Chapter
1I had five minutes left of an eight-hour shift. I'd been at the local grocery store since twelve that afternoon, and was really feeling it in my feet. My light was off, and I was just going to finish the rather obnoxious woman that was harassing my packer.
At last, the flood of food abated. I bid my packer farewell and went up to the service counter to tell Lisa, the shift leader, that I was off.
"Lisa, I'm going. Punch my out, ok?" I raised my tired eyes to hers and she nodded.
"But first I want you to help that guy over on the bench." She looked extraordinarily smug. If I hadn't been so tired…ah well.
"Why? I'm leaving…have Emily do it." I whined, citing the first packer (ie minion) I saw. All I wanted to do was go home and eat dinner; I didn't care if the guy fell off the bench and off the face of the earth.
"I think he is going to want more than the location of molasses, or something…he looks like someone from those weird books you read." By the end of that last sentence, Lisa was trying hard (and failing miserably) not to laugh. I shook my head at illiterate shift leaders and walked toward the bench in question.
However, when I saw him, I thought she might have been right. He looked like someone who had just walked off the set of The Time Machine. He wore a high collared three-piece suit and a bowler hat. A bowler hat. I surpressed a snicker. He had an old fashioned walking stick that he was shifting back and forth between nervous long fingered hands. There was a watch chain across his gray vest, and his shaggy black hair gleamed with gel or oil in the glaring florescent light. What was I getting myself into?
I walked up to him, slinging my apron over one arm and struggling to get my long black coat on with the other. The man stood up absentmindedly and held the coat for me like it was second nature. Weird. I turned to him, flashed my best 'God, I don't want to be here' smile and said, "May I help you?" It was the first good look I got at his face. He had gray eyes, a rather long nose that struck me as being somewhat Roman, and thin lips. He was also really pale.
"I do not know if you will be able to help at all. I find myself somewhat bewildered. I…do not know where to begin." His voice was low and he had a rather pronounced English accent. Wow. I felt myself feeling bad for the guy. He had the look of a little lost puppy.
"Well, I don't think that this is the best place to explain things…and to see if there's anything to be done. D'you have a coat? It's a bit chilly." He stooped form his considerable height and scooped up a big black greatcoat as I struggled with the idiocy of bringing him back to my place. I didn't know anything about him. At all. For all I knew, he could be some kind of serial killer with a Victorian fetish. But, and I knew it was a stretch, my best friend and her boyfriend had been working on a quantum computer that would allow one to move through time as easily as one could move through space. Maybe, just maybe, this unfortunate walked through one of Pip and Frank's fields. We needed to get out of there, fast. This guy (I still didn't know his name) was calling a lot of attention to himself. That was bad because being committed wasn't what he was after. I hoped.
I took Mystery Guy by the arm and half dragged him out of the store. By the time we hit the sidewalk, he surprise at being dragged by a woman at least a foot shorter than he was wore off and he forcibly slowed our pace, setting my gray-gloved hand in the crook of his arm. I shook my head, and the ghost of a smile flickered across his face. The guy was a nut. And I was bringing him to my house anyway. C'est la vie, I suppose. And maybe he really had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a possibility I couldn't discount.
"We're going right here. And left here. Up this hill, left again, and here we are." I unlocked the street door to my apartment. I lived on the fifth floor, and you could see Fenway Park from my bedroom window. Here was the dilemma and the proof: if he could handle the elevator, he was not a side effect of Pip's experiment. Then my only problem would be how to get him out of my building…Ah well. What will be will be, I suppose. We would just have to see.
"Ok, you're going to have to bear with me here. I live on the fifth floor, and I think my feet will fall off if I try and climb the stairs. So we're taking the lift. Do you trust me?" he looked down at me, he still had my hand under his own, with an eyebrow up.
"I hardly know you, Miss, but I perceive that you mean me no ill will, so yes, I believe I do trust you. It seams I have no choice." There was an almost hidden inflection of humor in his quiet voice.
"Good." I pushed the button and the doors opened. I stepped in and he followed, albeit with a bit of trepidation. When the doors shut and the elevator started to move, he compulsively grabbed on to the bar that ran around the cube. He kept looking around nervously, as if he was expecting an attack. From the closed elevator. Either he read my mind, or he'd never been on one before. This just strengthened my belief that he walked through one of Pip and Frank's fields.
The ride was short and my apartment was only two doors from the elevator. I unlocked the door, grabbing my cat by the scruff of the neck as she tried to bolt past us.
"What are you doing, you crazy cat?" I asked her, cradling her as I tossed my bag on the couch. I flopped into my overstuffed doublewide wing chair, folding my legs under me and tossing my coat over the back. I gestured to the sofa and the man sat, letting his coat fall beside him.
"Ok, let's start with names. Mine's Elizabeth James." He looked at me a moment with those gray eyes of his, then,
"I am Sherlock Holmes." He caught up my hand and kissed it before I could pull away.
"Really." I squeaked, turning bright red. "That's interesting. Well, you look the part anyway. How did you get here?" he had to be crazy. No way the most famous detective in the world would have just stepped into a field and not noticed it!
"I…do not know. I was walking to meet Watson at Simpson's for dinner and I…walked through…air, I suppose, but it was thicker and shimmering…I thought it was fog…then I was on the street in front of the market. I…do not know what happened." He stopped and looked at me, waiting for an explanation.
I was floored. What he had just described was exactly what was supposed to happen when the quantum computer worked right. He really was Sherlock Holmes, as impossible as that sounds. I had to say something, anything. Oh my God, I was going to kill Pip!
"Well, Mr. Holmes, I hate to tell you, but you've managed to jump ahead in time a hundred and some odd years." I tried to keep my voice steady and from the look on his face, I evidently succeeded. He sprang from his seat and began pacing.
"Why do you believe me? When faced with the same information, I cannot make sense of it! I feel as though my skull is splitting apart!" I blinked at him as he yelled at me.
"I believe you, Mr. Holmes, because I helped design the technology that brought you here."
He rounded on me then, his breath hissing from between his teeth. "What?"
"It was a quantum computer. I know you haven't any idea what that is, but trust me, the thing has some serious power. Its purpose, among other things, it to make time travel possible. There was an experiment going on this morning, or evening I suppose it was for you, and you must have walked through it. You aren't insane. I promise." To my credit and great surprise, my voice stayed steady.
"That is hardly a reason to trust a complete stranger, Miss James." He scowled at me. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone scowl before. I smothered the almost overwhelming urge to giggle.
"Would you rather have me throw you out?" I raised an eyebrow and he dropped the scowl and just glared at me. "Didn't think so. Now. I assume you know how to put sheets on a bed?" I got that glare again. "The couch pulls out, and it isn't even all that lumpy. I'll go get ya some." I left the room as he began to look around.
My maroon wingchair was under the window, looking as ratty and beat up as it had when I bought it at a thrift store two years ago to furnish my apartment. Next to it was the dark green pull out sofa that had been new when I bought it. On the other side of the sofa was a dark blue plush recliner that, like my wingchair, could fit two easily. Three, if one didn't mind being cozy. Between the couch and each chair, there was a mismatched set of Tiffany floor lamps that had come from the same thrift store as my chair. There were several other things to sit on; I called them my puffs, but I think they were really ottomans. There were four of them scattered randomly around the room in various dark colours. The ceiling if the big room I had painted a smoky blue, and stuck glo-in-the-dark star stickers around the single light that hung from a chain. I had never wanted to repaint the walls, which were the same shade as my wingchair. Matching wasn't what I was going for in my living room. When I first moved in, I had the nasty beige carpet pulled up and found mahogany floors. In the entire apartment, which wasn't small. There wasn't a single carpet in the place.
When I came back, I saw the inevitable distaste replaced by a grudging acceptance. This was where he would have been living for the next indeterminate amount of time, so he had best get used to it. The rest of the apartment was tasteful, so he could get over the living room.
I tossed him the linens and set to the couch. In bare moments, there were cushions in the air as I pulled out the iron bar. It was a couch no longer. "Go for it, kid." I stalked out of the living room into the gleaming chrome of my kitchen. I heard him trying to figure out how to how to get the sheets on the pull out, and I yelled, "I'm making coffee, you want?"
"Please, this has been a rather trying day." I shuddered to think what my brother would think when he walked in and found a random English guy on my couch…but I would worry about that when it happened.
The insta-coffee chose that moment to be finished, so I stalked back into the living room, where I nearly dropped it. Holmes was trying to get the fitted sheet over the mattress. Not a homemaker, our Mr. Holmes. He turned at my snort (yes, snort) of surprised laughter to glare at me again. The man was really fond of glaring at people.
"Here, you take the coffee; I'll do that. You'd probably hang yourself with them anyway." That last was muttered. I didn't want that glare again; I don't think I could have covered the laughter. I had the impression of being watched as I made up the bed, as if he was trying to learn from watching me. It was really creeping me out.
When I was done, I took back my coffee and sat down. He was obviously waiting for permission to do the same so I waved him into a chair.
"Tell me about yourself" he was looking at me over the rim of his mug. Instantly suspicious (that was the first direct thing he'd said to me since we met, and he wasn't screaming), I faced him squarely and said,
"Why don't you tell me about myself, Mr. Holmes." His eyes lit at the challenge, and he proceeded to tell me all about me.
"I have before me a woman of perhaps two and twenty. She is a student at Boston University, who recently colored her hair," I could hear just a hint of disdain; only women who were no better than they ought to be colored their hair in his time. "She is perhaps five feet and three inches, certainly no taller. She has the…distasteful…habit of snorting. She has vision problems, but doesn't wear her corrective lenses regularly. There is another person that comes and goes regularly in this flat, and she is very fond of a certain group of young women. Also," he said, his back to me, "The color of her eyes has been changed from blue to a shade of brown. I shall not ask how you accomplished that." He was done, apparently. And waiting for a reply.
"Not bad. I don't wear the glasses because I have contacts, little bits of plastic that you put on over your corneas, and one of my clear ones ripped this morning. Brown was all I had left. I assume you got BU from the mug. The group of young women are my friends from high school, and the other person that comes in and out regularly is my brother Richard. And about the hair. I lost a bet. I had to go blond for a week and I died it back to natural. I am five three and a half actually. But other than that, you're right, as always."
"I believe it is your turn." Gulp. I settled in to try and tell him all about him, but the doorbell rang. I jumped up, forgetting about the very hot coffee that ended up on my lap. I rushed to the door, stupidly, and to my great relief, it was Pip, the one person who could show up at the most opportune time and make it look like accident.
"What happened to you? And who's that?" she asked, indicating Holmes. Pip and I had known each other since we were ten, when she moved into the house across the street form me. She had very long dark curly hair, and greenish gold eyes. It was her super computer that had brought Mr. Holmes into our lives, well, her and Frank…but that is another story entirely.
"Spilled coffee…third degree burns…take me to ER…other stuff…I'll tell you on the way." She nodded, and took my arm. I turned back to Holmes, who had come to his feet and was looking rather perplexed, and said, " I'm gonna lock you in, don't open the door for anybody, got that? Well, let me back in, obviously…oh you get the point!" I let Pip drag me down the elevator.