A/N: More yet to come. Sorry, it feels a bit short for some reason. -csf


Three.

Ahead of me in the narrow underground tunnel leading away from Baker Street, Sherlock slows perceptibly as he studies the wall around us; wrapped in a tight loop, warping into a concave ceiling made in the same brick and mortar that encases us. The detective glances my way, enticing my curiosity without ever uttering a word – because he can. I come closer, attracted by the mystery he touches restlessly under his fingertips. Some gravel falls at his feet as a result, revealing the edges of a dusty metal grid, a vent in the brick wall.

'How in the world—? We're buried six feet under right now!'

'Definitely more', Sherlock corrects. Not phased by the notion of being buried alive. More alive now that we can tell there are built in vents to aerate the confined space. As I wonder how can they possibly still be functional, a small red spider emerges crankily from the openings. Each point leg edging forward in a numb yet mechanic walk of eight limbs and one mind. I recede slightly, but not the arachnid. Unaccustomed to human interference, it fears us not at all.

I guess that settles it. The vents are functional, leading shooting shafts to fresh air reserves somewhere above us.

Street gutters? Strangers' basements or back yards? Hollow air conducts in old houses like 221 Baker Street? I inch forward again after the spider, as if I could only squint and see beyond the metal grid.

Nearby, Sherlock glances at his wristwatch and comments placidly: 'Oh.'

I turn ominously. 'Oh?' I repeat.

'Come here, John.' My friend grabs me by the arm and grapples me into a tight, perfunctory embrace. My face ends up pressed firmly against the soft wool fabric of his long coat, his arms wound around my frame, keeping me locked in place. The torch illuminates us from an awkward side angle as Sherlock holds his phone against my shoulder, white light striking his features in sharp planes and dark hollows.

'What the—?'

Then I start feeling it too. A distant thrum, a vibration born out of the dirt ground and the rusty red bricks themselves, accumulating in frequency and intensity, becoming the stormy rolling clasp of thunder all around us, inside us, vibrating us into unsteady stance. Sherlock clasps me closer as if the intense storm could indeed sweep me away from his grasp. I stop trying to pull from the embrace and envelope him in the same tight fascination as the mortar keeps dropping as crumbled dust on our heads, loosening from the old tunnel. I wonder fleetingly if we are destined to meet our end here, buried alive, but I know – Sherlock a steady presence under my fingers – that we will pull through together, that we are the only witnesses amidst the collapse of the known universe.

The vertiginous sound is near deafening around us before it starts subsiding measuredly, like a desert storm edging away over the sand planes. I look on up to my friend's face, finding his eyes abnormally large. Fear, then. No matter what he acts like, he's human, he too feared as we survived the onslaught of danger around us, absolutely defenceless.

'What the hell was that?' I ask only as I'm sure my voice can override the receding thunders.

'Underground carriages, John. I counted six of them, but may have been wrong. How many did you count?'

I blink. None. Just one endless roar, mate.

'Next time then', he dismisses the query politely.

'Where are we? Parallel to the Underground network?'

The detective frowns. 'Why ask a question only to answer it in the same breath?'

'Well, I didn't know if I was right. Was I right?'

'This time, yes. We should have paid attention to the spider.'

'The spider?'

'Emerging this side for safety, clever little thing. Yes, the spider. It has grown accustomed to the Underground passing.'

I squint, look around in the dusty but empty tunnel on our side.

'So we're on the other side of an Underground track? Which one? How far from Baker Street have we come?'

He only smirks. Then he presently releases me – somehow I hadn't realised we were still hugging into a tight ball of detective and blogger – and presses on as if it were just another mid night stroll.

'Come, John! Three minutes until the next Underground!'

I hurry after him, sufficiently motivated by the specific time warning.

.

'Here we are, John.'

The words uttered by the detective make no justice to the scene we have laid out before us as we emerge from a meagre, flimsy door on the wall, no lock, at the end of the long brick road and tunnel.

"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Sherlock stares, definitely puzzled by the quote. No time to explain.

What we have before us takes us to a different land altogether.

It's a city. Or part of it. Under huge arched vaults of stone, brick and mortar, the main artery of a cobble stone street, or a segment of it. Store fronts line up on either side, along with front doors to half buried homes that grow no higher than a storey or two before they disappear into the brick and mortar. The top of those constructions engulfed by the abode ceiling suspended over the whole scene. The cast iron street lamps – gas lamps, perhaps – are too suck into the greedy vaults above, their tips merging into the brick patchwork. There is a lonesome hansom abandoned on the other side of the street, no horse. A small public fountain with a tap and a bowl to feed water to the waiting horses. There's a wooden stand with forlorn fabric stretched over it where some newspaper stacks still stand, shrivelled by time and damp. All stopped in time, a silent suspension, an eternal wait for a restart that will never come.

The colours are dusty, but alluring, vibrant yet. The atmosphere is stale, but not suffocating. It reminds me of a film set, but more realistic. There is plaster flaking off a nearby house, a crack on the window display of the next store, a lost shoe abandoned by the side of the road and I can still tell by the sign that The Strand Magazine's first volume was dated March 1891. Wow, that's close to 130 years ago...

I notice with a slight shock that there is no living being in sight. But how could it be otherwise? We are not visiting a lost civilisation under the city, but a buried segment of Victorian London, forgotten in the collective memory, little more than a hamlet of old nestled houses among the complex modern layers of London's Underground system?

Finally I realise also that I'm capable of discerning all this because there is light. Not the street lamps, of course not. However faithful the air ventilation from the connected tunnels or the surface above that keep us from running out of oxygen and passing out flat on the cobble stones, there is also electricity entering the site. At every centre vault along the tunnelled old street – and there are about four or five of those, sturdy looking – hang cobwebbed veiled chandeliers, wring in thick iron metal.

'This can't be true', I mutter, dazzled. Too dazzled, in fact, to blink. I want to take it all in, childishly fearing that if I blink I may be awaken, back in my bedroom.

It's a good dream. A better dream.

'Breathe, John. There's enough air', Sherlock reminds me, sensibly.

He's also smug, the bastard, knowing he's done it again, pulled a neat trick out of his magician's hat, surprised me by the sheer impossibility of my senses.

I follow the road with my eyes up to the murkier shadows ahead. There's an obstruction beyond a low bridge, it seems. Where it once lead, it is no longer accessible.

'Sherlock, how can this be? How did this survive?'

We've been walking about on the main street, aimlessly, just gazing around us. The detective shakes himself awake like a dog shaking off a flea. Then, contemplating me, he admits: 'Let's find out. Come, John.'

.

We're both lost tourists travelling in time and space, without the handy aid of a time machine. That doesn't stop Sherlock's fascination with the nearest window shop front, where wooden mannequins still rest their eternal stillness enveloped in fine tweed among further veils of arachnid silk. Sherlock tries the front door handle. It's open and the crystalline silver chime of a doorbell clinks every time he opens and shuts the door.

I stop the swaying door – solid oak, one loose hinge, collapsing from its frame – and keep the detective on the first mosaic inlaid step. There are a few notices attached on the door that catch my eye. Buried deep in the old city specimen the ink and paper have not faded much, secluded from daylight and chemicals. I can still read the gist of it. Among "The Great Chandler; magician, acrobat, contortionist and mesmeriser of wild beasts; acts that will spook the heartiest of men" and "studious young scholar gentleman of good birth searches to fill a vacancy of honest nature", there is a thicker paper in HM Queen Victoria's arms emblazoned stationery stating "Fever Nest; keep out of premises; Her Majesty's surveyors have deemed the waters insalubrious and rejected them for human consumption this day; heavy fines and imprisonment may be delivered to those who disobey the monarch's ruling and defy the quarantine".

What on earth? We just left 2020's pandemic virus to land headfirst into a Victorian quarantine zone?

'Typhoid, John. Not our present day virus and not a disease that will survive in abandoned premises to this date. It's safe.'

I nod, still bewildered. This seems straight out of a contrived case study scenario in med school.

'Typhoid fever. That's why this place was abandoned in a hurry?'

'By Royal decree. Progress and modernity carried on around it, buried it into some sort of time capsule for a better day's revisit, yet it fell out of collective memory at some point. Deleted out of maps entirely, in time.'

'Wow, this is... brilliant.'

'Indeed.' He hums like a content feline purring, I notice. He can't tell me he's not enjoying this, that he's putting himself through this for my benefit alone.

'As far as we know, only you, I, and whoever pays the electric bill for those overhead lamps knows this is down here.'

'Not entirely sure there is an electric meter running off those lamps, John.'

'Well...'

'Well, what?' Sherlock's eyes narrow as he reads off my body language.

'Are we exploring this place or not?' I dare.

'Most assuredly we are, my dear Watson.'

.

TBC