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.