No clothes, no weapons. I did the only thing I could think of: Shoved all the books off one of the wider shelves, dove through the opening.
A reptile tried to follow me, but its head got stuck, its claws punching books at me from the lower shelf. Unfortunately, a second one stomped up to me from my left, its mouth of sharp pointy teeth yawning open to bite a chunk off me.
I flinched, ready for the inevitable. Had this been the Doctor's cause of death? I wondered. Of course, the man's clothing had remained in one piece.
I opened my eyes to find a long needle-like piece of metal exploding from the back of the dinosaur's throat.
The point retreated, rough hands slamming the hilt of a rapier through the creature's skull.
My wife smiled and touched her scarification. `I'm still your wife.'
Under her cape, she wore two sword belts. Nothing else.
In a hurry to secure the area, I reached for her unused sword, but she pushed my hand away, and in one swift movement, skewered the lizard stuck in the shelves. It thundered to the floor. I looked over the balcony and found the third dinosaur belly up at the edge of the pool. All clear.
Without further ado, I dove into the pool.
I didn't know the first thing about pool maintenance, or how this one got cleaned, but I needed a bath, so I paddled in water muddied by dinosaur pheromones and whatever salmonella causing bacteria coats the outside of a reptile's body.
Eev joined me, and we swam ourselves clean, leaving blood and who knows what else floating in the water.
I flopped exhausted over the side, staring at carpet until Mrs. Wilson wrapped her body around me. I gave her an apologetic smile, and we made out in the water for awhile until something made a scuffing sound across the carpet.
We stared in shocked silence as a reptile crawled its way past the end of the bookshelves, ducking our heads down like commandos in a Vietnam movie, but then the beast just looked at us, with that rapier stuck hilt deep through its skull, and it flopped dead, staring at us with lifeless glassy eyes.
That killed the mood for us. We got out of there.
Still thinking in caveman mode, I dried myself off on a blanket from another bed inside the...spaceship.
Sufficiently dry by then, I took advantage of the costume shop, picking out the first set of clothes that caught my eye.
This "Doctor" person hadn't been too keen on denim, so I picked out a pair of khakis and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. I looked for briefs, but apparently our `MD' liked everything with lots of room on the inside, so I resigned myself to a pair of black boxers.
The guy also had little feet, but I found some flip flops that seemed adequate for my purposes.
Eve had been watching me the whole time, but she'd seen everything already. The only thing that bothered me was her playing with my clothes again. As Mark Twain once said, "Naked people have little or no influence in society."
I showed Eve into a nearby room with dressers stuffed to bursting with lady things, gesturing for her to try them on. She put the wrong stuff on her head. I had to actually show her how to dress like a woman.
Eve liked that a little too much, but the thought of the bodies decomposing near the entrance made me unwilling to try out the bed. I hugged myself, pointing down the hall.
She sighed and nodded, allowing me to select a blouse and skirt for her. They showed off a little too much, but I'm a guy, and she was used to wearing nothing anyway.
I stumbled across a bathroom, and after using it, noticed a door labeled hydroponics. Familiar with the concept from Star Trek, I opened the door and found a large garden inside. Immediately I showed Eve.
I hugged myself, pointed to the hall, pointed to the dirt. She nodded, so we dragged the big heavy lug down the twisting hallways.
As we did this, Eve sang a tune that reminded me of the chorus of Good Vibrations with the wrong notes, and mangled bits of the Memories song from CATS. I didn't want to mock a possible funeral dirge, so I kept my mouth shut.
The moment we reached a good burial plot, my bride stuck her fingers in an empty dirt patch, pulling out clod after clod of soil like some kind of pathetic dog burying a bone.
Although not brilliant, but I'm not that stupid. While she slowly scratched at the dirt, making pitiful whining howls like some kind of animal, I searched for a shovel.
A tool shed stood at the rear. The Doctor must have been an avid gardener, but had given it up at some point. Cobwebs covered a lot of things, including the shovel and a rack of books about gardening.
The moment I put my hand on the shovel, I again considered how this woman, my new wife, could really be my ancestor. Only someone related to me would try to metaphorically attempt to reinvent the square wheel. Not in this particular situation, to be sure, but many others.
I brought the shovel over, and got a fairly good sized hole going when Eve yanked the shovel out of my grip.
I thought she wanted to take over, but when I stepped away to look for a second shovel, she called to me, gesturing for me to dig in the dirt with my hands.
I shook my head violently.
They say it's wrong to interfere with other cultures, like you destroy it by introducing American ideas and values to it. People wouldn't be saying that if you had to live with them. Flush toilets. Dentists. Modern friggin' shovels.
I grabbed a spade and one of those long tree planting shovels that's not really good for digging graves Square wheels, but at least a bit more rounded on the corners.
I showed her the tools, then resumed shoveling with the other shovel.
She took the shovel away again.
I sighed and buried the end in the dirt, slumping on the floor. She, in the meantime, resumed digging with her hands. I could only stare at the floor in sullen silence.
Eve grabbed my hand, placing it on the hole, and I gave my head an even more violent shake.
She flexed her arm, to which I mimed pointing to an invisible watch. She didn't get it, so I gave her the Indian sign for sunrise and sunset that I learned a long time ago in Boy Scouts. I grabbed the spade and picked at the hole.
She jabbered at me for a whole minute, and I didn't understand a bit of it, except for the part where she hugged herself. Respect. That's a little too much respect for me.
Having enough of the whole thing, I got up and walked away, but as I neared the hallway, I heard her crying, and my heart just broke.
With a sigh, I walked back to her, struggling with emotions as I watched her weep and slowly pull the dirt away.
At last I gave up and joined her, pulling the dirt away with my hands, resolving to sneak in the trowel later when she wasn't looking. She sang a dirge that sounded like the Peanuts song, to which I just rolled my eyes.
I seriously wondered what happened to this Doctor person, and why he was dead. I'd thought about this lots of times, but I'd been too distracted with not getting killed to give it serious thought. What if I ended up dying like him? No way to determine the cause of death without the Doctor's body.
After scratching for a few minutes, I got some troweling in. Eev didn't stop me, she just whined and howled like a dog as she dug with her hands.
Ten minutes later, she cried and took the trowel, and I started back in with the shovel. She didn't stop that either.
After collapsing with tears pouring down her face, she took the other shovel and joined me, her bare calloused feet pounding on the shovel's other lip like she had boots on.
The dirt didn't go down six feet, more like four and a half, and we found a layer of white glowing stuff squirming on the bottom. This explained why cucumbers grew when the gardening tools had cobwebs on them.
With tears in her eyes, Eve hugged herself, pointed at the stuff and shook her head no.
Sighing, I hugged myself and pointed at the ceiling, you know, like his soul wasn't in his body.
She blinked in confusion, so I hugged myself, pointed at the corpse, and shook my head. I again gestured to the ceiling.
She responded by hugging me and nodding her head vigorously.
Heartened by my crude simplistic theology, she grabbed hold of her father's shroud, gesturing for me to do the same, and we dumped him the hole, staring down at the blankets.
I said a few words in honor of the dead.
Eev stared at me.
I picked up a clod of dirt and threw it on the body. She stared at that too. I got the idea that her people did that kind of thing while digging.
She bowed her head, mumbled something, then threw dirt on the body as well.
We buried him, then she ripped her blouse in ritual fashion and cried on my shoulder.
All that work with nothing since the bloody chicken made my stomach ache. I rubbed my belly, gesturing to the hallway, and she agreed that some comfort food would be appreciated.
Instead of following me down the tunnel to seek out food, she made a beeline for the place where the lizard corpses lay. I just rolled my eyes and followed.
As we progressed, I found a broom closet along one of the hallways, as well as a kitchen, though it seemed to be seldom used. I handed Eve a couple steak knives, making belly rubbing motions while pointing down the hall.
Still nauseous from all the blood and guts, I figured Eev could do whatever she wanted and I'd turn on the stove when she had the juiciest cuts selected.
I set about mopping up all the blood. The dinosaur blood caked instantly, and stuck on there thick. The closet had a hot water spout and a drain, and I kept having to change the water.
I had to put two scarves over my face to cope with the smell of loosed dinosaur bowels. My wife, in the meantime, created more messes with her chopping. I left that area for later cleanup.
Once Eve had a sizable dinosaur shoulder ready, I astonished her by operating the stove. I further astonished her by demonstrating storage of the remaining `steaks' in the refrigerator.
Unfortunately, I already found food in there, and the machine happened to be exactly the same size on the inside as on the outside.
Dr. Whats-its-name had stacked pizza boxes and unidentifiable food cartons on one shelf, crammed specimen jars, fish fingers and custard, and marmalade in the door, and something like an ostrich egg occupied one entire shelf. Vegetable matter decayed in a crisper, and I could almost swear I saw something move. Boxes with strange writing on them clogged the freezer.
Pizza sounded a lot better than Dino Burger at the moment, so I shared a few pieces of supreme and pepperoni with my partner. Eev emptied the rest of the box, and most of the next. One thing I can say, she wasn't the type to whine about her weight.
I ate a couple more pieces, until full, then stowed a chunk of dinosaur shoulder with the box. My woman, in the meantime, had been sliding her hand along the wall. When I glanced her way, a section of the paneling slid open with a hum, revealing a walk-in freezer.
"Hey!" I shouted.
She looked sorry to upset me, but I clapped my hands gleefully, then pantomimed storing meat.
Eev stared in confusion for a minute, then must have remembered the pizza, for when I returned to the entrance for a carcass, she picked up the other end, carrying it exactly where I wanted it.
We soon had the room cleared, and I mopped it into a liveable state. The library carpet, though, I had no clue about. I hadn't seen a single steam vac anywhere, and the pool seemed a lost cause.
I guessed that pools had drains at the bottom, you only had to shut off the water to get the water out...or so I imagined. I found a shutoff valve below a bust of Mozart, but the water just sat there. I left it alone.
About to pass out standing up, I abandoned housekeeping for the day, or whatever measurement of time it was, marching into the nearest bedroom. It had no sheets or blanket, and the bed smelled strongly of women's perfume, but I didn't care. I immediately flopped down and closed my eyes, too tired to think about Eve until I heard the soft sound of clothing dropping on the floor.
She tried to undress me and go at it again, but I shook my head, pantomiming sleep.
I pulled her to my side, arm around her bare shoulder. I thought she'd try something, but she appeared to be exhausted as well. Her head rested on me as we both drifted off to sleep.
A loud animal shriek awoke me from the early stages of REM sleep. I sat bolt upright and found Mrs. Wilson standing over a dead reptile with a steak knife stuck in its skull. It seemed another one had been lurking in the building. I asked if everything were okay. She pantomimed sleep, which I gladly obliged.
A few hours later, though, I heard a second monstrous shriek, and my woman screaming, so I jumped out of bed, staggering down the hall.
I suddenly noticed a cloud of smoke billowing through the tunnel, and one of those alarm bells like they have on submarines shrieked in my ears.
When I at last reached the entrance, I found Eve squatting naked next to yet another dinosaur carcass. She had built a roaring fire on the floor, consisting of wooden artifacts and books she'd dug up from somewhere on the premises.
I opened my mouth to yell at her about it, but just then a fire sprinkler came on, and my clothes became a wet rag.
She giggled at me, offering me a fried dinosaur drumstick, but I shook my head, sternly pantomiming no fires.
I cut a piece of the lizard's butt off with a serrated bread knife, demonstrating how to use the electric range in the kitchen (which she had thoughtlessly left on for who knows how long - every burner was glared red at me like some angry demon).
Eve responded with one of those yells that cavemen on TV do when they discover fire.
Few cabinets, every one of them crammed to bursting with items I couldn't recognize, shakers of glowing stuff with unreadable labels, paperboard boxes that suggested cereal but covered in gibberish and didn't fit the standard grocery sizes, bottles of colored fluids that could be wine or cooking oil, and a tiny collection of recognizable supplies like canola oil, salt and paprika. We had a skillet, the kind you could remove cooked eggs from by blowing on it, and spatulas, so we were in business. Or, rather, she was. Amazing how quickly she caught on.
I returned to her dead bonfire, staring at the sodden mess. Eve had taken shelves from something, dismantled a few antique chairs, tossed in a jewelry box and some papers for good measure, and then...all these books.
My gaze immediately jumped to a book cover that read `TARDIS Instruction Manual'.
Although badly charred, the middle could still be read. I tapped out the dying embers and stared at it.
Within the first few pages, I discovered I stood inside something called a T40 TARDIS, and that TARDIS meant Time and Relative Dimensions In Space. A diagram showed me where the buttons were, what did what...the unburnt portions did, at least. A cryptic line about the vehicle resetting to its original state when someone called a Time Lord perished, and something else about critical system failures if a replacement Time Lord were not found, but I didn't know what to make of it.
When I went to the bathroom, Eve followed me in. She had absolutely no idea how things like this worked, so I had to give a demonstration, resulting in her childishly playing with the flush handle.
I washed up and checked the kitchen to see what might be burning.
Dinosaur meat doesn't have safe cooking instructions. I rubbed some salt and olive oil on a chunk and attempted to bake it, but it didn't brown. The stuff blackened before looking even remotely done. I peeled off the skin, periodically stabbing the meat with a fork until it cooked through enough to stop bleeding, but didn't know if it were enough.
Eve wasn't much help. Inexperienced in safe dinosaur cooking, to her, it was always done.
I thought about dinosaur steak and eggs, but the egg in the fridge looked sketchy, so I settled for dinosaur meat by itself, of which I had plenty.
Not much flavor. Since `Doc' put the glowing blue stuff in his cabinets like they were paprika and seasoning anyway, I decided to be bold and sprinkle some on a corner of the steak.
It tasted of chocolate covered garlic covered rotten lettuce. If I knew where the trash can was, I would have tossed the bottle. The thought occurred to me that I should do some spring cleaning, but still couldn't shake the feeling of squatting in someone's house, and the owner would kill me. Already he'd be pissed about the books.
My wife joined me at the table. I didn't know how to ask if she had washed her hands.
She loved my cooking, grunting nonsense syllables as compliments.
Eve started by eating with her hands, but picked up the silverware once she saw me using it. Comical. At last I knew what Asian people feel when they see a Texan trying to use chopsticks. She bit her fork, went back to using her hands.
Since the meat needed something, I braved the blue stuff once more, and vowed to never do it again. Eve, on the other hand, loved it.
At first, she poured on too much, but after some displeased grimacing, she used it more moderately.
I remembered a pair of toothbrushes poking out of a cabinet in the bathroom. Out of desperate need to not kiss a woman with dog breath (and to not offend her with mine), I boiled the used implements in scalding hot water and gave Eve a lesson in oral hygiene. At first she didn't get it, eating the toothpaste and such, but after a little patient instruction, I witnessed a layer of plaque that would force a dentist into an early retirement vanish from her front teeth with a few simple scrubs.
My next immediate order of business: Figuring out how to get home.
I returned to the `Console Room', the entrance's description on the map I saw on page five, comparing the manual to the `console' with all the arcade accessories on it.
To be blunt, not very useful, like buying a Toyota Prius and being handed the instruction manual for a 1985 Tercel. I could only glean a general outline.
The book described something called a Time Rotor, but I only had a holographic image of a lava lamp, it only came on when I accidentally bumped something. The most information I got: It had something to do with time travel.
My own grandpa or not, what removing Eve from time did to history, or why we had dinosaurs existing side by side with cavemen fell well outside the scope of the material.
My woman wrapped her arm around my waist, staring at the book. I could tell she thought it a bunch of meaningless symbols.
The book described external cameras, which I really needed, but the console lacked the aforementioned activation switches.
Eve playfully spun a crank. I would have slapped her hand away, but didn't know what the hell the crank did anyway. Not like she could have made things any worse, or at least worse by my definition of the word.
Nothing in the manual or console told me when or where I was. I had dialogs on monitors, but they only showed hieroglyphics resembling Klingon. In the book, the symbols seemed decorative, like faux Elvish in someone's collection of fantasy paintings, but the console had them all over the place, and it seemed essential for the understanding of the machine, like a Japanese stereo. The presence of English in the manual at all baffled me. I could only guess by positioning on the console what device did what.
Eve snatched the book away, crumbling a couple pages to powder as she carelessly flipped through it. I didn't scold, the book hadn't helped anyway.
I figured my next move would be trial and error, but I was going to be scientific and careful about it. Eve had turned a crank, so I opened the door to see the result.
No change. We still sat in a desert, but a large dune had piled up around the door, so sand came spilling over the floor. I figured it helped soak up the blood anyway.
One monitor reminded me of video slots, a display of ten consecutive columns of faux Elvish that you could move up and down like tumblers on a bicycle lock. I rolled the counter on the end around, and the sand outside the door grew bigger. Rolling it down the other way made it shrink, so I could only assume it had something to do with years, but couldn't account for the discarded dinosaur head, and blood not being all over the place again (not that I minded). The symbols meant nothing to me, so I couldn't tell you the difference between July 4, 1776 and November 11, 1961.
This story would have been shorter if I hadn't been in a desert, and I could see Model T's and stuffy types dressed like the guy from the Monopoly box if I went back too far. Nope, nothing that simple.
As I flipped switches on a nearby panel, Mrs. Wilson held a live scorpion up to my face. I screamed like a pansy, yelling for her to throw it out. She, of course, found this hilarious.
I immediately grabbed a broom and swept the sand back outside, closing the door double quick. Eve's hands were empty, so I figured she'd tossed the critter when I wasn't looking.
I resolved to do my damnedest to relocate the box.
Clueless about the time control, I flipped a couple other switches just to flip them, opening the door again. I wished I had a monitor of the outside, but I didn't know where to find one. Nothing changed, just the same sand dunes and a dust storm blowing on the horizon.
Eve got bored, disappearing down the hallway as I fiddled with it some more.
I activated a sort of shortwave radio, which I could control with old fashioned dial knobs, volume and squelch levers, but got nothing but static on a ridiculously large range of bands and frequencies.
I thought for sure that the video game controller would get me somewhere, but it only scrolled through menus of gibberish and move an icon on a grid. The associated buttons seemed to relate to the windows on the screen, and I could use the Vic-20 keyboard to type on boxes, but when I typed anything cute like Mayflower 1492, or Lee's Summit, MO 1997, it didn't do anything, I assumed because I didn't phrase it in the form of a question. I spent several minutes scowling at the monitor as I moved around a cursor with the track ball.
Eve clomped back into the control room wearing a new outfit, red leather jacket over a orange shirt made from sown together rags, paired with a patchwork denim loincloth. She gestured to her clothes, tilting her head as if to say `What do you think?'
Honestly, not impressed. She clearly didn't use a regular needle and thread, yet another attempt to reinvent a perfectly good `wheel.'
I shrugged and nodded a lot to indicate approval. "You look nice." And I nodded a lot, trying to communicate approval. I would have said that if she had on a bunny suit or a clown costume. Who was she trying to impress? I supposed it better than bear skin.
I couldn't decipher Eve's reaction any more than I could decipher that crumbling instruction manual. She didn't seem to be super pleased nor one hundred percent happy.
She dug an Ipod out of her cleavage, waving it in my face. Don't know where it came from, but it had a full charge.
The previous owner had eclectic tastes. Beach Boys, Mozart, Iron Maiden, Parliament, Marilyn Manson, Statler Brothers, XIBIT, Snoop Dog, The Gospel Tabernacle Choir...and a bunch of foreign language tracks that needed a non-English character set.
Useless without headphones. I tried to tell her so.
Guess where those were.
At any rate, she had earbuds, and so I plugged them in, popping one in her ear as I pushed play on a random song.
Random unfortunately happened to be The Macarena.
Eve gasped, letting out an animal yell, nearly breaking the device as she jumped back, but then started making `I Have Discovered Fire' noises, doing some bizarre tribal dance (in my estimation, ten times better than the original dance). She was excited as people were when the song first came out, and all the more so because she'd never witnessed prerecorded music before.
She dug a piece of black chalk out of her jacket, scribbling on the wall. Not too happy about that, but when I discovered she wrote an actual language of some kind, I stopped being upset.
She pulled me over to the scribbles, pointing to each as she sounded them out. "Mall karenahs! Mall kareen karenas! Ay mock kurenicas!"
I felt like I had stumbled over a sort of Rosetta Stone, but couldn't figure out any use for this particular bit of information except establishing Mariachi bands at the beginning of time.
I stared at the symbols, stared at her, and as she jumped at the sounds of the Ramones, I got struck with a moment of uncharacteristic brilliance.
I wrote the symbols, sounding them out. She corrected me, and we had English letters next to caveman symbols and laughing at our awkward communication. B is for bird, I taught her, then spelled the word and drew a picture of one. Having some skill with chalk, I did a passable Big Bird, and the picture made her jump to her feet and yell.
"Big Bird!" she hollered, running down the hallway.
Satisfied she'd be busy for at least a few minutes, I returned my attention to the console. I found the scorpion crawling along the top of one of the panels, but didn't have anything safe to use to pick it up, so did my best to work around it.
I toggled through some screens and pushed a button, hoping nothing would break.
Nothing happened for a solid minute, then, as I walked around to the other side, the floor slanted under me. I open the door again, and I'm staring at stars. No landmarks, no hills, no sand...just stars. So this is the S in TARDIS, I thought.
The fact that I didn't get sucked out in space made me again wonder if it were merely a funhouse with malfunctioning dinosaur robots, actors in bear skins added for extra realism. I didn't believe in forcefields and artificial gravity. I leaned out the door to examine what appeared to be the Eagle or Crab Nebula, and noticed my hair flying around
I nearly fell into the void when a Sesame Street DVD got shoved in my face.
When Eve saw the stars, she got frightened and the DVD floated away. I had to grab it before it got sucked into a nearby oort cloud or whatever DVD's did in that part of space.
Eve gasped and grunted, and we had a little language lesson about space stuff.
When the novelty wore off (neither one of us wanted to try jumping out), I asked her where she got the DVD. She led me to a small den with a TV. Since Big Bird taught me so much about the English language when I was a kid, I popped it in and hoped for a breakthrough.
As retarded as I felt, I actually watched it with her, and kinda enjoyed myself, reliving a piece of my childhood without all the breaking things and yelling.
I put my arm around Eve, trying to forget how, as a child, my feet had dangled in the air as I tried to get my father's hands off my neck, how I heard Maria saying something to Telly about not being scared of the dark when sparkly bits drifted before my eyes.
When we got to the part with Big Bird complaining about freezing his nonexistent giblets off while waiting for Santa, I couldn't take anymore, returning to the console room.
The thing with all the menus seemed to bring results, so I toyed with it again, trying to make my selections as careful and as slight in difference from the previous as possible. For a moment, nothing happened. It only looked like one star had disappeared.
My woman returned from the den with dozens of silver DVD's sown to her vest and jacket. In between asking why she did it and where she got the thread, she interrupted my train of thought by waving a Barney DVD at me.
A moment later, something like an earthquake rocked the spaceship.
I opened the door, expecting Pompeii, but instead found myself surrounded by what appeared to be giant chrome salt shakers.
The things stood as tall as I was, but I found them as threatening as an idling engine block. It didn't make me scream or wet my borrowed pants, I didn't want to touch them, either.
They had no arms, only toilet plungers and stubby objects resembling fluorescent light bulb tubes poking out of their shells. Light bulbs flickered on their lid parts, mechanical eyeballs poking out of the front part of the lids, grating below the lids seeming to take on the shape of frowns.
Their eye stalks turned toward me, each one of them pointing their fluorescent tubes and plungers at me.
Before I could do anything to stop her, Mrs. Wilson hurled a clod of sand and the scorpion at one of those things, inspiring a strangled noise reminding me of a man drowning inside a motorized golf cart.
The others responded with the sound of a dozen angry people screaming through scuba regulators.
Light flashed. Something exploded.
My woman fell to the floor with a scream.