SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Riots! My mother writing to inform me that I have done the wrong thing! The queen is even angry with me, and now…my own creation tells me I can’t kill him?! Fine. I’ll write more. I will. But you’re mine , Holmes. I made you, and I can bury you!”

The only response to Doyle’s shouting fit was a low chuckle in the same tone as the disembodied voice.

Doyle fled the School for Young Witches, and the girls followed, watching as he and the rest of the guests all scurried away. Some even left their greatcoats behind. The gaggle of girls in evening gowns circled around in the foyer and looked questioningly at their headmistress.

“Did we pass, Miss Greensleeves?” asked Miss Harper, her eyes gleaming with triumph.

“Oh, we’ll just have to wait and see if you’ve successfully terrified the man into writing again.”

A few weeks later, when the Strand announced a return of the Sherlock Holmes stories, a young lady (Miss Harper, to be precise) sitting in the middle of the Hyde Park Mechanical Promenade shrieked from her carriage with glee and shouted across to another, “We did it! We saved Sherlock Holmes!”

Witches will meddle with anything, even publishing.

Originally published by Windrift Books

The whole thing started with the four of us and a riddle. I could spin an existential yarn about how spiritual and transcendent it was to hack an ancient Tibetan time cycle, but really, it was all about the trip, the psychedelic rocket ride Marty Feldman called the ‘diatomic quantum flop.’ You’d think because of the Eastern twist that it was Danny Wong who brought it up. But you’d be stereotyping because it wasn’t; it was Marty, though he wasn’t the one to make the Eastern connection, that was Dave. Looking to the future, I guess that makes sense, but there is no way I can change it now if I wanted to. That’s the thing. Though I can see the room clearly when I want to relive it, nothing changes. But I’m jumping ahead. I tend to do that. Let me start with the riddle.

Marty and I were hanging out at Dave and Danny’s patchouli patch in the student ghetto. We were doing what you would expect four college kids to be doing, sitting under a huge Marley poster—Ziggy, not Bob—listening to jams, waxing philosophy, and enjoying the types of recreationals one enjoys in college.

Marty liked to hold court, to have all eyes on him, so after he passed the bong to Dave he dramatically deadpanned and said, “You’re traveling along a high mountain pass and you come to a bridge spanning a deep crevice.”

“How deep?” Danny asked.

“Really deep.”

“Like bottomless?”

“No,” Marty said, curling his lip back, “like a train bridge in the Alps deep.”

“So I’m on a train?”

Marty’s nostrils flared with a short breath of restraint. “No, you’re on a yak. You’re on Everest.”

Dave saved Danny a scolding by taking the baton. “I always wanted to climb Everest,” he said.

“You and everybody else,” Marty said. “So listen, you’re traveling along a high mountain pass—”

“Are there Sherpa with me?” Dave asked.

“Sure.”

“I always imagined that when I climb Everest I’d have a bunch of Sherpa with me.”

Marty snapped, “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Dave said and then smiled dopily.

Danny couldn’t keep a straight face. A lungful of pot smoke burst out of his mouth with a spray of spittle, and the three of us began to giggle. Marty joined in when he caught on that he was the butt of the joke. He pretended to ease up, but that pissed-off glint in his eyes and painfully hammered smile betrayed him.

Marty always wanted to come off as laid back but he was too tightly wound.

“So you start across the bridge,” he said, “and a hooded figure with a strange watch on his wrist blocks your way.”

“Hooded?” I asked. “Like Death?”

“He’s not Death.”

“Then why is he hooded?”

“I don’t know why he’s hooded. I guess it makes the riddle more ominous.” Marty was so easy to get worked up. “Anyway, you have to cross the bridge because the crevice is too steep to travel down, and to go around, you’d have to go back down and around the mountain.”

“So you have to cross the bridge?”

“You have to cross, right. But the hooded figure tells you that he’ll only let you cross if you can ask him a question to which he does not know the answer. Now, the time traveler can go forward and backward in time at will, whenever he wants.”

“Time traveler?”

“The hooded figure is a time traveler, that’s what the strange watch on his wrist is all about. He can go back and forth, and you can only ask one question.”

“Well,” I said, “if he’s a time traveler he’ll know the answer to most everything, won’t he?”

You see this is the point where we would usually start trying to solve the paradox. With obvious stuff like How could the time traveler know the color of my underwear or What happens when I get to the other side? But Dave must have figured Marty was getting at something. “You’re talking about Kalachakra,” he said.

Marty nodded.

Now it should surprise you that Dave of all people said that. Why? Because back then Dave wasn’t a monk, he looked more like a frat kid—clean-cut, the baseball cap, white t-shirt. He was least likely to be the guy heading an Ashram in Phoenix today. But Dave had been practicing meditation for a year by then, would sit in his room, legs crisscross applesauce, drool dripping down his chin. So when Danny asked him what Kalachakra was, Dave was all over it.

“It’s the wheel of time, man.”

Yeah, he really said man . And then he pulled a hit from the bong. We were in college. Anyway. After he blew out a billowy white cloud of stinky smoke, he went on to say, “It’s Tibetan, you’re in the present, but there can’t be a present without a past and a future. So you’re there too. Time is like a wheel.”

At that moment, I thought what he said was stoner talk, nothing more. Armchair philosophy. So I said, “Riiight,” all drawn out, and reached for the bong.

“No, serious. That’s how the Dalai Lama can see if a person that is good right now is really a bad person or vice versa.”

“What?” Danny asked.

“He can see the future and the past and the present, all at the same time. He’s nonlinear.”

“Like outside of time?”

“Exactly,” Marty said. “It’s outside of time. What if I told you guys I’ve found a way to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Step outside of time. See the slices of past, present, and future at will.”

“Time travel?”

“Yeah. Time travel.”

“It’s possible,” Dave added, “but very tantric, takes lifetimes to learn. I mean, the Dalai Lama is centuries old.”

Marty shrugged his forehead, all sure of himself. “I found a shortcut.”

It was my turn to take a long pull from the bong and I about choked up a lung. You see, Marty worked in the psych lab below the science building, and they did all kinds of messed up stuff down in that basement. Mice, mazes, and shit like that. The last time he lured us down there he talked us into eating a bunch of shrooms and then locked each of us in a deprivation tank.

I tried to bellow out a plea, “Don’t tell me this involves the tanks?” but all that came out were some hisses and a ton of smoke.

“No,” Marty said. “Of course not.”

An hour later, we were in the forgotten back corner of the science building’s basement, next to the deprivation tanks. Marty’s office was actually the storage area behind the animal pens and sweetly smelled of shredded paper and rat piss. Marty’s TA-ship involved administering a cornucopia of pure grade chemical cocktails to the rats and monkeys and log what happened next. He walked a lot of the good stuff out the door, which was cool at the time. I mean he had access to government grade shit. Phenomenal.