I screwed with time.
That's not a metaphor. I literally screwed it.
Have you seen One Hundred Percent Lean Range Free Dinosaur at McDonalds?
Yeah. That was me. I put it there.
That, and worse.
The whole thing started with a blue box, and a dead man.
I first saw the box outside the bathroom window of my basement level studio apartment.
I wish I would have just left the damned thing alone.
I was taking a shower, and I glimpsed it through a crack in the Venetian blinds.
I don't know what you have where you live, but my apartment actually has a window inside the shower, and it overlooks a little wall, which I guess is supposed to keep people from trying to peek in.
I cracked a couple slats open and saw the corner of the thing behind this concrete partition. Figuring it was some tool chest or utility box left behind by the landscaping crew, I washed my hair and continued my morning ritual of eating breakfast and getting things together for work.
However, when I got in my car, I found myself staring over my building's retaining wall, attempting to examine the box more carefully.
It was then that I noticed that it wasn't a tool box at all, but rather something like a tall blue shed or a phone booth. And as I'm gawking at this thing, the doors of this box suddenly swing inwards, and I see a man in a suit coat spilling onto the dirt.
Although I generally avoid helping strange freakish people in unusual situations telling of their deranged psychological state, I decided it my moral obligation to at least climb over the rock wall and call for an ambulance, or, in case of crazy, check if one is necessary.
The guy was well dressed. He had on slacks, a button up shirt, a vest, and a tie, something that nobody at my complex ever wore. He looked like an older guy, wrinkled, his white hair unkempt. He had fallen on his face, but now lay on his back. He didn't look like he was breathing.
I checked his pulse and found none. I also put my head to his chest to see if he had any air going at all.
Nothing.
I knew first aid, but there wasn't much I could do with this. I called 9-11, telling them the address and location of the body, and as I'm waiting for the ambulance, I start staring into the "shed."
At first, it doesn't compute. The blue box is only a certain width, but I can see a huge room inside.
Naturally, I step through the opening to take a look around.
It was a white room, its walls covered in circular panels looking like inverted Frisbees. In the center I saw a six sided device reminding me of arcade machines. One side resembled the Tron video game, with a glowing monitor, an airplane joystick and a white track ball. The other side had a red lever, a brown and yellow keyboard styled after the Commodore Vic-20, and a set of buttons configured to look like a Sega Saturn control.
It all looked silly, like the man had some kind of mobile arcade, so I pulled the red lever and pushed a few buttons.
The door closed, the entire structure made a lot of grinding sounds, but I thought it part of the entertainment. Arcades are always loud and noisy.
I gave the controls a serious whirl, attempting to start a game on one of the many monitors sticking out of the console, but my attempts resulted in a lot of confusing computer menus, and I came to the conclusion I was playing one of those flight simulation things that you need to read a three thousand page manual to figure out.
I gave it up, deciding to explore the rest of the "building".
I wandered down a hallway, turned a corner, then got lost in a maze of identical looking white hallways.
Along the way, I found a library that, strangely enough, had a swimming pool at one end. There was also a bowling alley, billiards, and a chemistry lab.
At the end of a hallway, I came across a door with a vaguely triangular shape, which slid open like a supermarket entrance when I rested my hand on a square of metal next to it.
Inside I found a sort of warehouse, filled to near bursting with a number of expensive looking objects, half of them looking like the kind of things you'd see in a Voodoo shop on the French Quarter, like those banana headed wooden god sculptures from the Republic of Benin, black candles and a human skull with horns growing from the cranium.
But there were also shiny toys scattered among these creepy artifacts, devices that looked like tricorders from Star Trek, and a Seurat painting that couldn't possibly be anything other than a forgery.
After a few moments of careful examination, I decided that I was looking at a bunch of movie props, playing with them accordingly.
I had ceased to wonder why this big thing existed inside a tiny little phone booth, having rationalized it as being a sort of funhouse where mirrors reflect a basement and the floor drops you downstairs to a bigger room.
Of course it didn't make sense because I'd been in that apartment for more than a year, and I would have noticed a trapdoor on the grass, especially one leading to an unknown location below a basement studio, but it was the only explanation I could think of to fill in the gap.
To the best of my knowledge, things like alternate dimensions and time travel only existed on TV, and it wasn't the kind of thing that happened to you in real life. This is why I picked up a fancy looking silver egg covered in buttons and flashing lights, playfully pressing whatever item interested my finger.
The thing let out a steady beeping noise, like it were counting down to something, and I laughed as I imagined this fake alien hand grenade being tossed by an actor in a rubber suit.
As the beeping got angrier, counting down to one, I just smiled and rolled it in my hands, turning it over to look for the manufacturer's stamp.
A moment later, it let out a series of animal sounds and exploded.
I suddenly found myself coated from head to foot with a greasy viscous fluid the same color and consistency of old petroleum jelly, a clingy brown-yellow ooze that reeked of spoiled tuna.
The stuff had gotten into every crevice of my clothes, and into my eyes, so I was temporarily blinded for several minutes, staggering and stumbling around through unfamiliar bric-a-brac in a frantic search for the pool, or any sort of water bearing receptacle.
My hands found a scarf, which I ruined thoroughly as I blinked several times in attempts to clear my burning eyes.
I felt around the edges of a round thing, like a kind of antique heater unit with a knob on one end and lightbulbs up top, then a suitcase that I was sure to find first aid supplies inside.
I was wrong. The thing held nothing but weird socket wrenches with light bulbs on them.
Determined to find the pool, I zombie shuffled further, knocking over something that looked like a cel phone to my watery eyes.
Immediately, I heard a voice speaking to...someone, and I could tell it was a recording. The voice was British, sounding like a very stern and serious version of the GEICO reptile.
"I am the Doctor," he said. "If you're listening to this, it means I have died."
Doctor? I thought. Of what?
I didn't get an answer.
"Martha," the voice continued. "Time lords aren't always open in sharing their affection. Although we're not of the same species, I still...have these feelings for you. Had, actually. Past tense. No, no. That's not what I meant. It's past tense because I'm dead."
I heard him mutter something about redoing the tape. "If things had been different, I imagine I would have even taken you to see Jay Z, Ice T, and whatever other letters of the alphabet you kept going on about. But never mind that now. Martha, I love you. Remember that. I always love you." He paused at this point, and I could hear him swallow. "Maybe not always, since I've lived hundreds of years before you were born, but-"
My eyes were burning, and I couldn't take any more of this guy's blundering, so I stumbled on, knocking over a metal box, one which also had a recording of a British guy, this one a plodding, lilting voice with very little vocal variety.
"I am the Doctor," he said. "Sarah..."
Feeling like I were in a toy store after a bratty child had squeezed all the sound and music toys, I quickly staggered on, kicking over another device.
When I saw the man, I nearly had a heart attack.
It was some crazy guy with a big Jay Leno sized chin and a bow tie. "I am the Doctor," he said, launching into another farewell speech. I thought he'd jump me, or at least acknowledge my existence or tell me to get lost, but he just kept on talking, so I figured him to be a sort of theme park automoton and went on with my stumbling.
Great, I was thinking. I'm in the middle of the convention for doctors who are about to die.
The stuff...whatever it was, filled my nostrils and gave me headaches. The whole room seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
Somehow I found the door again, and I was groping my way down the bubbles along the hallway beyond.
I don't know how many rooms I stumbled through with bleary eyes, knocking over queer artifacts and wiping slime on anything that resembled a towel. I crossed an intersection, then a T-joint, then my eyes beheld something that nearly sent my heart into an arrythmia again.
It was a man in a dark suit, and he had a squid for a head.
The thing, whatever it was, had these huge baleful eyes, and it seemed to glare at me as the giant spaghetti noodles it had for a face quivered and squirmed independently of one another.
The guy or thing had a sort of glowing ball in its hand, and it was pointing it at me.
For several seconds I stared at it, and it stared at me, tilting its head in puzzlement, neither of us saying a word.
Since it didn't make any move to communicate, I assumed it to be another funhouse automoton. "And me without a fork," I joked.
A blob of smelly junk rolled across my bloodshot eyes, and when I blinked, the thing was gone.
Eventually I found the library pool, and fell, rather than dove into it. Being a vaguely petroleum based product, the stuff of course did not come out easily, but at last my eyes were clearing.
I swam around in the water for quite some time, rubbing my eyes and trying to shake the stuff off, but I soon gave up and climbed out, trailing water everywhere as I wandered the halls, attempting to locate the entrance of the wretched place.
At long last I did, and after a few minutes of poking and fumbling, I found the door lever, and that's when things got a whole hell of a lot worse.
The very instant the doors swung open, a big green thing the size of a giant great Dane knocked me against the "arcade machine", and a mouth of razor sharp teeth was breathing its hot smelly breath in my face.
The thing sniffs, shrieks at me, then tackles me against the wall, and I see five others stomping in, sniffing around, growling. I get thrown against something else, and everything goes dark.
