Tyro Vogel - The Girl with the Scarab Necklace

“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.

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.