looking like a cross between a church organ and the inner workings of a steam engine. Tubes ran from the control panel into the ceiling.

“Now what?” I asked when I’d recovered from the shock of seeing the impossible. “Impossible is nothing,” my drill seargant used to say, “deal with it.”

“TARDIS,” the young Holmes said, “Please welcome our new guests.”

A semi-transparent image of a man appeared on the control platform. He was wearing a modern suit over an expensive-looking vest, and, remarkably a bowtie (a misguided fashion statement, I was sure).

“Welcome, welcome to the TARDIS,” he said, “a TT Type 40, Mark 1 TARDIS to be precise, obsolete, retired, but, boy, can the girl fly! Excuse the police box appearance, I’ve had some issues with the chameleon module, but never mind that! I am The Doctor!” He raised his arms, smiling, as if he’d just told us the greatest secret in the universe. “Or, to be more precise, I am the holographic representation of myself fed into the TARDIS, which is now communicating with you using a voice module I’d infused with my personality! But all these are details, details! Mr. Holmes,” he said, “and Mr. Holmes! Truly a pleasure. Double the pleasure!”

Both Sherlocks nodded, the older one looking around with insatiable interest. “Unbelievable,” he said, “but… not impossible. Tell me, TARDIS, how did The Doctor acquire you in his posession?”

“I… well… He stole me. Or maybe I stole him? I don’t think it matters right now. What matters is that you’re all here!” The Doctor’s representation tilted his head and jabbed his finger into my chest. The transparent finger dissapeared inside me. I hadn’t felt a thing. “Mister Smith, I presume… if you would only know what important role the universe has in store for you! And Ms. Wesson!” He gave my boss’s hand an intangible kiss. “You’re the reason we’re all here, of course.”

She recoiled from him. “What do you mean?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Watson said, “or TARDIS, or whatever you are, what do you mean? Where is Victoria’s crew? And the letter… how did you write a Post Scriptum in a confidential letter from the President of the United States?”

“Ah, Watson,” the Doctor said, raising an index finger on each hand, “it’s elementary! I’ve got a TARDIS! Or I am the TARDIS! Hmm… this sure is confusing. The crew and the passengers on this ship disappeared, true enough, but they hadn’t reappeared somewhere else, they had simply ceased to exist. These people were erased from the fabric of reality; everyone who knew them forgot they’d ever existed.” He bowed his head as if in shame. “First it was the small things… a key would disappear from somebody’s keychain, or a book would vanish without explanation, things of that nature. Before I knew it, entire streets started to disappear! I had to put an end to this!”

“What does any of this have to do with us being here?” I asked, somewhat annoyed everybody was taking this crap for granted.

“Everything, Mr. Smith, everything! But what you really should be asking isn’t what, it’s why!”

“Why what?”

“The why is the world disappearing why! And there is only one explanation which makes sense: something had happened, something that shouldn’t have happened, but did! An event that altered the very composition of the space time continuum, damaged it, and forced reality to try to repair itself by erasing the parts it was no longer sure about. In other words, something’s made the world a bit wibbly-wobbly… and we need to stabilize it.”

“Stabilize it how? How do we save it? And why us?” Ms. Wesson asked.

The semi-transparent man stopped gesticulating.

“Ms. Wesson,” he said, “this wasn’t always your name, was it? You thought it was, but it wasn’t – you’d only learnt your true name a year ago, once you’d stepped into the inheritance left by a relative you thought long dead… you were born Jane Moriarty, weren’t you?”

Both Sherlocks stared at the young woman intensely.

“Yes,” the Doctor said, “Jane Moriarty, the daughter of Professor James Moriarty, the very same master criminal who had perished at the hands of Mister Sherlock Holmes.”

“Moriarty didn’t have children!” the older Holmes said.

“Not in your world,” said the Doctor. “But your world is different.”

“I see now. I see. I should have died at Reichenbach Falls. By all accounts, when me and Moriarty fell into the abyss, there shouldn’t have been anything for me to grab on to… pure chance saved me from certain death then. And now you are saying that the world is collapsing because I’d survived the fight with my deadliest enemy?”

“Something like that.”

“The luck of an Englishman…” Holmes said. “So what do we do?”

My boss, Ms Jane Wesson (Moriarty?) pointed her pistol at the older Holmes’ head. “We fix the problem,” she said.

I saw Watson go for his gun, but he was an old man, slow. I tackled him like a pro football player and we both went smashing into the metal wall.

“No, no, no!” The Doctor / TARDIS shouted. “This is not a good idea!”

I wrestled for Watson’s gun. Jane’s revolver went off nearby, deafening me. I winced, and Watson elbowed me in the chin, before kicking me in the chest with surprising strength. I hit the control platform with my back just in time to see him take aim. “Hands up!”

But before I could raise my hands in surrender, the floor went from under me. The room shook, sparks exploded from the walls, and smoke seeped through vents I didn’t know were there. We were thrown around the time machine like rag dolls as the now-familiar high-pitched, mind-numbing screech assaulted our ears.

White light filled the room; I grabbed onto the edge of the platform, shut my eyes, and held on for dear life.

* * *

When I came to, my back hurt from where I’d hit the platform and I could hardly see anything through the smoke, but at least nobody was shooting. Judging by how the last hour of the evening went, I suspected it meant things were about to go from bad to worse.

“Where are we?” I asked nobody in particular.

“Planet: Earth. Year: five hundred and five before Christ,” said The Doctor’s voice from the smoke.

I crawled in the direction of where I’d last seen Jane until my hands found her limp form on the floor. She coughed when I touched her throat to check for a pulse. “You all right, boss?”

She didn’t reply, so I helped her to her feet and staggered towards where I’d remembered the door to be, the smoke tearing at my eyes. She tried to protest but there wasn’t much fight left in her. “We have to get out of here,” I said. “Whatever’s going on, we’ll figure it out, but we’ve got to get out of here.”

The door was where I thought it’d be. I pushed it open and the smoke gave way to air. Not fresh air, but air nevertheless. Instead of the steamship’s deck, we stood in a dark cobblestone alley that smelled faintly of sweat, dung, and wet hay.

Crowd chatter and the sounds of a busy street market echoed in the alley. I shut the TARDIS door behind me (no need to give our pursuers a head start) and, with Jane leaning on my shoulder, headed towards the noise.

The alley lead us to a marketplace. People in togas and pushed their wares over wooden tables, everything from apples to textiles to fine-crafted swords, the haggling and bartering on the busy street making it hard to hear my own thoughts. We moved through the crowd as people gave us strange looks, some curious, some shocked or even disgusted. The heavy leather coat I wore over my dock worker’s overalls and Jane’s practical pants and jacket made us stand out too much for comfort. Sweat trickled down my brows.

“At least it’s summer,” Jane said, removing her jacket and tying the sleeves over her waist. She no longer needed my support to walk, although she looked as shocked as I’d felt.

“We need to get off the street.” But where could we go? We didn’t speak the language, we had no local money, and I still had no idea what was going on… but, like my drill had once said, “Solve one problem at a time or die trying, maggots.”

It was blind luck that made us stumble into a tavern a couple streets away from the market. The two drunkards by the porch were a dead give-away. “Quick,” I said, “we better get inside.”

Jane nodded and we stepped into the tavern. It was dimly lit, as such places should be; there were maybe a dozen people here, speaking Latin, or maybe Ancient Greek (all I spoke was English and bad English), but when I showed the innkeeper two fingers, he poured us wine from a clay jar into a couple of mugs like the professional that he was, and we retreated to a table near the back.

“So, your name’s not Jane Wesson, is it?”

“How are we going to pay for the drinks?”

I took a sip from my mug. The wine was sweet to the taste, more pleasant than what I’d expected to find in a seedy bar two thousand four hundred years into the past. “Really? That’s your main concern, that we won’t settle our tab? Ms. Wess… Jane, what the hell happened back there? You almost shot that Holmes fella.”

She sat back on the wooden bench and sipped her own drink. “Hmm.” Jane raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t bad!” I let her take her time as she drunk, gathering her thoughts. “No,” she said finally, “my name’s not Jane Wesson, not really. I’d only learnt that half a year ago myself, when I’d gotten the inheritance from my dad, my real dad. I was raised by Mr. Wesson, you see, an officer of the Chicago P.D. until he was killed in the line of duty when I was nineteen…” She took another long drink. “He got a full honors funeral. That makes me doubly an orphan, I suppose.” She sighed.

I knew there was something about her that made me feel the way I did. We orphans were like that, I supposed… almost telepathic in how easily we spotted each other from crowds of men and women who were blessed with families they could call their own.

“So your dad, your real dad, this Moriarty, who was he?”

“A professor of mathematics, a real genius if some papers are to be believed. But… but that’s not all he was. ”

“A criminal mastermind, huh? And this Sherlock Holmes of yours killed him?”

“It wasn’t easy to piece together, but I found out they’d fought by the Reichenbach Waterfalls in Switzerland, my dad and Holmes, until both fell to their deaths.”

“Only Holmes didn’t die… and now the world’s coming to an end?”

“So it seems. My inheritance was a huge pile of money, especially for a cop’s daughter. I could’ve done anything I wanted.” She slammed her mug on the table. Two drinking buddies at the opposite table gave her a disapproving stare. I thought nothing of it at the time, but I couldn’t have known the role they’d play in the events that followed. In the single glance I allowed them then, I’d only noticed that they both wore brown cloaks and the bulges under the cloaks indicated they were probably armed.

“So you hired me?” I asked.

“So I made the Smith & Wesson Detective Agency and hired you, yeah. There are perks to being a copper’s brat too. I knew Sherlock Holmes was coming to the States. I needed answers out of him. I have to know what really happened in Switzerland, do you understand?”

“And so you try to kill him?”

“You’ve heard what The Doctor said! The world’s disappearing!”

“And he killed your father.”

“And he murdered my—”

Mid-winter wind cut through the summer heat. Jane shivered. All conversations died and it became quieter than in a dead man’s tomb. I looked around: all the tables were empty except for the two drinking buddies across the room, who stared intensely at the door.

Three men materialized by the entrance. They hadn’t simply popped into existence like I’d seen the TARDIS do, it was more like as if they’d been wearing some kind of camouflage that perfectly blended them into the room, and now they’d chosen to disengage whatever magical technology had made them invisible. They wore black cloaks, reinforced with metal plates, and their faces were hidden behind protective helmets. Strange tubes hung on their belts like the hilts of bladeless swords. They headed straight for us.

“Well,” I said, “the good news is that we probably don’t have to worry about the bill now.”

One of the drinking buddies across the room stood up. A scar ran down from his eye, almost touching the lip. “It is not time yet,” he said.

“It is as good time as any, Jedi,” the leader of the three said. He didn’t as much lounge at the scarred patron as he flashed towards him. One moment he was three feet away, the next – he’d moved five feet, and was no almost touching their table. Before I had time to blink, the scarred man disappeared into a blur of motion, reappearing at the back of the tavern, three tables away from his attacker. His partner hadn’t even bothered to stand up.

“I am not a Jedi.”

The sound of a high voltage transformer from one of Edison’s or Tesla’s experiments cut through the silence as a bright ray of concentrated light appeared from under the scarred man’s cloak. It continued to emanate a menacing hum as the man brought it up in front of him, adapting a defense position.

A light sword, I thought, looking at the three-foot ray of silver light glowing around a core of impossible white.

The man in the black cloak removed his weapon from his belt, and a blade of red light extended from the two-handed hilt, pulsating with unrestrained energy. And then again, DZHHHHHHHHEEEEEEE, as an identical ray protruded from the other end.

He twirled the light staff, slicing through the wooden tables in an arch of fire. The scarred man’s friend jumped back and produced his own energy sword, shining the brightest blue I’d ever seen.

“Not a Jedi, are you? Well… neither are we,” said the man with the double bladed light sword as his two friends lit up their red swords.

All hell broke loose. The men in black delivered an onslaught of blows, driving back the scarred man’s companion towards the back of the tavern in a hellish assault. The attack was perfectly orchestrated, the three men moving in a complicated dance of death… I imagined their faces, twisted in berserker grins under the masks. “Get down!” I shouted, and pulled Jane to the floor.

I only saw the combatant’s feet, but it was obvious from the way they moved they were no ordinary people: they were faster, smoother… better. They fought in silence above us until I heard a brief whimper, and the scarred man’s partner fell to the floor, his light sword extinguished. He raised his eyes, looked at me, and smiled before the twin-bladed sword ran him through.

“Noooooooo!” his friend screamed. He crouched, and a hard wall of air hit me with the force of a train, throwing everything and everyone into the walls. The table we were hiding under shot up to the ceiling; I hit the wall with my back – my poor back – and then Jane smashed into me.

“This is enough!” I heard somebody yell. The Doctor! “Sith! Jared! You will stop this nonsense now, or I swear you will not like what comes next!”

The Doctor stood at the entrance, holding two thumbs on his bowtie and a silver cylindrical tube in his other hand. This wasn’t a hologram, he was flesh and blood, bowtie and all. His cylindrical device didn’t look much like an energy sword hilt, but a lamp on its top blinked a sinister green.

“You have no power here, Immortal,” the main in black said, disengaging the light staff. Smoke rose from the hole in his victim’s back.

Jane’s Browning barked. The killer’s head jerked back and he fell to the floor.

“No, no, you can’t do that!” The Doctor shouted, but two more shots rang out and the two remaining men in black cloaks collapsed to the floor, their light swords disengaging as they fell. Jane’s knuckles turned bone white as she clutched the weapon’s grip. She pointed the revolver at The Doctor. “Hands up!”

The Doctor raised his hands and Jane rushed past him and out of the tavern. I followed; what else was I to do? I was hired to do a job and I was going to see it through… and with any luck, no one else was going to get killed. Yeah, right.

I followed her through the market and back into the alley. The blue box was where we’d left it. She jerked the door open. “You coming, Mr. Smith?”

“Where are we going?”

“This is a time machine… but what if it also travels in space? And if it does, what… what if we can leave this all behind? Go somewhere far, far away?”

“The world would still be disappearing.”

“Not if we go back to the time before the whole thing with my real dad happened!”

“You mean go somewhere a long time ago in a place far, far away?”

“Exactly.”

What did I have to lose? “Let’s do it.”

Run, You Clever Boy, and Remember

If the army had taught me anything, it was to stick up for your buddies. And so I decided to follow Jane Wesson – Moriarty through time and space to Destination Unknown. Come to think of it, maybe I should’ve dodged the draft.

“Where are we going?” I asked, closing the door behind me. She was at the control pedestal, pulling levers and pressing buttons in an inspired frenzy. The panel hummed, gurgled like a drowning animal, whined, and went quiet. Jane took a step back from the panel and pressed her fists against her waist in monumental defiance.

“TARDIS,” she said, “can you hear me?”

No reply came.

“TARDIS, hello?”

“You are not The Doctor,” said a woman’s voice from inside the walls.

I thought how if this machine was as fabulous as it appeared to be, it could’ve been anywhere at any time, heck, it could have probably been in many places at the same time, what did I know. The secrets it must have held, the answers to love, life, the universe… they key to everything that mattered. I could have asked it anything I wanted.

“TARDIS,” I said, “why do they call The Doctor Immortal?”

“The Doctor is known by many names throughout the multiverse. He is the last of the Time Lords, and I am the last TARDIS.”

“Where are the others?”

“Gone.”

“Should you be telling us this?” Jane asked.

“Yes. The Doctor installed a voice interface into me and left me with specific instructions to assist you in every way I can.”

“Then take us to where we can make this right again. Take us where we can stop the world from disappearing.”

“It is a place in a universe very different from this. The odds of you surviving are –”

“Never tell me the odds,” I said, and leaned against the wall, grabbing a nearby ramp.

Exactly nothing happened. No vibrating of the walls, no mind-numbing screeching, nothing.

“Hey, are you still there?”

“We are already here,” it replied, and made a clicking sound, indicating an end to the discussion.

I pushed the door open, and the next thing I knew, somebody’s inhumanely strong, scaly fingers clasped around my jacket and threw me out of the TARDIS. I flew a short distance, spun through the air, and hit a muddied puddle face-first. I spat out the rotten water and rolled to the side. Just in time, too, because my attacker, an orange humanoid with a reptilian face, was following me with the barrel of a rectangular rifle. I closed my eyes and prepared to die.

Jane’s Browning popped in an explosion of sound. I waited three seconds. I wasn’t dead.

My boss lay on her side, feet inside the TARDIS, the pistol’s barrel smoking in her hand. The reptilian creature lay dead on the ground. “Gun… fighting in a nut… shell… shoot them when… they aren’t looking,” she said through clunking teeth.

I helped her up. My heart beat like a drummer gone berserk; it was a monumental effort to calm my breathing and act as if I was one of those guys who are cool under fire. But I managed.

Around us, mud gave way to twisted trees, their heavy branches low to the ground, their “leaves” more resembling sea weeds than leaves. One side of the clearing opened to a dark lake that looked denser than the mud we stood in. A thick layer of fog rose from the ground, reaching up to my ankles. The fog carefully flowed around the TARDIS as if afraid to touch the blue walls.

Everything was almost exactly like the last time we took the time machine for a spin: we didn’t know where we were, we didn’t know what to do, except that now, somebody was trying to kill us. My army training must’ve kicked in because I found myself pulling the rifle out of the dead creature’s fingers, careful not to cut my hand on its talons.

“What the hell is it?” Jane asked.

“Wish I knew.”

The creature’s face looked like somebody crossed a pitbull with a crocodile. From the way its black eyes stared at the sky, you could tell it was dead. The reptilian man wore a yellow jumpsuit with stylized leather plates on his chest, covering everything but its scaled head, hands, and feet. “Whatever it is, there might be more out there.”

It was hard to tell anything through the fog, but I could have sworn I heard branches crack in the distance.

“I think maybe we should wait this out in the TARDIS,” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”

The door to the blue time machine snapped closed before Jane reached the porch. She tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.

“TARDIS!” she said, “let us in!”

“I’m afraid that is impossible. The Doctor programmed me to return to him as soon as you were both transported to year three thousand nine hundred fifty six Before the Battle of Yavin.”

“What? Why?”

“He also programmed this voice module to self-destruct in three seconds.”

“Hey, hold on,” I said.

“Two.”

“Hey!”

“One. Goodbye.”

The familiar screech screamed from the time machine as it disappeared. If somebody in the area was deaf enough to have missed this gunshot, they knew we were here now.

More branches cracked in the distance. We were stranded at the edge of the universe, surrounded by lizard men with rifles from the future who in most likelelyhood planned to kill, roast, and eat us. I wasn’t the cowardly sort, but a chill ran down my spine. I gathered all my courage and said, “Oh well. Was a useless conversation anyway.”

What difference did it make where to die? I had nobody to come home to. Hell, I didn’t even have a home. But I wasn’t about to make it easy for them. My drill sergeant drilled at least that much into me.

“How many bullets do you have?”

“Three. You?”

It was a trick question. I insepected the rectangular rifle: it was twice as heavy as the Remington they’d given me at the army, and touching the flat trigger made me feel like it would pack a punch. These folks could wave their light swords all they wanted, there was nothing like a big caliber firearm. Maybe we had a chance after all.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Is there anyone out there?”

“Korshura amatashi jirada!” came a coarse voice from the fog; a lizard voice. I pointed my rifle at the sound.

The lizard men came from all directions at once, tusks in a grin, with other freaks of this alien world at their sides. They were all kinds of creatures: a red woman with horn-like tentacles for hair, bonded with a strip of leather; a pair of green male humanoids with eightball-like eyes, a snout for a mouth, and two saucer-like antennae on their heads, men dressed in armor from head to toe, another humanoid with eyes on three flesh stalks protruding from his head, even a metal construct with glowing red dots in its cylindrical head, its moves mechanical and precise. An ammo belt crossed its metal frame. Its dexterous fingers gripped a heavy duty machine gun. I waved my rifle at it. “Nobody move.”

“Your dialect of Galactic Basic is peculiar,” the mechanical man replied. “Who are you, what are you doing here, and why have you murdered my employee?”

“We’re the ones who should be asking questions here,” Jane said. “Why did your employee try to murder us?”

Cool under fire, I thought, check, and hoped they wouldn’t incinerate us for an answer. The red dots on the cylindrical head blinked twice.

“Information is never free,” it said. “We must bargain.”

The rest of its crew looked irritably confused and so I’d kept my rifle pointed at the construct’s talking tin can of a head.

“Where are we?” asked Jane.

“I will tell you for a price. Business is business, and information is certainly business.”

“What’s the price?”

“You will tell me everything you know about The Doctor.”

“The Doctor?”

My eye twitched as Jane mentined the man who got us into this mess to begin with.

“Sure,” she said. “We’ll tell you everything we know. But you must answer first.”

“Very well. You are on planet Dagobah. More specifically, you are inside a death stick dealer’s camp; I do not know who you are and you are certainly not welcome. The galaxy is in turmoil. Darth Revan has returned from the Outer Rim with an army of Dark Jedi behind him, and is bent on taking down the Republic. It is a time of Civil War. Business is booming.”

“Who’s Darth Revan?” I asked.

The cylinder-head ignored me. “Does that answer your question?”

“What are the Jedi?” Jane asked.

“A question for a question, that was the deal. It is time to fulfill your part of the bargain. Your clothes indicate you must possess knowledge on the one they call The Doctor, or, sometimes, The Immortal.”

“We don’t know squat about The Doctor,” Jane said before I could protest.

The red dots on the on the cylindrical head blinked again.

“Then this concludes our business deal, you primitive meat-bags. You are no longer of any use to me. I’m afraid we won’t be doing business agai –”

I squeezed the trigger before the thing had a chance to point its machine gun at us. A blast of white fire erupted from the barrel. The recoil threw me backwards and over the dead lizardman, sending me stumbling to the ground. The last thing I saw before falling: a wide,flameless explosion eating up the mechanical man, uprooting trees, and throwing its accomplices into the fog, the image imprinted in my eyes like a flashing daguerreotype.

I shook my head, trying to clear my brain from the concussion damage… but only emotions rushed in, pushing all rational thoughts aside.

I’d never had any real family. As I grew up, I’d picked up the qualities of every person I’d met according to my moral compass… until I met Jane – Jane, who was twice an orphan. She was like me… only better; and she was here because she feared nobody on Earth or beyond. I could respect that. Not to mention, she was also kind of pretty, and that was always a plus. The realization kicked in: I had no idea where she was.

My agitation helped me ignore the pain in my temples as I sat up on my butt, looking for any signs of her. The blast must have thrown her back too, but it was as if she’d disappeared entirely. I looked towards the murky green water. I needed her. I needed to save her… I tried to will strength back into my body and failed… but headed towards the lake anyway.

Half-crouched, half-deaf, one-third-alive, I made it towards the shore. “Jane?” I shouted, without hearing myself. “Are you there?”

It was a stupid idea. I had to jump into the water after her. But what if she wasn’t there? Or what if it was too late? No, I thought, it is never too late, taking off my leather jacket.

I felt a presence to my right, and as soon as I looked, I was shocked to find a man standing next to me, wearing a brown cloak like the one I’d seen back in the tavern. He’d even looked like one of the two men we’d met there, the man with the scar, only without the scar, and with disheveled long hair falling to his shoulders. His hand was extended towards the lake.

Jane rose from the thick water and levitated above the surface, sliding through the air towards the shore, limbs hanging limply at her sides. She landed on the mud as I stood there, mouth wide open. And here I was thinking I’d seen everything. The brown cloak approached her, touched his hand to her chest, and the next second, Jane was coughing up mud and water, looking more pissed-off than scared.

“You all right?” I asked.

She looked up at the face of the man in the cloak and concentrated for a few seconds on clearing her throat. “What’s your name?” she asked him.

“I’m Jared,” he said.

I noticed the metallic fingers on one of the fallen trees first; the rest of the sentient mechanical device soon followed. Its left leg and right arm were torn off its chassis, but it used its remaining hand to pull itself forward with stubborn determination. Jared turned to face it. The lights on the thing’s head blinked in crazed patterns.

“Jedi,” said the broken machine.

Jared walked towards it with panther’s grace. “IG-68,” he said, “you have failed to meet the conditions of our deal.”

Air shimmered behind the disfigured tin can man.

First only an outline appeared, but it soon shaped into a black cloaked figure some distance behind the torn up mechanoid. “The droid had made another deal,” he said, his voice a loud whisper.

Jared ignored him, never letting his eyes off the metal carcass before him. “One more thing,” he said. “I am not a Jedi.”

“Do not dismantle me please. I am sorry,” it pleaded.

Jared’s sword ignited with a silver ray of concentrated energy as he chopped the cylinder head off its metal shoulders. The head hadn’t rolled as much as sunk into the mud.

He then Jared bent his elbows, with his light sword parallel to his face, pointed vertically up, legs slightly bent at the knees, eyes locked on his future opponent.

The man in the black cloak threw back his hood. He wore a metal mask with stripes engraved into it, each engraving painted the red of faded blood. Only darkness lured in the slit for his eyes. “So be it, Exile,” he said.

Jane rose from the ground in a sudden jerk, as if a hurricane picked her up and threw her towards the masked figure’s extended hand. Both me and Jared rushed forward, but the figure in black simply nodded towards us and we froze in place like human statues. My muscles tensed as paralysis tingled my nerves; I couldn’t even move my eyeballs to see how our new-found not-Jedi friend Jared was doing. All I could do was watch the man in the black cloak hold Jane suspended in the air half a foot above ground.

With a lazy motion, he unzipped her jacket and lowered her shirt ever so slightly, exposing a scarab amulet hanging on a cord from her neck.

“You are the one, then,” he told her. “Jared thinks you will change the universe.” He hadn’t moved his helmeted head, but I practically felt the heavy gaze under his mask fall on Jared. “Jared is a fool.”

I saw the flash from Jane’s pistol before I heard the sound. The masked man moved away, flashing to the side, but his grip on us was lost. Jane fell back into the mud; I managed not to collapse to the ground, but this was not my fight: a blast from my rifle would’ve shredded everyone in sight. Before I could finish the thought, Jared already crossed the gap separating him and the man in the mask, his light sword arcing through the air in a savage cut.

A ray of orange so bright it looked like an evil shade of red met his silver energy blade half-way and sparks exploded from where the two energy swords crossed their blades.

“Run!” I shouted.

And so we did.

The two duelists ignored us as we ran for the trees. We heard the fight behind us, swords sizzling in violent blows, the air electrified with the feeling of hatred, pure, unadulterated hate.

We ran. And then we ran some more.

At some point I’d grabbed Jane’s hand, my heart racing. With how the events and circumstances around us were recently unfoldeding, it looked like it was high time for me to start getting used to the feeling. We must have made it half a mile through the murky swamp forest before deciding to slow down the pace; we didn’t know where we were running, or from whom, but it was safe to assume we’d bought ourselves a few moments to rationalize. I stopped.

“What?” Jane asked, panting.

“Where are we running?”

“We need to stop the world from disappearing, Adam. Or did you forget?”

“We’re in a swamp! How are we going to save the world from disappearing from a swamp?”

She looked around. “Yeah, hardly looks like the place to decide the fate of the universe from, does it? We need to find out why The Doctor made his time machine bring us here… and why us.”

“That masked guy seemed to know you. Or your amulet, at least.”

Jane held out the silver scarab on the palm of her hand. “It was the only thing my father left me besides his name and fortune,” she said. “I thought it was just a trinket.”

“But you wore it ever since.”

“Only ever since I’d met you,” she said with an inquisitive look. Words failed me: words were often too complicated, especially when beauty was so simple it required actions instead. I took a step closer.

“Jane, if we solve this problem, save the world from disappearing, like The Doctor said, what would happen to you? Remember how he’d mentioned you were only born because Sherlock Holmes didn’t die? If he dies… if this gap in the universe is fixed… what happens to you?”

She looked at the tips of her boots. “I guess we’ll find out. What’s the world without a little mystery, right?”

I brushed my hand against her wrist. She didn’t pull away, so I took her hand in mine as she stood there, head lowered. This was no time for romance… but time was ticking away. I lowered my head, and pressed my forehead against hers.

Jared came running from the trees and grabbed us by our sleeves, barely slowing down. “Run, run, run,” he said; a hideous cut, cauterized by fire, scarred him eye to lip.

And so we ran… again. We ran in silence. When I had no breath left and when Jane was about to collapse, we reached a clearing. A gigantic construction towered above us on three support columns, its walls painted brown, the mud it stood on cooked to stone. Jared ran past the support columns, dragging us behind, until we reached the center of the massive construction.

Jane looked up. “Beneath a metal sky,” she said quietly.

A trap door lowered from the ceiling, leading up into the building (if that’s what it was).

“This is my ship,” Jared said. “Come with me if you want to live.”

Neither of us had much to say to that, so we followed him up.

The trap door closed behind us as soon as we got onboard, blending back into the floor.

“Get us off this rock, R2D5,” Jared said. The walls shook as we followed him into a room with a long table surrounded by oblong leather couches. “We’ve already breached atmosphere,” he added. “Never underestimate the value of a good astromech droid.”

I wasn’t sure if I should’ve been happy or terrified. Events were unfolding so fast I had a hard time keeping track. I decided to concentrate on the important things first and sat on one of the couches. It felt great. “What did that… that guy in the scary mask want Jane for?”

My boss looked at me like I was a human ant, then back at Jared. “Thank you for saving our lives,” she said. “Your wound, does it hurt? We have to do something about it.”

He smiled, although I could tell it was forced. Of course it hurt, I thought, silently thankful that nobody had tried to cut my face off yet.

“I’ll be all right,” Jared said. “I’ve got a medical droid onboard. Get yourselves comfortable. This is going to be a long trip.”

“Where are we going?” Jane asked.

“The Jedi Academy on Dantooine. This is much more serious than I’d originally anticipated. I might have joined Revan’s war, and they might’ve exiled me from the Jedi Order… but they need to hear this. It was foretold.”

“Foretold?” I asked. “What, like you’ve had some sort of prophecy about Smith & Wesson Detective Agency crashing your party?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“Yes. Something like that. The being you know as The Doctor had once hinted the location of a Sith Holocron to Darth Revan, a recording of ancient knowledge; a key to power unfathomable to mortals. Darth Revan found it and assigned a research team to study it. I was one of the researchers… and I’d learnt there was more than mere knowledge of the past stored inside; the holocron spoke of the future. A prophecy, if you will.”

“Such things aren’t possible,” I said.

“Anything is possible through The Force. All living things in every galaxy are connected through it. We are all one. And when we learn how to reach into the fabric of this energy field that surrounds and binds us, only then do truly understand what is possible… and what is not. ”

The Force? This sounded too much like useless blabber. I wondered what destiny, fate, and actions of brave men and women held for us next. Some answers, I hoped.

“This prophecy,” Jane said. “What exactly did it say?”

Jared looked at her scarab necklace. “It spoke of many things. About power. About wisdom. About truth, and about the banality of evil. But each story told to those willing to learn always mentioned a girl. One girl. Sometimes in passing, sometimes in more detail, but the girl was always the same. Texts recorded in long-forgotten languages refer to her as The Impossible Girl… a girl who shouldn’t exist, but does. She is said to wear a scarab necklace… and destined to change the fate of the universe.”

“Me?” Jane asked.

Beeping erupted around us. Jared looked away from Jane’s necklace and straightened up. “Are you sure, R2D5?” he said. Then, quietly, “Looks like we’ve got trouble.”

I wasn’t even surprised.

He went past the table and we followed him into the control chamber of what he called his ship (although it hardly looked like any ship I’d ever seen). The chamber ended in a circular viewscreen with white dots of stars glowing beyond the glass. A pair of empty comfortable-looking chairs sat in front of the viewscreen, surrounded with knobs, buttons and flashing displays. “R2D5, what’s going on? Why are we slowing down? Thrusters are at full capacity, report.” Only beeps came in reply, but Jared frowned, and I knew it couldn’t be good.

“Em, what now?” I asked.

“It’s Revan.”

“Revan? The one who started your Civil War? What do you mean?”

“I thought it was a tractor beam at first…” Jared said. “Look.” He pointed at the stars sliding across the viewscreen. Our ship was turning. “He’s in his starfighter, flying next to us. This isn’t a tractor beam, he has so much power he can move my ship with his mind. There’s nothing we can do.”

“The guy in the mask was this Darth Revan you mentioned? The one who started the war?” Jane asked. “How is he… don’t bother, not important, what important is, what does he want?”

“I’ve no idea.” The stars in the viewscreen slid away, giving way to a triangular spaceship the size of a small country.

“This is Revan’s flagship, the Interdictor-class cruiser Moonshade, the Bane of the Republic, “Jared said. “Revan’s going to board us, and then he will do as he pleases. He is too powerful,” Jared said. “But don’t give up without a fight.”

Me and Jane looked at each other. Today was getting worse by the year. “We never do,” I said.

* * *

It had happened like Jared told us it would: our ship was pulled into the belly of the Moonshade, and as our space-faring vehicle entered what could have only be called a hangar bay, I saw Revan’s small, V-like ship fly past us into the hangar.

This was very possibly the end to our adventure: failure and defeat at the hands of the Dark Jedi they called Darth Revan and the end to my chance with Jane. I braced myself against negative thoughts and followed Jared out of of the trapdoor. It was too late to pretend giving up was ever an option.

The three of us climbed down to the hangar’s steel floor, its plates polished to a glimmering shine. Darth Revan’s starfighter stood in some distance like an upsided V. A hatch opened, and the man in the mask jumped out, landing softly on the floor, the only sound: the buzz of his blood orange light sword as the energy blade extended from the hilt. He held the sword in one hand, slightly to the side, his posture relaxed, the black hood lowered over his head.

“What are you waiting for?” Jared asked.

“The correct moment,” Darth Revan replied.

I heard another light sword ignite, and it wasn’t Jared’s. Another man stepped out from behind Revan’s ship and took place at his side: a bald man in his thirties, armed with a red light sword. His rage was almost tangible: I could feel it the air, rage directed at everything and everyone. Here I knew was another man who would never stop, and for whom murder was but means to an end.

“They are the Sith,” Jared said. “The Master and The Apprentice. There are always two.”

Jane had two bullets, I had my rifle, and Revan and his companion stood far enough to risk our lives on something I’d hoped they wouldn’t expect. I raised my concussion rifle, as I’d dubbed it, pointing the barrel at Revan’s ship, and was about to pull the trigger when some invisible force ripped the weapon out of my grip and sent it hurling towards Jared.

He barely had time to use his energy sword to cut through the improvised projectile when I’d felt the dreaded prickling in my skin I’d felt when Revan had paralyzed me. Jared remained unphased, his sword pointed at Darth Revan’s head.

The bald man next to Darth Revan was smiling.

“It’s never that easy,” Darth Revan said, mirroring Jared’s sword stance.

The screech I’d learnt to associate with the TARDIS skipped its usual three second warm-up and assaulted our ears at once, the sound reverberating through the metal hangar as the blue booth with the text POLICE CALL BOX appeared by Darth Revan. The door flew open, hitting the stunned Dark Jedi’s sword-wielding hand and driving it upwards – right into his Apprentice’s jaw.

What happened next wasn’t pretty.

I flinched, watching the energy separate flesh from bone in one clean cut. The Apprentice fell before he could scream. His sword fell, extinguished, and only his fingers clawed the floor in silent agony. The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS. “Actually, sometimes it really is easy,” he said, waving his small cylindrical tube at Revan. “Do you know what this is?”

The Dark Jedi wrapped his other hand around the hilt of his sword. He reminded me of a cobra, coiled for a strike. “No,” he said in his loud whisper, “Immortal, I do not. I also do not see how it can stop me.”

“This, my friend Sith Lord Darth Revan, is a sonic screwdriver. You, who are soon to be known as Revanchist, reviled as Revan the Butcher, and praised as the Prodigal Knight should know better than to mess with a sonic screwdriver!”

The Sith Lord Darth Revan had not moved an inch.

“Okay,” The Doctor said, fiddling with his bowtie with his free hand. “Okay, it won’t really stop you, I admit.” He put the cylindrical device back into his suit’s inside pocket. “Nope, won’t stop you at all. Good thing I don’t have to stop you, Sith Lord. We want the same thing.”

“Is that right?”

The Doctor’s lips tightened into a line. “I want to heal the damage done to the universe,” he said. Darth Revan continued to stand motionless.

“How?”

“The Impossible Girl,” said The Doctor.

We all looked at Jane. She gripped the handle of her pistol tighter. A drop of sweat rolled down her cheek. Or was it a teardrop?

Cool under fire, I thought, as if she could hear me think, that’s who we are.

“What about the Impossible Girl?”

“I take her with me to a different place. Her and Mr. Adam Smith over here.”

“And what do I get?”

“Peace of mind knowing that you’ve helped make the universe a better place?”

“That is not enough,” Darth Revan said, the soft voice from under his mask bypassing my ears and reaching directly into my mind. “I want the girl.”

“You can’t have the girl,” I said.

The Doctor said, “Sorry, Adam… I’m afraid we can’t have her either. She can go to a different place with us, but never a different time. Not our time, at any rate. She wouldn’t exist.”

“What?”

“She is a girl who was never supposed to exist and yet who changed the entire course of time and space for billion of years into both the past and the future. She can’t come back to the twentieth century Chicago; after Sherlock Holmes fixes the time stream, she would no longer exist.”

“We can’t just leave her!”

“It’s the only way, Adam.”

“Are the two of you done whining now?” Darth Revan asked. “I take the girl. I take the man. And I take your little spaceship box that IG-68 had so miserably failed to acquire, and then I let you live. Maybe. I think it’s a fair bargain.”

“Like hell!” Jane said, and shot twice into his face. Sparks flew as the bullets ricocheted off the metal, jerking Revan’s hood off his helmet. I grabbed Jane’s arm and ran for the TARDIS, but as I was about to drag her through the door, something jerked her back, sending her flying back towards Darth Revan. I saw the fear in her eyes as The Doctor pulled me inside. The door shut closed. “Nooooooooooooo!” I screamed.

I don’t know exactly how much time passed after I’d stopped trying to pry the door open. It was useless. All useless. I was alone.

“There was no time,” said the Doctor after a while. “I am sorry.”

* * *

The method to fixing the universe turned out to have been simpler and more elegant than I could’ve imagined, though at this point it felt like the entire universe no longer mattered.

The Doctor had transported myself and both versions of Sherlock Holmes (the two of whom chattered on subjects too numerous to list without pause or tiring) to year 1891, Switzerland, Reichenbach Falls.

The Doctor had left Watson in year 1903. I couldn’t say I blamed him.

The older Holmes looked at the path leading from the TARDIS and down to the waterfall, where his deadliest foe Professor Moriarity awaited… a foe whom he had bested once, and whom he knew he wouldn’t be besting again. Not so completely at any rate.

“If Sherlock Holmes has to die,” he said, lighting up his pipe, “then so be it. As long as the world has at least one Holmes. I believe I already wrote my letter…” He winked at his younger self.

The two said no more, and the older man headed down the path. He stopped mid-way, turned, raised his deerstalker cap, and continued on, never to look back again.

“Good luck… my colleague,” said the young Sherlock Holmes when the other disappeared behind a cliff. “And thank you.”

He also took out his pipe, but his hands trembled so much he only lit it on the third strike.

“What happens now?” I asked .

Holmes took a puff from his pipe, then handed me an envelope. “This is for you Mr. Smith.”

“What is it?”

“Open it, would you?”

I did so. Inside was a letter.

Dear Mr. Smith,

It is with great disdain that I have to inform you that if you are reading this, I must be dead. If our plan had worked (a plan for which I take full responsibility should The Doctor feel bad about the events that had to transpire), my death should have restored balance to the world. It should have also erased Jane Moriarty out of existence, unless she was in a time before my unfortunate paradox with Professor Moriarty had taken place, somewhere so far away that no ripples in our universe (were I to use The Doctor’s terminology) could have possibly reached her. Having had the pleasure of spending some time in The Doctor’s company, I assume this is the case.

Nothing lasts, Mr. Smith… but nothing is lost.

Your friend, Sherlock Holmes

In my young age life had taught me that in matters of love and war, there was no second best. The Impossible Girl, I thought. The only girl worth being with.

I showed the letter to The Doctor and asked him if he could bring me back to her. His eyes gleamed. “Maybe,” he said, “perhaps… probably! But no guarantees. We can be transported to year three thousand nine hundred fifty six Before the Battle of Yavin… or fifty four. Or even fifty five. It’s not exactly a precise science.”

“If… if she’s there, what would have Revan done to her?”

“She might not be there at all.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

The Doctor frowned and looked away. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is if she’s still herself… and if so, perhaps there are more adventures for the girl with the scarab necklace.”

“Does it matter when we depart?” I asked.

“Not really. With time travel, arrival time is where it’s at.”

* * *

As I’m finishing writing these pages, sitting on the grass with my back (my poor back) against the TARDIS wall, I wonder if perhaps I’d misread the signs. It is already after dark, but The Doctor kindly lent me his sonic screwdriver which doubled very well as the best portable lamp I’d ever seen. Whether the many circumstances leading to the events I’d recorded here were all coincidental or if there was a divine plan in place, I do not know. But I choose to think that The Impossible Girl had left a footprint in the universe so powerful that no mystical Force can ever hope to compare.

She hadn’t shot Darth Revan in the face so she could escape. She knew what would happen if she’d come with us. My clever, clever, Impossible Girl.

“You sure you want to leave these notes behind?” The Doctor asked.

I was. I am.

And so I must put the final dot in this manuscript, step inside the TARDIS, and tell The Doctor that we are all stories in the end.

– THE END –

Thank you for reading! If you liked this book, tell a friend. If you didn’t, tell an enemy.

You can find more of my work at www.tyrovogel.com or on my Google+ stream at http://google.com/+TyroVogel.

Copyright

Published by Beginner Bird

Tyro Vogel Copyright 2014

Smashwords Edition

Dedicated to Teodora Grigorova. Without you this book would have never been the same.

With special thanks to Jon’C for his helpful comments and to Tobias DJ TB Bassline for all the music.

Cover art by S.A. Hunt.

This is a FAN-MADE story inspired by the SHERLOCK HOLMES, DOCTOR WHO and STAR WARS franchises. It is INTENDED TO CELEBRATE these franchises and is in no way affiliated with the copyright holders or the official works.