Then, she began to breathe and live,
and every moment took her to a place where goodbyes were hard to come by.
she was in love, but not in love with someone or something, she was in love with her life.
and for the first time, in a long time,
everything was inspiring.
- R. M. Drake.
and every moment took her to a place where goodbyes were hard to come by.
she was in love, but not in love with someone or something, she was in love with her life.
and for the first time, in a long time,
everything was inspiring.
- R. M. Drake.
Prologue
Lizzie sat on a chair that was probably a bit too big for a six-year-old, since her feet couldn’t touch the ground and were left dangling in the air. She was watching the sunlight streaming in through the window, fascinated with how it made the buckles on her shoes glimmer and shine. Jenny had told her to put on these shoes on because they were her best pair, and they made her look ‘smart.’ This was the same Jenny that called her Elizabeth, so Lizzie thought she was a bit posh and didn’t like puppies or ice cream or fun.
Lizzie watched her shoes because she didn’t want to look out the window – all the other children were playing outside, in the afternoon summer sun, and she wanted nothing more than to join in, but she wasn’t allowed. She thought it was probably Jenny’s way of being nasty to her, because it didn’t make any sense – she hadn’t done anything wrong. Even though this wasn’t her real home, Lizzie still liked the other children, but she didn’t always join in. Sometimes they just didn’t want her.
The office was dusty, and Lizzie watched as the particles of dust floated and fell through the air. She reached out to touch them, but they flew just out of reach whenever she tried. Eventually, she gave up and slumped backwards in the chair, bored, and waiting for Jenny to come back and tell her why she had to sit here alone.
The door opened, and Jenny walked in. She looked down upon Lizzie, as if Lizzie were an alien. She had not come alone.
“Elizabeth – this is Maggie. She wants to talk with you.”
Lizzie had learned that there wouldn’t be any point in replying. Whatever Jenny wanted would happen anyway, so she waited, in silence.
The woman who pulled up a chair opposite her was older than Jenny. Lizzie liked her patterned cardigan. Unlike Jenny, this lady didn’t talk to her as if she were stupid.
“Hello Lizzie,” Maggie smiled at her. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” Lizzie replied, still slightly unsettled by how friendly this woman called Maggie was being. “How are you?”
The only reason she responded that way was because that’s what adults told her to say.
“I’m very well, thank you. Have you been enjoying the sunny weather?”
“It’s alright,” Lizzie said. “I can go and play outside then. But I like the rain too.”
“Do you?”
“Without rain – things wouldn’t grow.”
The woman-called-Maggie hesitated for a second. “Yes – well done. Now – what sort of things do you like doing, Lizzie?”
“Erm… I like television and I like music, and also like to read lots of books. Also, I like dogs, but only small ones. The big ones are scary. I like cats more than dogs. They’re nicer and we get along better.”
“Now then, Lizzie. My name is Maggie – and, I can’t be sure, but someone tells me that you’re a bit sad.”
Lizzie watched her shoes because she didn’t want to look out the window – all the other children were playing outside, in the afternoon summer sun, and she wanted nothing more than to join in, but she wasn’t allowed. She thought it was probably Jenny’s way of being nasty to her, because it didn’t make any sense – she hadn’t done anything wrong. Even though this wasn’t her real home, Lizzie still liked the other children, but she didn’t always join in. Sometimes they just didn’t want her.
The office was dusty, and Lizzie watched as the particles of dust floated and fell through the air. She reached out to touch them, but they flew just out of reach whenever she tried. Eventually, she gave up and slumped backwards in the chair, bored, and waiting for Jenny to come back and tell her why she had to sit here alone.
The door opened, and Jenny walked in. She looked down upon Lizzie, as if Lizzie were an alien. She had not come alone.
“Elizabeth – this is Maggie. She wants to talk with you.”
Lizzie had learned that there wouldn’t be any point in replying. Whatever Jenny wanted would happen anyway, so she waited, in silence.
The woman who pulled up a chair opposite her was older than Jenny. Lizzie liked her patterned cardigan. Unlike Jenny, this lady didn’t talk to her as if she were stupid.
“Hello Lizzie,” Maggie smiled at her. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” Lizzie replied, still slightly unsettled by how friendly this woman called Maggie was being. “How are you?”
The only reason she responded that way was because that’s what adults told her to say.
“I’m very well, thank you. Have you been enjoying the sunny weather?”
“It’s alright,” Lizzie said. “I can go and play outside then. But I like the rain too.”
“Do you?”
“Without rain – things wouldn’t grow.”
The woman-called-Maggie hesitated for a second. “Yes – well done. Now – what sort of things do you like doing, Lizzie?”
“Erm… I like television and I like music, and also like to read lots of books. Also, I like dogs, but only small ones. The big ones are scary. I like cats more than dogs. They’re nicer and we get along better.”
“Now then, Lizzie. My name is Maggie – and, I can’t be sure, but someone tells me that you’re a bit sad.”
THE EIGHTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES
SERIES 5 - EPISODE 1
HALF THE WORLD AWAY
WRITTEN BY Peter Darwin
“Hello?”
Lizzie was jolted awake from her daydream.
“Oh – er – I am so sorry, Mrs Smith.”
She stood up quickly, because she wasn’t particularly up for losing her job.
“Away with the fairies again, Elizabeth?”
To be fair, to kill hours of boredom, yes, she had been away with the fairies. Her boss (not Mrs Smith) tended to leave her to it, while he went off and did whatever it was the people like him did. It meant that Lizzie saw the inside of the café more than anything else, due to the fact that, barring the girl who came in for a Saturday job, she was the café’s sole fulltime employee.
“Something like that. What can I get for you, Mrs Smith?”
“My usual, please.”
She knew exactly what that “usual” was, due to the fact she served it to Mrs. Smith every Wednesday morning at about half ten-ish, give or take the cooperation of Mrs Smith’s springer spaniels. Her tea would require just a ‘dribble’ of milk, and a slice of carrot cake to go with it.
Since Mrs Smith also pulled a blinder of a question with each visit to the café, Lizzie awaited, with bated breath, for said question to arise.
“So, Elizabeth.”
Here we go.
“What are you going to do with your life?”
And there it was. Mrs Smith knew it irritated her, and yet she always posed the same question every single time. Lizzie resented her enquiries for a number of reasons:
After spending so long watching this particular middle class wife of a doctor, who instead of drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, seemed to drink from the fountain of eternal 60-something, Lizzie had realised that Mrs Smith rather liked dogs. Lizzie was more of a cat person herself.
Not unexpectedly Mrs Smith responded with great enthusiasm! “Well, I had to take Jasper to the vets. He required some inoculations. And Peter is as feisty as ever. He’s so tricky to take for a walk, goes straight for the pheasants! But it’s always worth it! I do love him.”
“There we go,” Lizzie passed over the mug, doing her best not-real-smile. “Call me over if you need anything.”
Lizzie partly said this last bit just to wind her up, knowing full well that Mrs Smith would desire nothing more than to call her over and complain about something petty, while expressing her profound concern about Lizzie allowing her standards to slip.
“I will,” nodded Mrs. Smith, a grim look on her face, as she withdrew to the corner by the window where she could see her dogs. Lizzie pitied anyone who might attempt to sit in Mrs Smith’s corner seat. It had become her territory, her place, and no one else would dare even attempt to annex it from her, no matter how unwittingly.
Lizzie had grown accustomed to the habits and behaviours of each of her café regulars. She knew their orders – what they ate, what they drank, whether they took milk or sugar– and whether they would come in pairs, or alone. In fact, for a lowly waitress who merely poured the tea and coffee, and cut and served the cake, Lizzie was privy to more knowledge than perhaps she should be. People gave away a lot more during everyday conversation than they realized. Not that any of it was of particular concern to her – but still….
It was a nice little tea room. Lizzie would even have gone so far as to say that if she didn’t spend so many waking hours in here, she would love it. It was a cosy little shop, its walls hung with framed paintings of pretty country scenes, of the harvest, and of shooting parties, in either watercolour or oil. An eclectic assortment of ornaments decorated its oak shelves as well as the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace. The shop’s entire trade came from customers shopping in the little market town.
Lizzie realized rather quickly after she started working here that she spent so much of her time just doing nothing. She was often left alone with her teacakes; left alone to find some way of occupying herself.
Sometimes she loved that part of it.
Sometimes she just wanted to get out
Lizzie was jolted awake from her daydream.
“Oh – er – I am so sorry, Mrs Smith.”
She stood up quickly, because she wasn’t particularly up for losing her job.
“Away with the fairies again, Elizabeth?”
To be fair, to kill hours of boredom, yes, she had been away with the fairies. Her boss (not Mrs Smith) tended to leave her to it, while he went off and did whatever it was the people like him did. It meant that Lizzie saw the inside of the café more than anything else, due to the fact that, barring the girl who came in for a Saturday job, she was the café’s sole fulltime employee.
“Something like that. What can I get for you, Mrs Smith?”
“My usual, please.”
She knew exactly what that “usual” was, due to the fact she served it to Mrs. Smith every Wednesday morning at about half ten-ish, give or take the cooperation of Mrs Smith’s springer spaniels. Her tea would require just a ‘dribble’ of milk, and a slice of carrot cake to go with it.
Since Mrs Smith also pulled a blinder of a question with each visit to the café, Lizzie awaited, with bated breath, for said question to arise.
“So, Elizabeth.”
Here we go.
“What are you going to do with your life?”
And there it was. Mrs Smith knew it irritated her, and yet she always posed the same question every single time. Lizzie resented her enquiries for a number of reasons:
- It was as if Mrs Smith were deliberately trying to make her feel guilty about something she couldn’t do anything about, and…
- … if Mrs Smith actually cared about “Elizabeth’s” situation, she might understand that perhaps the vote Mrs Smith took part in every 5 years at the polls was not helping “Elizabeth” at all. And, furthermore…
- Mrs Smith was renowned for being particularly harsh on anyone from the estate, where she knew Lizzie lived.
After spending so long watching this particular middle class wife of a doctor, who instead of drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, seemed to drink from the fountain of eternal 60-something, Lizzie had realised that Mrs Smith rather liked dogs. Lizzie was more of a cat person herself.
Not unexpectedly Mrs Smith responded with great enthusiasm! “Well, I had to take Jasper to the vets. He required some inoculations. And Peter is as feisty as ever. He’s so tricky to take for a walk, goes straight for the pheasants! But it’s always worth it! I do love him.”
“There we go,” Lizzie passed over the mug, doing her best not-real-smile. “Call me over if you need anything.”
Lizzie partly said this last bit just to wind her up, knowing full well that Mrs Smith would desire nothing more than to call her over and complain about something petty, while expressing her profound concern about Lizzie allowing her standards to slip.
“I will,” nodded Mrs. Smith, a grim look on her face, as she withdrew to the corner by the window where she could see her dogs. Lizzie pitied anyone who might attempt to sit in Mrs Smith’s corner seat. It had become her territory, her place, and no one else would dare even attempt to annex it from her, no matter how unwittingly.
Lizzie had grown accustomed to the habits and behaviours of each of her café regulars. She knew their orders – what they ate, what they drank, whether they took milk or sugar– and whether they would come in pairs, or alone. In fact, for a lowly waitress who merely poured the tea and coffee, and cut and served the cake, Lizzie was privy to more knowledge than perhaps she should be. People gave away a lot more during everyday conversation than they realized. Not that any of it was of particular concern to her – but still….
It was a nice little tea room. Lizzie would even have gone so far as to say that if she didn’t spend so many waking hours in here, she would love it. It was a cosy little shop, its walls hung with framed paintings of pretty country scenes, of the harvest, and of shooting parties, in either watercolour or oil. An eclectic assortment of ornaments decorated its oak shelves as well as the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace. The shop’s entire trade came from customers shopping in the little market town.
Lizzie realized rather quickly after she started working here that she spent so much of her time just doing nothing. She was often left alone with her teacakes; left alone to find some way of occupying herself.
Sometimes she loved that part of it.
Sometimes she just wanted to get out
***
5 o’clock eventually came.
She then set the alarm, installed a few years back, stepped out into the evening air, and locked the door behind her. It was summer, and the weather was warm and sleepy, like the town itself. Dunsworth was not the sort of place for anyone looking for thrills and exhilaration. There was a bus stop, just down the street, where you could catch a bus that went right up to the edge of the estate. It was a bus she could take, but rarely did because she enjoyed the walk; it wasn’t far.
Dunsworth was dotted with small cafés, and boutiques, and general gift shops for anyone who came to enjoy the typical middle England life, with an old castle looking down from on the top of the hill. Dunsworth had been twinned with a town in Germany and another in Italy. Recently, it had won the “Britain in Bloom” competition three years in a row, and another five wins before that. There were a number of retired couples who lived there, and some young families whose dad was likely a banker in the city or whose mum babysat for the lord of the manor. They all lived quietly, and contentedly.
It was quiet. Except – not always. Because there was…the estate.
Lizzie’s former home, once situated on the outskirts of Dunsworth, was no longer on the outskirts of Dunsworth. Seven years ago, the council had made the decision to build a council estate there instead.
The council would’ve gotten a friendlier reaction had they decided to kick a nest of very angry wasps.
There was an immediate uproar from the legions of pensioners. Lizzie, at the time, was still in school, still hating school, and remembered it well. There were protests….well, not really protests, more like a few disgruntled elderly ladies who stood outside the library, holding hand- painted protest signs. There was rioting… well, again, not really rioting, more a matter of angry planning in the café. There were petitions and there were letters to the council. The council retorted with a perfectly understandable response: They needed housing. There wasn’t enough of it.
It was at this point that Lizzie first began to dislike the residents of Dunsworth and had not-so-fervently celebrated when she finally left to study history at Durham. The care home where she had grown up was delighted for her; her teachers were delighted.
Student life, it transpired, was not for her. The endless partying was nauseating.
However, it seemed you can do whatever you want at university and there’s usually no positive outcome when you graduate. Ever. No jobs. At all. Especially for people with history degrees. It was because of this non-positive outcome, that Lizzie had come back to stay in the town she’d grown up in and, after getting the job in the café, had found asylum in one of the properties on the estate. It was only meant to be a temporary measure until something better came up.
But nothing better had come up.
She would stand at the edge of the valley – there was a sort of observational area, fenced off, where one could sit on a bench, and look out into the distance. The view was beautiful, and it was possible to sit there and watch the sunset, over fields and distant cottages and great tall oak trees.
Even when there seemed like there would never be a chance to escape her present existence, she could come here and dream for ten minutes, before she had to return to her reality.
She stopped this particular evening, and sat for five minutes, letting the rest of the world pass her by. She could do that– just sit, and drink in the view before her each evening after work. The sunsets were always magical. Now June had passed, and the nights would start to draw in a little earlier, meaning she could look forward to that magic more and more, especially after long and pointless days at work.
On this evening, only five minutes passed and Lizzie left the bench earlier than usual. She wanted to pay someone a visit.
***
Lizzie still had a key to the house where she had grown up, because now as a “responsible” adult, she was always the one on cat feeding duty and plant watering duty whenever Maggie went away, which was rare, but occasionally she’d go and stay with her children.
The hallway was cramped – all the houses on the estate were small, and the flats were even smaller. A staircase led upstairs, and after one of Maggie’s hearty meals, one would have to breathe in deeply to get past the chest of drawers on the way through the hallway and into the kitchen.
Lizzie hung up her coat, and walked through into the kitchen, where Maggie stood fiddling with the oven.
“Oh, hello!” Maggie called over. “Just putting the tea on. Do you want some, or will you be off?” Maggie murmured. “Honestly, this oven is five years old and I still can’t figure out how to – oh. There we go.”
“Now. Sit down,” she said to Lizzie, while bustling about the kitchen. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“No, I’ll do it,” Lizzie offered, walking past her.
“Elizabeth, sit down. You spend enough time making tea, let me do it. I hate thinking of you in that godawful café all day.”
Lizzie was okay with Maggie calling her Elizabeth because she would do it in a friendly way whenever jokily telling her off; it was kind of heart-warming and made Lizzie smile.
“You’re going to go insane,” Maggie told her, as she bustled around the kitchen with the tea bags.
“It won’t be long before I lose it.”
“You’ll find something better. You deserve to, at least.”
“I did three years in university and I’ve got like –,” she sighed. “I’m tens of thousands of pounds in debt. Nobody needs people who’ve just graduated and have ‘no experience’.”
“But you’re intelligent! Even if you have no experience, as you say, there’d be people wanting to snap you up. I just can’t believe the current state of things. I swear it’s nigh on impossible to get work nowadays. When I was young…”
As Lizzie listened, she was feeling a tangled mix of emotions, most of them guilt-related, or just general panic and anxiety about how she was wasting her life. She longed to be out, travelling the world, walking across mountains, and deserts, and swimming near coral reefs, and doing whatever it was that well-travelled people did, like the things her Facebook friends did. But she was stuck, as if the universe were conspiring to stop her from doing any of that stuff, while at the same time it seemed to be reaping her of every penny she had. And, she acknowledged, she was increasingly anxious about all this anxiety and was spending some Sunday mornings (the café wasn’t open on Sundays – an overly religious community and all that) lying in bed and not doing anything useful at all.
“It’s that flat as well,” Maggie continued. “It’s tiny, and it’s in such a rough part of the estate. You know, I’d have you stay here, but the system won’t have it. Honestly, I can understand why you’re so anti-THEM. But ‘improper’ they said! Improper. You’ve been out of the system for years, and Mikey moved out last month. I haven’t been alone here for 40 years, and I think I’m going to go doolally if I start now. You are all that keeps me from losing my marbles.”
Maggie stopped, and sat down opposite her. Lizzie looked up from the table and into the old woman’s eyes. Maggie had seen so much and Lizzie always felt as if she were being a burden.
“But I’d rather lose my marbles than hold you back. You’re special. I always said so to that care worker. You’re the most intelligent child I’ve ever worked with. No, not just intelligent. Understanding. So, I want you to go out, and live a bit.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just – I can’t. Things are –”
“I know. Money. It’s annoying, isn’t it? That, and, of course, you’re so nervous.”
She always loved Maggie for being so straight to the point.
“I’ve been there,” Maggie took a sip of her tea. “When my mother dropped me off in my own flat for the first time, she helped me unpack everything, and then suddenly said ‘Bye then’ and was off. And I sat there alone on my sofa, this old thing we’d been keeping in the attic for years. For a few seconds, I was fine, just like being left on my own of an afternoon. Then, it hit me. She wasn’t coming back. Suddenly, it was very quiet and very cold. And I was alone. Oh – Lizzie, I know your worries almost as well as I know my own. I’ve been privy to them since you were a little girl. You were such a sad little thing, and I look at you now, and sometimes I think you’re not any different. I know how you’re feeling. But there is something you need to remember: you’re never alone. Not really. If everyone vanished from the Earth – there’ll always be someone here, for you and with you.”
Maggie had been Lizzie’s support worker since she was 6 years old. Nowadays, it wasn’t anything formal, but Lizzie still stopped by every so often for a cup of tea and a chat. Maggie was an incredible woman, and the closest thing Lizzie had to a mother. She treated the children she worked with as if they were her own, and all of them treated her like a mum.
***
It was getting dark as Lizzie arrived back home.
There were two women, probably high or drunk or something, and they stood at the end of the road, catcalling and giggling, waving vigorously at her as she walked past. She smiled at them before turning the key into the rusty lock, pressing against the door with her foot (it would often stick, and require an extra bit of force) and making her way inside.
Her flat was indeed tiny, as Maggie continued to point out. But it was home, at least. Her front door opened up against stacks of books – there wasn’t enough space for them all on her bookshelves, so she had piled some of them up against the hallway wall, a bit too near the door, apparently. There was a bedroom off to the right, and the living room/kitchen diner just ahead.
It was tidy, but looked lived-in as well. Lizzie was partial to the term ‘cluttered’. As already implied, the bookshelves were full, with some smaller novellas stacked lengthways on top of the other books. And on the top of the same unit were some old shoeboxes gathering dust, containing remnants of her childhood and of her school days.
The floor space was relatively uncluttered and clean, with a coffee table and a sofa, both of which she’d picked up from a charity shop. The kitchenette was accompanied by a little table and two chairs, none of which matched. But Lizzie liked it – she appreciated the individuality of it all.
On the wall above her table was a pin board, where she kept a few photos and postcards, and notelets to herself to remind her to take the bins out and such. There was a window opposite her sofa, looking out onto the street below. As she entered her flat and before she flopped down on the sofa and closed her eyes, Lizzie drew the tartan curtains, and switched on the fairy lights that ran from the window, above the TV, and around into the kitchen diner.
Time passed, with her just sitting there, wasting it, before she opened her eyes and looked up to see a battered novel on the coffee table, waiting for her. She loved books. As a child, she’d been such an avid reader, and often had her nose buried in a book. It was comforting, having the struggles of someone else to escape into, and it was heartening how those struggles could help her understand her own.
But as she’d grown up, it had become harder to read as much as she used to. Lizzie promised herself, as some kind of New Year’s Resolution (which, if she did say so herself, she was rather good at sticking to), that she would read 20 pages every day, partly so she didn’t feel so rubbish about not having the same bond with stories as she used to. The looming, overstuffed bookshelves were a reminder of the days when that bond was strong and when she had made time for books, before the days she came home, ate alone, washed up, and sat in the dark, empty flat, just dreaming of that time when books were her life.
This evening, she’d grabbed some chips on her way back home, and had eaten most of them as she walked. It had left her at a loose end, now, as she sat on her sofa, absent-mindedly watching the light fitting (the bulb had no shade), just waiting for something to happen. So, Lizzie took herself off to bed. Maybe sleeping would make her feel better.
Of course, it didn’t help that Lizzie was an insomniac – and a bad one at that. Some nights she could go off to bed, and sleep just fine. Other nights, she just couldn’t lie still, or get rid of thoughts she didn’t want, and allow herself to be carried off into a world of the not-real and of the seemingly-real, of disjointed, random bits of life, strung together in the form of dreams, almost like little clips of movies uploaded to YouTube – the story, there, but not the whole story.
But in one way, insomnia worked for Lizzie, though, because sometimes the nights were the only time she could find a way to feel better. The calmness and tranquillity of the small hours, at just gone three, when nobody was awake.
Nobody at all.
This was one of those nights, where no matter how much she tried, sleep just refused to come, and she just wanted to go out and wander the Earth as everyone else slept. When these nights came, Lizzie would take herself over to the lone window of the flat, that looked down onto the street below. She was lucky to have one of the flats with an actual window – this was the only flat that had one.
On these nights, Lizzie would pull back the curtain, and sit on the windowsill, looking out at the night- shrouded street outside, and marvelling at how the stars looked down on her from above. She’d shut the curtains behind her, enclosing herself in this little bubble on the edge of reality. It was like she was in a capsule, watching the universe drift by, at the same time the nights would tick by.
It was so comforting to lock herself away like that, a set of curtains blocking out the real world, with a starry world ahead. She’d always found it comforting. Lizzie had memories, of doing this even as a child. When all the others were in bed, and she was the last one awake, she would sit on her windowsill and look out over the garden in the night.
Blissful moments of solitude.
Tonight, as she watched, the night was calm, and the weather was still. As summer approached, the nights would grow warmer – but there would be storms as well. But tonight, there was no cloud layer, and she could enjoy the never-ending cycle of stars, burning and re-burning in the dome-like impossible navy blue of the night sky above her head. Lizzie sat back, resting her head against the wall and hugging her knees hunched up in front of her, and watched. The temperature by her window was colder than that of the rest of the flat – it made the hairs on her neck and arms stand up, and it chilled her. But it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was almost cathartic.
Lizzie was thinking how impossible it would be to count how many nights she’d spent like this, by the window. She had lost count, herself. That’s why Lizzie was reasonably certain that, despite the constant change unfolding in the sky, the estate grounds below her window would not be too different whenever she chose to look down. She knew there was another block of flats over the road, exactly the same as hers, with three storeys, one in the middle with a large window. And she knew that if she were to continue down the road to either the left or the right, there would be some houses, paintwork crumbling off them, and litter tossed into their gardens.
So, because of her experienced understanding of the geography of the grounds outside her home, Lizzie Darwin was certain that she had never seen a large blue box on the street corner, just opposite her window.
It was a police box, the sort from 1950s London. It was built from the most beautiful, blue-painted wood, and had a glowing light on its roof, illuminating the various signs on the rest of the box, as well as the area surrounding it, with its warm, yellow, glow. It looked fundamentally normal in terms of its construction, just like a funny little cabinet. And yet she had a strange, nagging feeling, one that people in her favourite books usually felt (and that Lizzie had ridiculed as a child), that whatever the box was, it wasn’t simply someone’s idea of a joke, left out on the street corner as a lark. There was something different about it.
Her mind already had gone straight onto some weird and out-there possibilities before she even dared to consider what was probably the more realistic explanation. After all, in the real world, there was no such thing as a magical blue police box. But Lizzie also knew that nobody would go to so much trouble on just a whim. Why would you even bother building such a thing for ‘a bit of a laugh?’ she quoted herself back to herself, as she often did when she thought she was being stupid.
For a reason she could not define, Lizzie just knew that somewhere there was such thing as a magical blue police box.
She threw on some jeans and a t-shirt, grabbed her coat, and sailed out of the flat.
***
When she arrived on the street below, Lizzie realised she was definitely not going mad.
There was a man as well.
He was sitting half in and half out of the box, fiddling with something in his hands that looked like some battered piece of technology. She was sceptical about going over to him, and yet, she continued to approach him anyway, because she was curious, and she didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to investigate a weird box that had suddenly appeared on the corner of her street.
As she neared him, he looked up at her and smiled.
His smile told her a lot about him. It was a sad smile, the sort of smile smiled by a person who had seen … a lot. It seemed to Lizzie that the man had once smiled many happy smiles. However, the days of those happy smiles were done, and he’d now resigned himself to days of only sad smiles.
His hair wasn’t long, but it was unkempt, making it look longer and shaggier than it was, and that added to a rather worn down appearance overall, when combined with the light stubble on his chin and the clothing he wore. He was wearing a battered pair of brown leather boots, and a rugged pair of black trousers ran down to just above his ankles. His rather antiquated frock coat ran down to his knees, and a once-white, now-dirtied shirt lay open, making way for a simple woollen scarf that now sat beside him draped over his leather satchel.
“Hello,” he said to her.
It was a simple word, a simple greeting, that many people would say in passing. But the way he said it indicated that this was, most definitely, not in passing. Lizzie sensed that he didn’t say this to many people.
She hesitated, just for a few seconds, wondering whether this was a stupid idea, and whether she should just turn around and go back into her flat. She did an odd little should-she/shouldn’t-she dance in the middle of the road, while debating in her mind what she should do, while a strange, incomprehensible babble of syllables that were probably meant to form ‘this was a bad idea,’ spilled out of her mouth, followed by a beat of silence, and then….
“Erm – hi.”
There we go. She’d greeted him. And now she could continue down the road in an awkward walk, as if she were in fact just off on a late-night stroll. Lizzie could read people through their faces, through the little twitches and changes that they made. She read his face quite clearly, and stopped.
“I saw you, sat up there,” the man gestured up to her window.
She didn’t know what to do, even now. Could she still find some awkward excuse to retreat, or should simply try to engage in some sort of conversation.
“Oh, er, yeah. I just – I sit there sometimes. I know, it’s a bit weird but, I just –”
“No, don’t worry. The stars,” the man looked up. “I can understand why.”
“Good, right, well,” she turned to leave, praying to some deity she didn’t believe in that this painfully awkward moment would end as quickly as it had started. “I’d better be –”
“What’s your name?”
Once again, Lizzie did her weird hesitation jig in the middle of the road.
“I’m, er, Lizzie.”
“Nice to meet you, Lizzie.”
“And you?” she asked, automatically playing her role in the formalities of introduction, although having such a formal conversation in such absurd circumstances just felt unreal.
“I’m –” he paused, almost as if he’d forgotten what his name was. “I’m the Doctor.”
He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to examine his own words and extract some meaning from them. It was as if he hadn’t heard those words from anyone in a long time, let alone himself.
She couldn’t just… go. Here was a strange man called the Doctor, sitting in the open door of a blue 1950s police box…. Lizzie walked closer to him, to get a better look at what he was doing.
“What’s that?” she asked him, attempting to use some of the ‘small talk tactics’ her manager had attempted to instil in her.
“It’s a screwdriver. It used to be sonic, but now… I think I need another one.”
She paused. “But it’s-”
“Yeah,” the strange Doctor-man nodded, as if he fully understood Lizzie’s bewilderment. The device, to her, did not look remotely like a screwdriver. It was a sort of… tool, a gadget thing, with a red hoop at the end, and some wires sprawling out of the metal stick it was attached to.
The conversation was awkward. Neither of them really knew what to talk about because both of them were avoiding the elephant in the room.
“If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, with the box…”
“Oh, er, yeah,” Lizzie said. “What are you doing here? With the, erm, box.”
“I had seen a picture of this place on a calendar. Thought it’d be nice to come here for a break.”
“They put the main town on calendars all the time,” Lizzie nodded, thinking back to all the ‘Best British Market Town’ calendars she’d seen in gift shops.
“No…,” the Doctor looked confused. “I mean this bit.”
Lizzie looked at him, a confused expression moving across her face. He was having a laugh, and it annoyed her, because there were some idiots who took every opportunity to make fun of the people who lived here in the estate.
“It was. Not joking,” the Doctor continued. “’The Universe’s Most inspirational Places.’ For the year 5327, I think.”
This place isn’t inspirational, Lizzie thought to herself.
“Why isn’t it inspirational?” the Doctor smiled, as if he knew what she was thinking.
It suddenly struck Lizzie, what he had said about the year of the calendar being 5327. The 54th century. Although her instincts were shouting at her that he was just having a laugh at her expense because obviously nobody could actually be from the future and have magic ‘sonic screwdrivers’ or whatever they were! On the other hand, there was something that told her he couldn’t be making this up.
“The year 5327,” she turned to him. “Surely that’s – I mean, I don’t know, that’s not real. Unless, like-”
The Doctor looked almost surprised that she’d picked up on it so quickly.
“What are you a Doctor of?”
He looked down suddenly, as if she’d asked a question that had reminded him of something from the past, or…
“Sorry,” she backtracked. “I didn’t, erm, I didn’t mean to upset you. Are you… are you alright?”
“No, it’s my fault,” the Doctor looked back up at her, smiling again. Lizzie could tell it wasn’t a genuine smile like his smile from before. “The question, that’s all. Brings back memories.”
“I’m sorry.” And she was.
“No, it’s not your fault. Friends of mine – they always ask that question. Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” the Doctor put the sonic screwdriver in his bag and stood up.
Lizzie caught sight of his eyes. His friends, whoever they were, weren’t with him anymore. That would explain why he looked so sad.
“Do you want to talk about it? Cause, I mean, like, you can, if you want.”
The Doctor walked over to her, and gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Lizzie – it was lovely meeting you.”
Although she barely knew who he was, there was part of her that still wanted to help him. “I guess – if you need to vent, you know where I am.” Lizzie turned to walk away.
She sincerely wanted him to know that, to just acknowledge that whatever he’d been through, there would always be someone for him to turn to, and to talk to. He didn’t have to suffer alone. She pulled her coat tightly around her, as she walked back to the flat.
Then, a voice.
“Lizzie. Please – stay.”
***
Lizzie had sat down next to the Doctor at the foot of the open door to the police box. The lights had been switched off, so she couldn’t see if there was anything else in there. But – it wasn’t like normal lights being switched off. It was like there was an absence of light there, as if the darkness had almost been put there artificially so she couldn’t see whatever was inside.
“So – I was a bit aimless,” the Doctor admitted. “But I picked up a high concentration of dimensional disturbances, somewhere within this town…. at least.”
Although Lizzie didn’t have a clue what he was saying, she knew it was good that he was talking about something he was interested in, at least. It would help him.
“Unusual amounts of dimensional energy. I’ve been tracking it, and I told the TARDIS to track it ….”
She had no idea what this tardis thing was, or if it had something to do with the sonic screwdriver or the box or something else. Lizzie was just willing to let him talk.
“…And it brought you here?” she finished his sentence.
“Yes. It’s not always precise, but it usually gets the rough location reasonably correct. That’s when I discovered my sonic screwdriver was broken.”
The TARDIS clearly had nothing to do with the sonic screwdriver, then. Lizzie decided just to broach the subject anyway. It couldn’t do much harm.
“What’s the tardis?”
“Oh,” he brushed it off, as if the answer were obvious. “The box. It’s magic.”
“The magic box,” Lizzie whispered to herself.
The Doctor patted the wood, as if it were a loyal and faithful hound. “The magic box.”
He looked at it sadly, as if the words woke something up deep inside him.
“What happens, then?” she asked, referring back to the Doctor’s concern about the unusual amount of “dimensional energy” that he had tracked here.
“It’s not that harmful, in small doses. In the grand scheme of things, the amount here is still tiny – just large in comparison to the usual state of affairs here. I’m just intrigued.”
Lizzie nodded – and then caught sight of the thing at the end of the road.
“Erm –”
“Yes?”
Lizzie gestured towards a tall figure, dressed simply, in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, and a tee-shirt picked up at a metal concert of some kind. She did, in fact, recognise him as a man who lived on the estate, just down the road from her. She had passed him sometimes, as he leaned against the wall outside his house, smoking. But what she saw before her now, chilled her to the bone.
It first struck her, that his feet were bare. That would not seem so odd on its own, but he was also wearing a mask. Something simple, with the basic features of the face shaped into white plastic. What was disturbing was that the eyeholes were empty. Or rather, where two eyes should look through and bring life to an otherwise cold and blank template, there were two deep pools of blackness. Lizzie could see this clearly, even from a distance. And for a moment, she froze.
As she always told herself, eyes were a good way to understand a person – and she knew that whoever this person was, they were not just someone she vaguely recognized, standing in the middle of the road wearing a mask. That would be absurd anyway – even if that’s all it were.
But this was something outside of the norm.
Lizzie wondered whether it was a coincidence that some of the weirdest stuff she’d encountered in her life so far was occurring on this one evening. She decided it wasn’t a coincidence, because the Doctor seemed to have some idea of what was going on; he had tracked some odd disturbances to her very neighbourhood and now the Doctor was rushing on foot towards the masked figure, perhaps to take a closer look?
And Lizzie followed.
The figure didn’t react, even when the Doctor went right up close and stared into its face. It remained motionless, staring off into the distance with empty eyes.
“I hope he’s alright,” Lizzie murmured, a nervous look on her face.
“Do you…?” the Doctor started to ask and then stopped, as if he expected her to know what he was about to ask, which she did
“He lives just down the road… I pass him on the way to work.”
“Ah,” the Doctor murmured, as he tried to pull the mask from the face. Lizzie heard the crackle of electricity and the Doctor whipped his fingers back.
“Don’t hurt him,” Lizzie gasped.
“I’m fine,” the Doctor responded, shrugging it off.
“I was talking to you. Be careful. Whoever he is, he is like… you know. A person.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
In a way, Lizzie felt a little bit guilty, because the Doctor looked disappointed with himself.
“It’s stuck,” he continued, “I mean, there’s an electrical field bonding the mask to his skin. I don’t know what it’s for…”
“Why him?” Lizzie asked, interested as to why, of all the people, this had happened to this man, on this estate, although to be honest, it didn’t completely surprise her.
“I… don’t know.”
The Doctor placed his fingers just where the mask touched the skin.
“What are –”
This time, he gave a firm yank, and this time he lurched back as the electricity shot up through his hands and straight up both his arms.
“Be care…” And, as he reeled from the pain… “Doctor!”
One more go, one more searing shock of electricity, and the mask was in the Doctor’s hands, along with the face of the man that had been beneath it.
There wasn’t any blood or gore, though. Instead, the face looked like it had been stitched together. His mouth, nostrils, eyelids and earholes were bound tightly together with thin, white thread. The operation had been executed with expertise – all the stitches were perfectly even, and a knot had been tied at the end.
Lizzie grimaced and spoke softly. “Poor, poor guy.”
The Doctor frowned. “The mask – it bonded to his face so securely that it intruded so much on the facial structure that… the mask…repaired it.”
Lizzie understood what he meant, though the Doctor, almost as if for dramatic effect, decided to elaborate anyway.
“When it became attached to his face, it damaged his eyes, and nose, and mouth. So … to fix that the mask stitched them up, like a doctor stitches up a wound.”
The man who’d worn the mask remained standing, as the Doctor made his way back to the TARDIS.
“What do we do with him?” Lizzie placed an arm around the man, just to make sure he didn’t fall over.
“We take him back to wherever he lived. Then – eventually his body will be found.”
Lizzie turned towards the house where the man had once lived, his body leaning on her, as if he had just sprained his ankle, or bruised his shin badly, and she were helping him back home.
“Lizzie –”
“It’s fine, Doctor. I’ll take him home.”
***
As Lizzie walked, supporting him, her mind went into overdrive. This man was dead.
The Doctor had said the mask had helped him, it would’ve been more painful had it not stitched him up like that. But someone was dead, and in what was both a simple and extraordinary fashion. This man had loved people, people had loved him. A whole life. And she hadn’t even known his name. His body was heavy, really too heavy for her. She should’ve let the Doctor help, but she was determined to do this on her own. She needed time away from him, to think about what she’d seen. When she returned, the Doctor would probably be gone, just as quickly as he’d arrived. But – the incident with the mask could not have been all there was to this. Whatever the Doctor was here for, it was not over yet. She was almost sure of it.
The Doctor was intriguing. And terrifying as well. He’d looked disturbed when it was clear the man was dead. But he had also looked at the body as if he’d seen the same thing a hundred times before. Whoever he was, he was fundamentally a sad man. She was certain he had lost someone. So many possible interpretations of him – but that’s what intrigued her even more. Was he a mad man, or a sad man, or a bad man, or maybe all three at the same time?
The front door to the masked man’s house was unlocked, so she gently steered him inside, and through to the downstairs bedroom. With great difficulty, she managed to lie him down on the bed.
Whoever he was, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had done nothing to deserve this. It all had happened because someone had decided it should be him.
Lizzie shut the front door behind her and headed back to where she had left the Doctor.
***
When Lizzie arrived back down the road, the blue box was still waiting. The Doctor stood outside, pacing up and down, like an eccentric and impatient professor trying to sort out what was going on and must be done.
“Ah, there you are,” the Doctor said, a hint of urgency in his voice.
“Sorry, er…” she began.
“Lizzie, don’t worry, it’s not your fault. But I need you to come with me. Now.”
Of course, her first instinct was to run away from him as far and as fast as she could. And she very nearly did, since she still had very little idea who he was. And some men were dangerous.
He presented the mask to her. A message was on the front, as if the mask were a screen, in simple black font.
Facial connection compromised. Defence formation transmitted.
“I’ve done a scan,” the Doctor said, his voice quick and anxious. “Pre-residual teleportation energy. But regardless of whatever the mask was, whoever owns it is on their way, here, and soon, looking for answers.”
“… and?”
“’Defence formation,’ Lizzie. That means, whenever they do arrive, they’re going to be looking for whoever detached its face. And you were there, with me.”
Lizzie stared at him, and she saw how worried he was. He was genuinely concerned for her, and was nervously looking to his ‘TARDIS’ every few seconds, as if he were desperate to get away from whatever was coming. Whoever he was, he wanted to help. Lizzie looked at the Doctor, as he waited, just a few feet away from her, and while she looked at him, she could see the huge expanse of sky and stars behind him, like two big, black curtains, splattered in glitter, drawn across the night sky.
And she walked towards him.
The Doctor ran into the TARDIS, and Lizzie followed. But then, as she approached the wooden frame of the doors, she hesitated for a second, watching the Doctor as he disappeared into the darkness inside. It would be cramped. A very tight squeeze. But the Doctor – when he’d run inside, he’d just… kept running. As if the box had no back.
Then the lights turned on.
What Lizzie saw in front of her was impossible.
The box was, rather obviously, bigger on the inside. She poked her head back outside again, just to make sure that she definitely wasn’t imagining it or that she hadn’t fallen asleep in front of the telly, or something equally stupid. Strangely, though, she knew for certain that she wasn’t dreaming.
It was real. The bigger-on-the-inside box was real.
The chamber was huge, and gleaming white, but full of character too. It was hexagonal in shape, just like the shape of the quirky console in the middle, which was completely covered in all manner of buttons and switches and levers. The ceiling was made almost entirely of glass, but the view was not that of the sky outside. Instead, it was some other sky, with ecstatic swirling clouds of shimmering dust, an explosion of colours from all ends of the spectrum, with shining beads of golden light bursting through it all. It was a view of something so far off, and yet so close.
For a brief moment, Lizzie stood in the doorway, unsure of where to go and what to do, but the Doctor firmly hurried her in. As she stepped inside, she saw that two of the walls were lined with bookshelves crammed full of books of all kinds. As she walked past them, she recognised some of the titles, but others, she had never set her eyes upon before. Their titles spoke of the future; many were novels that, for her, had not yet been written, even though they sat there, in front of her, looking as old as the battered books that one often found in second-hand bookshops.
Beside the console was a lone armchair. The Doctor, whoever he was, clearly travelled and even lived here alone, although, partially hidden away on a bookshelf, was a black and white photograph of a woman, wearing something that looked like a make-do bridal gown. It was small photo, just a bit smaller than A5 size, but in a golden frame. Lizzie glanced at it as she walked past, her mind desperate to know who she was to the Doctor, and who else had come to know him.
There was a viewing gallery above, and just down a set of steps, was an open area where an old, antique writing table stood in the corner, covered in papers. There was a bar as well; Lizzie didn’t dare go in, but as she walked past the entrance, it looked like the bar was quite literally gathering dust. It hadn’t been used for ages.
The Doctor was looking at her, as if he knew that she would have some questions for him to answer; it was almost as if he expected it – as if she were in a position experienced by so many before her, and he was just following the script.
“We must be somewhere else,” Lizzie said as she looked up at the galaxies above her..
The Doctor smiled. He looked tired, but happy, as if he were almost pleased about something.
“Why do you think that?” the Doctor replied as he flicked some switches on the console and pulled a lever.
“Er… I guess, well … it was definitely wardrobe-sized on the outside. And then I came inside and it wasn’t. So… we must be somewhere else that isn’t within the four walls of the wooden blue bit…”
“And…the ceiling kind of also gives it away,” she added, softly, almost as an afterthought.
“Yes. Basically. It’s another dimension.”
There was a screen attached to an articulated metal armature, mounted on a turntable on top of the console, and the Doctor grabbed it, and gracefully, slid it towards him.
“We have to get away from them.”
“I guess this thing, your… TARDIS… it moves?” Lizzie stood, motionless, and slightly awkwardly, looking at the Doctor as he danced around the console. And, the way he moved was like he was doing it all again for the very first time. And yes, she was aware of the paradox at the heart of her observation.
“Oh, Lizzie,” the Doctor seemed to be smiling at her naivety, even though pretty much everyone on Earth would’ve been naïve in her situation. “It moves.”
With those words, he pulled down the lever with one emphatic move – the largest lever, the one in the middle of the console. And clearly it was the ON switch– the one that made the magic begin, the one that made the great machine burst into life.
She was right – as the Doctor’s hand left the lever, the glass column in the middle started to slide up and down, and a great, mechanical whirring, like the sound a machine would make if somehow it could breathe, echoed throughout the box.
Seconds later, the box stopped.
Lizzie was aware of how quick it had been. Most spaceships had to do the whole launching thing, and then had to fly, but it was as if the box had picked itself up, and had moved itself to wherever they were now, without any mechanical fuss.
In the blink of an eye, the Doctor was past her, looking out the doors, peering from side to side.
“It’s safe. They haven’t followed us.”
He stepped out the door and beckoned for her to follow. She did.
“Why here?” Lizzie asked.
“Set the coordinates to random, somewhere within the vicinity of the town.”
Lizzie had a startling sensation: it was as if the TARDIS had known she was in here, and Lizzie began to wonder whether the bigger-on-the-inside box could sense things, like a real, thinking person, as if the computer in the middle was the brain and the control centre of the whole thing.
“I need to find the source of this mask.” The Doctor’s words abruptly brought her out of her thoughts.
Lizzie looked at him, her expression asking him to elaborate, as he held the sonic screwdriver to the mask.
“This isn’t the only mask or even the main mask.”
His observation had not helped. She waited for more to come, and it did.
“Imagine a nervous system of masks,” he continued.
It almost made Lizzie laugh, as it was such a ridiculous notion.
“And this is just one of the nerves at the end, one of the little, tiny ones. Somewhere, there is a brain. The one that controls all the rest.”
“Oh. And you want to find it? Or … something else…”
“Exactly. I quite fancy a cup of tea,” the Doctor had made his way over to the door of a café. He was about to use the sonic screwdriver (a device that Lizzie seemed to note had featured quite heavily in their encounter so far) to open the door. Then, Lizzie reached into her coat pocket, and pulled out a set of keys.
“Where did you get those?” the Doctor looked at her in surprise.
“My manager.”
There was a look of realisation on his face. “You…”
***
It would come as no surprise to anyone, except perhaps the Doctor, that there was no one in the café at that time of night. It was gone half past two, after all, as she put the key in the lock and the Doctor followed her inside the empty shop and turned on the lights. Lizzie began to think of what it would be like the next morning if her manager found out. That is, if there ever was a next morning.
Lizzie had truly mastered the art of the perfect cup of tea – not only because she spent so much of her personal time drinking it, but because it’s what she spent so many of her work days, making it for others.
“You work here,” the Doctor distractedly stated the obvious as he looked up from the mask when she placed the mug down on the little table in front of him and sat down across from him.
“Yes.”
“That’s… a surprise.”
“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment,” she laughed nervously.
“It was meant as one. But you’re intelligent. Very intelligent. Why are you here? Living in that council flat, and working in a café making tea for the locals over 70 and for tourists passing through?”
Passing through. Like you? She smiled to herself.
She realised that the Doctor probably lived in his magic box. That it was like a home on wheels, perhaps like a caravan. He was obviously from somewhere, wherever that was, but for some reason, stayed away from it. Lizzie noticed the contrast between the two of them, especially since here she sat, stuck in the town she’d lived in since childhood.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go ….” Lizzie responded finally, and then stopped, as if she’d revealed too much.
“Go on.”
“This town is home, I suppose. And I also don’t really have much of a choice.”
“I noticed. The estate, and then this part of the town. The divide between both halves. Not even halves – the estate is sprawling, with this island of the upper class in the middle.”
Lizzie noticed the Doctor as he said this: he’d looked away from her and then down into his mug of tea. He was trying to hide his face.
“Are you…?” she began.
“Sorry. Don’t worry. I – I knew someone from your country who was meant to fix all this.”
Lizzie didn’t understand what he meant, because he sounded so certain that somebody had been going to help them.
“His vision for the country. No more poverty, or gaping inequality, or anything like that. No university tuition fees. Social care, so much better.”
Lizzie would’ve voted for him, whoever he was.
“I don’t even know your last name,” the Doctor said to her.
“I don’t even know your first,” she snapped back, rather pleased with her witty retort. “Sorry, not that I…”
But the Doctor was smiling, almost as if he were pleased with her.
“Darwin,” Lizzie said.
“As in Charles?”
“As in Charles,” she confirmed.
“I met him once. Interesting chap, to say the least.”
There was probably some kind of ‘oh my god!’ comment that Lizzie should’ve used to respond to whatever the Doctor said, but she decided just to take it as it came, because the oddness showed very little sign of stopping.
“Elizabeth Darwin,” the Doctor said, letting the name flow off his tongue. “It’s a lovely name.”
She hesitated. She’d never liked anyone to call her by her full name. It reminded her of the scary care-worker from the home, back when she was younger, who used the name like a threat or a warning. With the look on her face, she told the Doctor all he needed to know and he understood. But then she added, “Thanks, I guess-”
The Doctor, so far, had spent the entire conversation looking at her, almost like the way she chose to focus on a person’s eyes. The Doctor had been focusing on her – on everything about her. She saw something else, just for the briefest of seconds, as his eyes flicked away from her to something else.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” the Doctor dismissed it, sipping his tea and trying not to look sheepish that he’d been caught out. Lizzie thought about ignoring it, but it was as if, for just a few seconds, he’d fallen out of their conversation.
“Like, I don’t want to be weird or anything, but you were definitely – you were definitely looking behind me.”
“Lizzie, wait – ”
She’d got him.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Don’t turn around. Just – look into my eyes, Elizabeth.”
“How far away is it?”
“Approximately 10 metres, give or take.”
“Erm...”
“I’ve been scanning the mask – I think I know what it is. And this is what they do. It’s better when they take their victims by surprise, so they have no idea. Or, even better, they like to put you slightly on edge, like sowing the seeds of the bad dreams of a child lying awake in bed at night...”
The Doctor’s analogy chilled her to the bone – and he continued.
“That’s what they are, Lizzie. They are the shiver that runs down your spine. Maybe the sound of a few footsteps, here and there. Just to make you slightly wary, setting your blood to a gentle boil. Then they pounce.”
“But…,” Lizzie tried hard to think of some explanation, as if her life depended on it. Which, she just realised, it kind of actually did. “But, surely, if you’re telling me it’s there, then – then there’s no point in it killing me! Because … because if I’m aware of their existence, then there would be no point – no – no shock factor.”
“In theory,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve come to realise that theory and practise are very different things.”
Lizzie was taking slow, deep breaths, as the fear bubbled up through her, rising up her gullet and clawing its way up her throat.
“Can we get away from it?” she whispered. “I mean – this is just a drone, or something – what about the main it?”
The Doctor stuffed the sonic screwdriver and the mask into his satchel. “Okay. Lizzie, stand up.”
Lizzie pushed her chair away from her as she stood. By speaking in his slow, calm, voice, the Doctor was almost hypnotizing her into rising slower.
“Slowly, that’s it,” the Doctor smiled. “Keep looking at me – that’s it, keep looking – Lizzie, don’t look.”
She turned her head, but only an inch. She could see the shadow, where the creature lurked. She could see the outline of its mask, and the blurred, yet dark, and empty pits, where its eyes were watching her. Those eyes must’ve been the only way it sensed. Everything it was registering – her movements, the movements of the Doctor in front of her, would be streaming through the blackness of those eyes.
Lizzie was up now, and the Doctor was looking over her shoulder at the masked figure.
“Now, Lizzie … step around the table, and walk.”
She did so, and started slowly walking away. Gradually, as she got further and further away from the table and hopefully the figure she could not see, she began to speed up.
“Don’t speed up. Just … stay … calm.”
The Doctor’s words made her slow down again, made her breathe. She was frozen in the moment, but unlike the masked man, she didn’t sense everything through her eyes. She could feel the coldness of the café on her arms underneath her coat, causing the hairs on her arms to rise, and she could hear only one sound – the Doctor’s soothing voice.
She was near the door.
“Now … go outside,” the Doctor continued. She began to leave, as he said, but when she started to turn around to look back into the café, the Doctor firmly warned her, again, “Don’t.”
He strode past her, out the café door, and a few feet later, was at the doors of the TARDIS, unlocking them and stepping back inside as Lizzie followed.
Almost as soon as she’d shut the TARDIS doors, she heard the sound of a hard object slamming against the wooden doors. It was like somebody had a battering ram, and was pounding the navy blue oak as hard as they could.
The Doctor was looking at the monitor – its screen showed a view of the street outside. But … there was no battering-ram, just the masked figure thumping the doors with its fists.
“It won’t be able to get in. Nothing can get through those doors,” assured the Doctor saw her standing tentatively by the doors, watching them fearfully.
“’Nothing’ only extends to what they’ve been tested against,” she said, not taking her eyes off them for a second.
“Good point,” he walked over to her. “But, we’re leaving anyway. It won’t be able to come after us.”
“You said that before.”
“This time we’re going further afield.”
Lizzie began to protest. “You … I need to … I have to work tomorrow.”
The Doctor smiled a coy smile. Lizzie was beginning to realise he had rather a knack for surprises. So, as he had done before, he pulled the lever and the TARDIS started its husky, mechanical breathing once more. She shrugged at his impudence, and then wished she hadn’t because she was worried she’d offended him.
“Lizzie, open the doors.” the Doctor flung his satchel over his shoulder and joined her by the doors. “Trust me,” he pointed to the handle.
“But it’s still out there,” she said, and yet she had walked back to them and joined him, apparently trusting him enough to go against what her instincts were telling her.
She opened the doors.
It was daytime now. And yet they were in exactly the same place, in front of the café. She remembered Charles Darwin.
“So it – it travels in time as well?”
The Doctor’s face lit up as she said it and as he watched her realization that she had been in a time machine.
“Yes. It travels in time. And that should shake them off for a bit.”
“Erm – yeah, I guess. But,” she asked, as he reached inside his satchel, and took out a strange, mobile phone sized device. “Surely we need to look for the brain? You know? The one in the middle that controls all the rest? Or, I don’t know…”
“Yes – we do. I’m trying to lock onto a trace of the dimensional energy. That’s how they travel, I think. Bending dimensions.”
“So… what are they?”
“Hmm?” the Doctor asked.
“You said you knew.”
“Oh. No, don’t worry….”
“You can’t just tell me, and then not tell me. That’s not fair. I am part of this. Sorry, I don’t want to be a….”
There was a brief, awkward silence between the two of them, as they stood in the glinting, golden sunlight of the morning. They were on the edge of the town square: a memorial wall stood in the centre, like an island in a sea of perfectly trimmed grass, the green protected by a ring of ornamental, black metal, chains.
The Doctor looked at her, as if he were confused about something. As if nobody had spoken to him like that in a while. His eyes were kind, though, as if he appreciated her for having said it.
“Of course. I’m sorry,” he said.
The two of them walked down the cobbled pavement, beneath the lamp posts with their perfect hanging baskets, full of flowers of all kinds and colours. Lizzie checked her watch – it was wrong. It was as if she’d just walked straight out of her own time and through an open door into another. A few people were out and about – but it was quiet, and there weren’t as many tourists as usual. Just the odd villager walking their dog, or a young family out for a morning walk.
“I picked a Sunday,” the Doctor noticed her looking. She wondered why.
“There’s an old myth, Lizzie – It was a bedtime story, for me – about the mask.“ the Doctor began. “It was a story they used to tell children, back home. It involved a spectre, a ghostly figure all robed in white, with a mask, like the ones we’ve just seen. They called her the Masked Maiden. And supposedly, she’d come at night, find children, and stitch their eyes shut, so they’d never be able to see again.”
Lizzie grimaced, before realising it was really no worse than most fairy stories she had heard.
“I didn’t realise it at first,” the Doctor admitted. “I thought about the similarity – but dismissed it….”
“Because you don’t believe in fairy tales?”
Lizzie wished she could take back her words and wipe them from his mind, because they’d both stopped walking, and it was probably too sudden, too personal, too sentimental an observation. But in those few moments, something the Doctor had said – she wasn’t even sure what it was – had struck a chord in her, and made her say it, even though she hadn’t even thought it through.
“Sorry, I should just – like, not speak , or…”
r blunt observation rather than her awkward apology for it. Lizzie nodded, a sort of awkward nod, because she didn’t really know what to say.
Still beside her, the Doctor was intently reading something—dimensional energy? – with his sonic held aloft, and humming busily.
“Where are you tracking it to?”
“I’m not sure. What landmarks are in this place?”
There wasn’t anything significant Lizzie could think of. It was just a little market town, where old people came to live out their final years, and where tourists flocked to in search of the finest middle-class experience.
“Anything you’d find on a map would do,” the Doctor said.
“Erm… there’s a pub, a post office, a church,” Lizzie saw the Doctor grimace slightly at the mention of a church. “A gift shop – actually there are lots of those… And….”
“Ah, hello Elizabeth!”
Lizzie stopped her list when she saw Mrs Smith walking towards her.
“Good morning Mrs Smith!” Lizzie exclaimed a touch too cheerfully, straightening her coat and striding towards the lady with her two springer spaniels (Peter and Jasper, ages 5 and 6, respectively, Peter having recently suffered from worms) The Doctor was left looking around in confusion, as the shy and bumbling girl beside him had suddenly transformed into somebody else.
“Who’s your friend?” Mrs Smith gave a wry smile as the Doctor approached them.
“This is…,” Lizzie realised she couldn’t introduce him as a doctor without Mrs Smith reaffirming her suspicions that everyone from the estate was delusional. Speaking of which, Lizzie was expecting some kind of mocking comment right about –
“Another one from the estate, hmm?” Mrs Smith looked down at him. “I’ve not seen you around here before.”
“No. I’m –”
Mrs Smith turned to Lizzie. “He’s not an– ,” she mouthed something at her.
“No, Mrs Smith. The Doctor is not an immigrant.”
The Doctor looked at Mrs Smith in disgust.
“And, Mrs Smith,” Lizzie continued. “Would you mind not using such language– ”
“What are you looking at me like that for?” Mrs Smith frowned at the Doctor. “Honestly. My husband served our health service for a good few years. They ought to charge foreigners– ”
“Mrs Smith,” Lizzie interrupted, her voice fierce in a way that surprised even Lizzie herself. “Your husband served a health service that promises free healthcare to everyone. Including immigrants. And also including bigots. Good morning.”
And Lizzie walked away.
Mrs Smith had a lot of power in this small town, so it didn’t matter how much Lizzie could travel in time or how easily she could run away, she was probably out of a job. But it had been worth it, just to see Mrs Smith’s shocked expression as she’d turned and walked off. It was heart-warming to know that if they did cut off the heating in Lizzie’s flat she’d still have the memory of Mrs Smith’s face to treasure always!
“Where did that come from?” the Doctor whispered in awe as he appeared behind her.
“Erm ... what?” Lizzie asked, as if she had no idea what he was talking about. She did, of course, but she’d decided she’d like them both to forget about it and move on.
“All of it! First you were all small-talk and smiles, and then you completely ripped into her. I’ve – I’ve not seen that side of you before.”
Lizzie turned to him. “They’re – I mean, they – well, they’re not sides of me. I mean the scary one, yeah, that one is, but like – I don’t want to be horrible ‘cause she has children and stuff, but she deserves it and I really hate her. And the smiley one, I have to treat her like that in the café, and it genuinely makes me feel sick. So yeah.”
The Doctor looked impressed, and Lizzie still felt uncomfortable.
“It’s like acting,” Lizzie continued, then shut up. She thought about saying something else, but didn’t. Then she did. “That two-sided person, is not me. Like an actress, I can become them, and talk about the weather, and dogs, and other things like that, but it’s a performance.”
The Doctor seemed to understand. She hoped he did. Lizzie was concerned that the Doctor would expect to see more of the not-real waitress personality, which wasn’t her, at all. Lizzie had found it hard at first, finding the confidence to make small talk with people. But it had come down to the wire – she needed the job, and so she had to learn. And when she finally developed a way of making it like pretending to be a different character, an alter-ego of sorts, it had made it so much easier. She was just playing the role of a happy, confident and outgoing young woman, while knowing, all the time, that she wasn’t. She still got shaky whenever she had to make phone calls to people.
Suddenly she realised the Doctor’s face had changed from kind and understanding to shocked. He was looking down the road, where a masked figure stood. It was an old woman, who looked like she’d just come out of her house.
Lizzie turned and looked behind herself: at the far end of the road, there was another – an old man, out to collect his morning paper. There were only two of them, though. They could get away from two of them – probably. Then she looked across to the other side of the square: access to the streets on that side were blocked by two more, and standing at the head of the path to the church that also led down to the square, was the vicar, wearing a mask the same white shade as his robes.
The Doctor strode over to the old lady. She was at least a foot shorter than him, her hair permed, and she still wore her slippers, along with a thin red cardigan. A cup of tea was clutched in her hand. It looked almost comically normal – as if she were offering him a morning cuppa.
“I know who you are,” the Doctor said.
The masked figure did not respond.
“’The Masked Maiden’. A figure of Gallifreyan legend, a bedtime story. You were used to terrify me.”
Lizzie watched as the Doctor tried to… what? Intimidate the woman.
“What are you doing here?” he asked..
Still no response.
“There’s nothing for you here.”
“Ask it why does it choose those people,” Lizzie nudged the Doctor.
The masked woman turned to her. A message typed itself out onto the face of the mask, like text being entered into a word document.
These people are disposable.
Lizzie wanted to break something, preferably the mask. “Nobody’s disposable,” she answered firmly. “There’s no such thing as– ”
The Maiden is looking for the prize.
“You’ll have to talk to it,” the Doctor urged Lizzie. But she backed away, because she just couldn’t do it, she was sure of it. There was no way at all she could talk to aliens about all this stuff she didn’t understand.
“I – I –”
“You can, Lizzie! You just told that old bat Mrs. Smith where to stick it! You can do the same now.”
Lizzie sighed, like the audible ‘fine’ of a sulking teenager.
“What do I say?”
“The questions have to come from you.”
Lizzie scanned her brain as to what questions would be relevant to ask this creature. Where was it from? No. The Doctor wouldn’t need to know that anyway. Were they invading? No. Stupid. Jumping to conclusions. Then she remembered the last thing the old woman had said. Or rather, typed. Or whatever.
“What is the prize?”
Unauthorised information for drone 5:1467835.
Suddenly, Lizzie thought of an even better question, and was rather pleased with herself.
“Why are you only answering my questions?”
You are authorised.
In her brain, she ran through what she’d just learned. For some reason, she was authorised to talk to this drone. But the Doctor wasn’t. Maybe the Doctor was alien – it was possible – no, it was probable, with a box like that – and perhaps, as a human, she had special authorisation?
“Well … clearly … they like authorising people. Including their human drones,” Lizzie said. “And – for some reason, I’m authorised for certain information that the drone isn’t, which I guess means that the Maiden keeps some information exclusively to herself – maybe so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands? Or, am I just reading too much into this?”
“No,” the Doctor gave her a reassuring look. “I think you might be right.”
“I guess the Maiden herself,” Lizzie began, spooked at what she was saying because it sounded too fictional to her liking, “is probably where the prize is? Whatever that is...”
“Yes – I believe you’re right there as well. Think, Lizzie, think. When I asked you for locations – what other landmarks are there? In fact – even better– think of locations in relation to you. Places that relate to you and to people you know. Because you have authorisation, for some reason.”
Lizzie thought, thought, and thought. There was the café, but the masked figures had already been there, and found nothing. There was a school, but she didn’t see what they’d be able to find there either. Then again – they were probably looking for something obscure. There was her former home, obviously, but –
Oh.
“Erm … Doctor, a question for you, I think?”
The Doctor was eyeing the area around them. The TARDIS was still in reach.
“No,” Lizzie dismissed it. “No. Don’t worry. Stupid idea –”
“Elizabeth Darwin, listen to me. Your ideas aren’t stupid.”
Lizzie breathed, and continued. “I – I grew up in a care home, long story. Well, not really that long but… anyway … you did say it was a fairy story, used to scare small children. Well –”
The Doctor stared at her, suddenly realizing what she was saying. Lizzie saw his look – it was the look of somebody putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and beginning to understand what they meant.
“Lizzie,” the Doctor said, still looking at the figures out of the corner of one eye. The one word that would describe the look on his face was “ominous,” as if he were about to say something really big or really important. He kept her in suspense, for a beat, as he watched the creatures in silence. They were beginning to advance now, one by one, slowly making their way towards them. Lizzie hoped he’d just hurry up and finish whatever he was going to say because second by second she was growing ever more concerned for her life... and his.
“On three, we run … to the TARDIS!”
***
The care home had not changed much over the years, apart from the fact most of the people there were different. The older residents now had been the youngest during Lizzie’s time. But as she had done, they too had grown up, and yet there they were still here.
Pat opened the door and looked out as the two of them approached on foot – they thought it best to park the TARDIS outside and at a distance instead of just popping up, despite the urgency of their visit. Lizzie looked at the outside. She wondered if people looked at the houses of their parents the way she looked at the front of this home. She thought probably not.
It was sad, for the reason that things are just sad when they’re over. People are automatically entitled to feel sad about things from their childhood, because the things and moment from happier times aren’t around anymore. They had been good to her – really good to her. But there were still the emotions that kids in care went through, that it was almost impossible to protect kids from. But the four walls ahead of her had protected her when she needed it, even though sometimes the home itself was the reason she needed protecting.
Although she frequently passed it, she was looking at it close up now, for the first time in years, and getting ready to go in for the first time in years. She took a deep breath, and followed the Doctor.
Pat, the guy who opened the door, had taken over as head care worker when she was 15, and had been there throughout her last few years at the place. He was a broad-shouldered Irishman, with a heart of gold. He was, to be fair, one of the kindest people she’d ever met.
“Lizzie,” he seemed shocked at her suddenly turning up. It probably was a bit of a shock, considering she hadn’t been back in so long.
“Hey, Pat,” she smiled warmly.
“Come in! Who’s this?” he asked, as he shut the door behind them. A staircase ran up beside the door – Lizzie looked at it, and remembered the days when, as a six or seven-year-old, she’d want to be taller, and would try as hard as possible to get up those stairs two at a time, hoping it would increase her height.
“Oh,” the Doctor gave one of his mysterious smiles. “I’m an inspector,” the Doctor flashed a strange, blank bit of paper. But Pat clearly bought it – because he seemed to believe him. He’s also very immoral, Lizzie wanted to say, as she saw that Doctor was clearly faking his credentials with a magic bit of paper. She couldn’t believe that she was letting a weird spaceman into this care home, but because he was presenting himself as an ‘inspector’, Pat would stay with him, so she felt reassured.
“Listen, Lizzie – sorry about this,” Pat said to her. “I’ll deal with the inspector. Ah – Carmen.”
A girl walked down the stairs – she looked like she was about 16, and she had somehow managed the remarkable art of being able to traverse stairs and look at a mobile’s screen at the same time.
“Yeah,” Carmen said as she didn’t look up.
“Go and make Lizzie some tea, would you?”
Then, Carmen did look up, and saw Lizzie standing there. “Oh my god! Lizzie! Heeey!” she almost ran up to her, and the two of them hugged. Carmen had only been about… 11, the last time they’d seen each other. The little girl Lizzie had left behind had become a young woman. How things changed.
“Oh, Pat,” Carmen said, as Lizzie followed her into the kitchen. “I have some forms for you to sign, or… something.”
***
After Carmen had made Lizzie her tea, they’d sat around the table in the kitchen (which was not meant to be a place where one ate or drank, unless special permission had been given). At one point, a few kids passed her - some she recognised, some she didn’t. The ones that recognised her said hi. She suddenly realised, that she was missed.
The conversation went as many of Lizzie’s conversations did. She was worried she’d be a little too honest about her situation, because she didn’t want to scare Carmen about the world, and was worried that by telling her about her own situation, she’d make her extremely anxious. But she couldn’t lie to her – and perhaps Carmen had her head screwed on a little better than Lizzie.
“That guy,” Carmen obviously meant the Doctor. “He’s not really an inspector, is he?”
Lizzie hesitated. She didn’t actually know.
“Lizzie. He’s not – oh my god, he’s not a paedo-”
“Look,” Lizzie hushed her. “Something… I don’t know… something weird is going on.”
As Lizzie told her story, Carmen looked increasingly sickened by what she was hearing. And then, Lizzie realised that Carmen was crying, and she felt really guilty because she had wanted more than anything else to avoid upsetting her.
“I – I’m really sorry,” Lizzie said. “I – I didn’t mean to– ”
Carmen looked up at Lizzie, wiping tears from her eyes. “You haven’t heard, have you?”
Carmen told Lizzie her story: there was a kid from the home who’d been found dead a few weeks ago, with a mask on his face. And when Pat had prised it off, they’d found exactly what Lizzie had just described to Carmen: his eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils had all been sewn shut. Lizzie felt terrible for her, especially about how she’d had to face that actually happening, in reality, at only 16.
“Pat tried to keep it as quiet as possible,” Carmen shrugged. “But a few of us found out, and he made us swear that we wouldn’t tell any of the younger kids. Obviously, they know the kid died – but they don’t know… you know… how he was found.”
Lizzie could not believe that something she’d become mixed up in, already had led to something so terrible for the children of the home she’d grown up in. And yet somehow, the Doctor remained mostly unfazed. Why go to the children first? After all, if that’d happened weeks ago, before anything like it had happened in the rest of the town, why would the creatures go for the innocent before anyone else?
“Carmen – I don’t – I mean, I don’t really know much about the Doctor. Not much at all. But I believe he knows what he’s talking about, mostly. And I think he genuinely wants to help here.”
“How did you even meet him?” Carmen asked.
“He just sort of… turned up, over there, on the street corner.”
***
Lizzie knocked on the door to Pat’s office, and heard his deep Irish voice call out “Come in!” She did so, leaving the door open, as a matter of long-ingrained habit. As she entered, Pat was there, talking to the Doctor.
She didn’t want to get him embroiled in all this. It wasn’t fair on him – he was already dealing with the death of one. For someone so nice, who had treated her well, and so many others well, he didn’t deserve being involved in this horrific matter any further. “Pat, can you leave us quickly?”
“But, why – ?” Pat looked between the two of them.
“Please,” she said, a more insistent this time. Pat did as he was asked.
“There was…” Lizzie gulped, as she tried to tell the Doctor what she had learned from Carmen. She didn’t think she could continue. But she did. “There was a child, and the mask did its thing, and– ”
“I know. Pat told me,” the Doctor said, his face grim. Lizzie could see he was just as disgusted as her – but he did a better job at hiding it. Perhaps too well? “It’s here, Lizzie. You were right. The Maiden is here, somewhere.”
“But – Doctor,” she began. “A child is dead.”
“I know. And I’m going to do everything in my power to stop the Maiden from killing again, doing whatever it is she’s doing, because– ”
“It’s just – like – I don’t think it’s fair, that she’s focusing on children,” she said.
“No. It isn’t.”
“And you’re kind of… you seem…. pretty relaxed about it all. Just because the child was from a care home, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t loved. He was, a lot, so don’t just treat it like another casualty, like you’ve treated everyone else so far. It’s been a bit like – “oh no, there’s another one.” And you’ve not shown much understanding that these are people who have their own lives. Apart from the boy. He was meant to have a life – and now he won’t. And, I think that’s …”
The Doctor sat on top of the desk, in silence, looking at his feet, ashamed.
“You care,” he said.
She held herself back from stating the obvious, like he’d just done. Of course she cared. People were precious; they didn’t come along often. But all of this came out rather awkwardly when she finally spoke, “Erm, yeah. Like. Quite a bit.”
The Doctor looked at her and smiled. “Thank you.”
She didn’t really know what he was thanking her for – was it just one of those ambiguous thank yous that people say when they’ve finally understood something that was confusing them before? Or, was it from the heart, stated awkwardly, and incompletely, like she had just done?
“Thank you, so mu-”
But the Doctor’s words stopped with the scream that came from outside.
***
Loads of kids were standing at the French windows, looking out into the garden.
It was a huge garden – a heaven for children, an immense playground for their imagination. Lizzie had memories of walking around this very garden when she was really small, wearing little red welly boots, and a bright yellow mackintosh that was just a little bit too big. Sometimes the bottom part of the garden got really muddy, and became swamp-like, and it had to be closed off. But Lizzie used to duck under the safety tape that they’d put around it, and walk out into the bog, and just to walk around in it, enjoying the feel of the soft, squishy mud through the protective layer of bright red rubber.
And she thought of how, years later, when in the dog days of summer, she would sit out on the patio, reading while she watched the younger children just… enjoying themselves, without a care, and she wished that she could be like that again. It was a force so powerful that sometimes, while lying in bed at night, thinking of it, the memory would become real again, almost touchable.
The memory shattered now in the face of a new and dangerous reality, as she watched the Doctor push through the crowd of children to get to the French window.
Lizzie joined him and the children as they looked out at a spectral figure, draped in white, with a veil covering the now iconic mask. And there was a little girl – not very old – backing away from the figure as it raised its veil with a single skeletal finger, revealing an ornate azure floral pattern on the right side of its face. It seemed to smile at them, and then vanished into the trees behind it.
After it had gone, the Doctor opened the doors and ran down into the garden – with Lizzie close behind him. When he arrived at the little girl, she seemed fine, but shaken. The Doctor, as if he had done his job, stood up and walked over to the trees, following the direction of the figure. Lizzie, in his place, knelt down beside the little girl. She didn’t recognise her; the girl could only have been about as old as Lizzie had been when she had come down here to play as a little girl.
Pat was running towards them, like a father would run to see if his children were all right. Lizzie gave the shivering girl the kindest and most genuine of smiles.
“Don’t be scared.”
And the little girl nodded in understanding as Lizzie hugged her.
“Tell Pat to make sure he keeps the other children in the house. Yeah?”
“Yes,” the girl agreed.
“Good girl.”
Pat arrived and scooped the girl up in his arms, thanking Lizzie, before he ran over to the other children.
Lizzie wished for nothing more than for Pat to be able to help her, to give her the advice she needed now, or for Maggie to suddenly appear and give her a few comforting words. But Maggie was off doing what she did best, and Pat had somebody else who needed his help more.
Her life here had been calm. It hadn’t been easy, but nothing much had happened. Well, quite a bit had happened. But in comparison to whatever was going on now, it seemed simple and trivial, when in fact that’s the one thing it hadn’t been. Once upon a time, she had feared not being liked in school. Then she’d feared exam results. Then she feared debt, and then eviction, and more recently, a masked creature that wanted to kill her.
Now, she couldn’t think of anything more to be scared about. She couldn’t see anything except some very scared children. And her words would not allow her to arrange them in a way that could describe how she felt, but she wanted to help protect the little girl as much as she possibly could, no matter what it took.
The world around her seemed to pass by in slow-motion, as she turned and stumbled over ground that had once marked her childhood, down to the gap in the trees where she knew she could pass through and into the woods.
All of the children up there, looking at all this from behind the windows of the French doors, would remember this day – it would haunt them. The memory would be passed down to their children and to their children’s children, and eventually it would become a story, a fairy tale, for the simple purpose of scaring children before they went to sleep.
Just as she had when she met the Doctor, Lizzie now had another choice to make: she could run and be with him or she could stay here and run away from him.
Lizzie promised the little girl she wouldn’t be long, as she turned and ran into the trees.
***
The Doctor was waiting for her on the other side, beyond the trees.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
She wanted to shout at him, to tell him that of course she wasn’t alright. Her whole life had just changed forever, all within the space of a couple of hours, and he was asking her the sort of pointless question that he might’ve also asked a stranger on the street.
“Yes,” she lied, and she could tell that he knew she was lying. “You?”
“Yes,” he lied, and she could tell he was lying.
They continued down the pathway for a second in silence, before the Doctor asked the most obvious question.
“Where does this path go?”
Lizzie knew this place like the back of her hand. She’d walked it so many times, when she was younger, because it was where she came when she wanted to be alone.
They had arrived.
It was tidy, but looked lived-in as well. Lizzie was partial to the term ‘cluttered’. As already implied, the bookshelves were full, with some smaller novellas stacked lengthways on top of the other books. And on the top of the same unit were some old shoeboxes gathering dust, containing remnants of her childhood and of her school days.
The floor space was relatively uncluttered and clean, with a coffee table and a sofa, both of which she’d picked up from a charity shop. The kitchenette was accompanied by a little table and two chairs, none of which matched. But Lizzie liked it – she appreciated the individuality of it all.
On the wall above her table was a pin board, where she kept a few photos and postcards, and notelets to herself to remind her to take the bins out and such. There was a window opposite her sofa, looking out onto the street below. As she entered her flat and before she flopped down on the sofa and closed her eyes, Lizzie drew the tartan curtains, and switched on the fairy lights that ran from the window, above the TV, and around into the kitchen diner.
Time passed, with her just sitting there, wasting it, before she opened her eyes and looked up to see a battered novel on the coffee table, waiting for her. She loved books. As a child, she’d been such an avid reader, and often had her nose buried in a book. It was comforting, having the struggles of someone else to escape into, and it was heartening how those struggles could help her understand her own.
But as she’d grown up, it had become harder to read as much as she used to. Lizzie promised herself, as some kind of New Year’s Resolution (which, if she did say so herself, she was rather good at sticking to), that she would read 20 pages every day, partly so she didn’t feel so rubbish about not having the same bond with stories as she used to. The looming, overstuffed bookshelves were a reminder of the days when that bond was strong and when she had made time for books, before the days she came home, ate alone, washed up, and sat in the dark, empty flat, just dreaming of that time when books were her life.
This evening, she’d grabbed some chips on her way back home, and had eaten most of them as she walked. It had left her at a loose end, now, as she sat on her sofa, absent-mindedly watching the light fitting (the bulb had no shade), just waiting for something to happen. So, Lizzie took herself off to bed. Maybe sleeping would make her feel better.
Of course, it didn’t help that Lizzie was an insomniac – and a bad one at that. Some nights she could go off to bed, and sleep just fine. Other nights, she just couldn’t lie still, or get rid of thoughts she didn’t want, and allow herself to be carried off into a world of the not-real and of the seemingly-real, of disjointed, random bits of life, strung together in the form of dreams, almost like little clips of movies uploaded to YouTube – the story, there, but not the whole story.
But in one way, insomnia worked for Lizzie, though, because sometimes the nights were the only time she could find a way to feel better. The calmness and tranquillity of the small hours, at just gone three, when nobody was awake.
Nobody at all.
This was one of those nights, where no matter how much she tried, sleep just refused to come, and she just wanted to go out and wander the Earth as everyone else slept. When these nights came, Lizzie would take herself over to the lone window of the flat, that looked down onto the street below. She was lucky to have one of the flats with an actual window – this was the only flat that had one.
On these nights, Lizzie would pull back the curtain, and sit on the windowsill, looking out at the night- shrouded street outside, and marvelling at how the stars looked down on her from above. She’d shut the curtains behind her, enclosing herself in this little bubble on the edge of reality. It was like she was in a capsule, watching the universe drift by, at the same time the nights would tick by.
It was so comforting to lock herself away like that, a set of curtains blocking out the real world, with a starry world ahead. She’d always found it comforting. Lizzie had memories, of doing this even as a child. When all the others were in bed, and she was the last one awake, she would sit on her windowsill and look out over the garden in the night.
Blissful moments of solitude.
Tonight, as she watched, the night was calm, and the weather was still. As summer approached, the nights would grow warmer – but there would be storms as well. But tonight, there was no cloud layer, and she could enjoy the never-ending cycle of stars, burning and re-burning in the dome-like impossible navy blue of the night sky above her head. Lizzie sat back, resting her head against the wall and hugging her knees hunched up in front of her, and watched. The temperature by her window was colder than that of the rest of the flat – it made the hairs on her neck and arms stand up, and it chilled her. But it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was almost cathartic.
Lizzie was thinking how impossible it would be to count how many nights she’d spent like this, by the window. She had lost count, herself. That’s why Lizzie was reasonably certain that, despite the constant change unfolding in the sky, the estate grounds below her window would not be too different whenever she chose to look down. She knew there was another block of flats over the road, exactly the same as hers, with three storeys, one in the middle with a large window. And she knew that if she were to continue down the road to either the left or the right, there would be some houses, paintwork crumbling off them, and litter tossed into their gardens.
So, because of her experienced understanding of the geography of the grounds outside her home, Lizzie Darwin was certain that she had never seen a large blue box on the street corner, just opposite her window.
It was a police box, the sort from 1950s London. It was built from the most beautiful, blue-painted wood, and had a glowing light on its roof, illuminating the various signs on the rest of the box, as well as the area surrounding it, with its warm, yellow, glow. It looked fundamentally normal in terms of its construction, just like a funny little cabinet. And yet she had a strange, nagging feeling, one that people in her favourite books usually felt (and that Lizzie had ridiculed as a child), that whatever the box was, it wasn’t simply someone’s idea of a joke, left out on the street corner as a lark. There was something different about it.
Her mind already had gone straight onto some weird and out-there possibilities before she even dared to consider what was probably the more realistic explanation. After all, in the real world, there was no such thing as a magical blue police box. But Lizzie also knew that nobody would go to so much trouble on just a whim. Why would you even bother building such a thing for ‘a bit of a laugh?’ she quoted herself back to herself, as she often did when she thought she was being stupid.
For a reason she could not define, Lizzie just knew that somewhere there was such thing as a magical blue police box.
She threw on some jeans and a t-shirt, grabbed her coat, and sailed out of the flat.
***
When she arrived on the street below, Lizzie realised she was definitely not going mad.
There was a man as well.
He was sitting half in and half out of the box, fiddling with something in his hands that looked like some battered piece of technology. She was sceptical about going over to him, and yet, she continued to approach him anyway, because she was curious, and she didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to investigate a weird box that had suddenly appeared on the corner of her street.
As she neared him, he looked up at her and smiled.
His smile told her a lot about him. It was a sad smile, the sort of smile smiled by a person who had seen … a lot. It seemed to Lizzie that the man had once smiled many happy smiles. However, the days of those happy smiles were done, and he’d now resigned himself to days of only sad smiles.
His hair wasn’t long, but it was unkempt, making it look longer and shaggier than it was, and that added to a rather worn down appearance overall, when combined with the light stubble on his chin and the clothing he wore. He was wearing a battered pair of brown leather boots, and a rugged pair of black trousers ran down to just above his ankles. His rather antiquated frock coat ran down to his knees, and a once-white, now-dirtied shirt lay open, making way for a simple woollen scarf that now sat beside him draped over his leather satchel.
“Hello,” he said to her.
It was a simple word, a simple greeting, that many people would say in passing. But the way he said it indicated that this was, most definitely, not in passing. Lizzie sensed that he didn’t say this to many people.
She hesitated, just for a few seconds, wondering whether this was a stupid idea, and whether she should just turn around and go back into her flat. She did an odd little should-she/shouldn’t-she dance in the middle of the road, while debating in her mind what she should do, while a strange, incomprehensible babble of syllables that were probably meant to form ‘this was a bad idea,’ spilled out of her mouth, followed by a beat of silence, and then….
“Erm – hi.”
There we go. She’d greeted him. And now she could continue down the road in an awkward walk, as if she were in fact just off on a late-night stroll. Lizzie could read people through their faces, through the little twitches and changes that they made. She read his face quite clearly, and stopped.
“I saw you, sat up there,” the man gestured up to her window.
She didn’t know what to do, even now. Could she still find some awkward excuse to retreat, or should simply try to engage in some sort of conversation.
“Oh, er, yeah. I just – I sit there sometimes. I know, it’s a bit weird but, I just –”
“No, don’t worry. The stars,” the man looked up. “I can understand why.”
“Good, right, well,” she turned to leave, praying to some deity she didn’t believe in that this painfully awkward moment would end as quickly as it had started. “I’d better be –”
“What’s your name?”
Once again, Lizzie did her weird hesitation jig in the middle of the road.
“I’m, er, Lizzie.”
“Nice to meet you, Lizzie.”
“And you?” she asked, automatically playing her role in the formalities of introduction, although having such a formal conversation in such absurd circumstances just felt unreal.
“I’m –” he paused, almost as if he’d forgotten what his name was. “I’m the Doctor.”
He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to examine his own words and extract some meaning from them. It was as if he hadn’t heard those words from anyone in a long time, let alone himself.
She couldn’t just… go. Here was a strange man called the Doctor, sitting in the open door of a blue 1950s police box…. Lizzie walked closer to him, to get a better look at what he was doing.
“What’s that?” she asked him, attempting to use some of the ‘small talk tactics’ her manager had attempted to instil in her.
“It’s a screwdriver. It used to be sonic, but now… I think I need another one.”
She paused. “But it’s-”
“Yeah,” the strange Doctor-man nodded, as if he fully understood Lizzie’s bewilderment. The device, to her, did not look remotely like a screwdriver. It was a sort of… tool, a gadget thing, with a red hoop at the end, and some wires sprawling out of the metal stick it was attached to.
The conversation was awkward. Neither of them really knew what to talk about because both of them were avoiding the elephant in the room.
“If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, with the box…”
“Oh, er, yeah,” Lizzie said. “What are you doing here? With the, erm, box.”
“I had seen a picture of this place on a calendar. Thought it’d be nice to come here for a break.”
“They put the main town on calendars all the time,” Lizzie nodded, thinking back to all the ‘Best British Market Town’ calendars she’d seen in gift shops.
“No…,” the Doctor looked confused. “I mean this bit.”
Lizzie looked at him, a confused expression moving across her face. He was having a laugh, and it annoyed her, because there were some idiots who took every opportunity to make fun of the people who lived here in the estate.
“It was. Not joking,” the Doctor continued. “’The Universe’s Most inspirational Places.’ For the year 5327, I think.”
This place isn’t inspirational, Lizzie thought to herself.
“Why isn’t it inspirational?” the Doctor smiled, as if he knew what she was thinking.
It suddenly struck Lizzie, what he had said about the year of the calendar being 5327. The 54th century. Although her instincts were shouting at her that he was just having a laugh at her expense because obviously nobody could actually be from the future and have magic ‘sonic screwdrivers’ or whatever they were! On the other hand, there was something that told her he couldn’t be making this up.
“The year 5327,” she turned to him. “Surely that’s – I mean, I don’t know, that’s not real. Unless, like-”
The Doctor looked almost surprised that she’d picked up on it so quickly.
“What are you a Doctor of?”
He looked down suddenly, as if she’d asked a question that had reminded him of something from the past, or…
“Sorry,” she backtracked. “I didn’t, erm, I didn’t mean to upset you. Are you… are you alright?”
“No, it’s my fault,” the Doctor looked back up at her, smiling again. Lizzie could tell it wasn’t a genuine smile like his smile from before. “The question, that’s all. Brings back memories.”
“I’m sorry.” And she was.
“No, it’s not your fault. Friends of mine – they always ask that question. Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” the Doctor put the sonic screwdriver in his bag and stood up.
Lizzie caught sight of his eyes. His friends, whoever they were, weren’t with him anymore. That would explain why he looked so sad.
“Do you want to talk about it? Cause, I mean, like, you can, if you want.”
The Doctor walked over to her, and gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Lizzie – it was lovely meeting you.”
Although she barely knew who he was, there was part of her that still wanted to help him. “I guess – if you need to vent, you know where I am.” Lizzie turned to walk away.
She sincerely wanted him to know that, to just acknowledge that whatever he’d been through, there would always be someone for him to turn to, and to talk to. He didn’t have to suffer alone. She pulled her coat tightly around her, as she walked back to the flat.
Then, a voice.
“Lizzie. Please – stay.”
***
Lizzie had sat down next to the Doctor at the foot of the open door to the police box. The lights had been switched off, so she couldn’t see if there was anything else in there. But – it wasn’t like normal lights being switched off. It was like there was an absence of light there, as if the darkness had almost been put there artificially so she couldn’t see whatever was inside.
“So – I was a bit aimless,” the Doctor admitted. “But I picked up a high concentration of dimensional disturbances, somewhere within this town…. at least.”
Although Lizzie didn’t have a clue what he was saying, she knew it was good that he was talking about something he was interested in, at least. It would help him.
“Unusual amounts of dimensional energy. I’ve been tracking it, and I told the TARDIS to track it ….”
She had no idea what this tardis thing was, or if it had something to do with the sonic screwdriver or the box or something else. Lizzie was just willing to let him talk.
“…And it brought you here?” she finished his sentence.
“Yes. It’s not always precise, but it usually gets the rough location reasonably correct. That’s when I discovered my sonic screwdriver was broken.”
The TARDIS clearly had nothing to do with the sonic screwdriver, then. Lizzie decided just to broach the subject anyway. It couldn’t do much harm.
“What’s the tardis?”
“Oh,” he brushed it off, as if the answer were obvious. “The box. It’s magic.”
“The magic box,” Lizzie whispered to herself.
The Doctor patted the wood, as if it were a loyal and faithful hound. “The magic box.”
He looked at it sadly, as if the words woke something up deep inside him.
“What happens, then?” she asked, referring back to the Doctor’s concern about the unusual amount of “dimensional energy” that he had tracked here.
“It’s not that harmful, in small doses. In the grand scheme of things, the amount here is still tiny – just large in comparison to the usual state of affairs here. I’m just intrigued.”
Lizzie nodded – and then caught sight of the thing at the end of the road.
“Erm –”
“Yes?”
Lizzie gestured towards a tall figure, dressed simply, in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, and a tee-shirt picked up at a metal concert of some kind. She did, in fact, recognise him as a man who lived on the estate, just down the road from her. She had passed him sometimes, as he leaned against the wall outside his house, smoking. But what she saw before her now, chilled her to the bone.
It first struck her, that his feet were bare. That would not seem so odd on its own, but he was also wearing a mask. Something simple, with the basic features of the face shaped into white plastic. What was disturbing was that the eyeholes were empty. Or rather, where two eyes should look through and bring life to an otherwise cold and blank template, there were two deep pools of blackness. Lizzie could see this clearly, even from a distance. And for a moment, she froze.
As she always told herself, eyes were a good way to understand a person – and she knew that whoever this person was, they were not just someone she vaguely recognized, standing in the middle of the road wearing a mask. That would be absurd anyway – even if that’s all it were.
But this was something outside of the norm.
Lizzie wondered whether it was a coincidence that some of the weirdest stuff she’d encountered in her life so far was occurring on this one evening. She decided it wasn’t a coincidence, because the Doctor seemed to have some idea of what was going on; he had tracked some odd disturbances to her very neighbourhood and now the Doctor was rushing on foot towards the masked figure, perhaps to take a closer look?
And Lizzie followed.
The figure didn’t react, even when the Doctor went right up close and stared into its face. It remained motionless, staring off into the distance with empty eyes.
“I hope he’s alright,” Lizzie murmured, a nervous look on her face.
“Do you…?” the Doctor started to ask and then stopped, as if he expected her to know what he was about to ask, which she did
“He lives just down the road… I pass him on the way to work.”
“Ah,” the Doctor murmured, as he tried to pull the mask from the face. Lizzie heard the crackle of electricity and the Doctor whipped his fingers back.
“Don’t hurt him,” Lizzie gasped.
“I’m fine,” the Doctor responded, shrugging it off.
“I was talking to you. Be careful. Whoever he is, he is like… you know. A person.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
In a way, Lizzie felt a little bit guilty, because the Doctor looked disappointed with himself.
“It’s stuck,” he continued, “I mean, there’s an electrical field bonding the mask to his skin. I don’t know what it’s for…”
“Why him?” Lizzie asked, interested as to why, of all the people, this had happened to this man, on this estate, although to be honest, it didn’t completely surprise her.
“I… don’t know.”
The Doctor placed his fingers just where the mask touched the skin.
“What are –”
This time, he gave a firm yank, and this time he lurched back as the electricity shot up through his hands and straight up both his arms.
“Be care…” And, as he reeled from the pain… “Doctor!”
One more go, one more searing shock of electricity, and the mask was in the Doctor’s hands, along with the face of the man that had been beneath it.
There wasn’t any blood or gore, though. Instead, the face looked like it had been stitched together. His mouth, nostrils, eyelids and earholes were bound tightly together with thin, white thread. The operation had been executed with expertise – all the stitches were perfectly even, and a knot had been tied at the end.
Lizzie grimaced and spoke softly. “Poor, poor guy.”
The Doctor frowned. “The mask – it bonded to his face so securely that it intruded so much on the facial structure that… the mask…repaired it.”
Lizzie understood what he meant, though the Doctor, almost as if for dramatic effect, decided to elaborate anyway.
“When it became attached to his face, it damaged his eyes, and nose, and mouth. So … to fix that the mask stitched them up, like a doctor stitches up a wound.”
The man who’d worn the mask remained standing, as the Doctor made his way back to the TARDIS.
“What do we do with him?” Lizzie placed an arm around the man, just to make sure he didn’t fall over.
“We take him back to wherever he lived. Then – eventually his body will be found.”
Lizzie turned towards the house where the man had once lived, his body leaning on her, as if he had just sprained his ankle, or bruised his shin badly, and she were helping him back home.
“Lizzie –”
“It’s fine, Doctor. I’ll take him home.”
***
As Lizzie walked, supporting him, her mind went into overdrive. This man was dead.
The Doctor had said the mask had helped him, it would’ve been more painful had it not stitched him up like that. But someone was dead, and in what was both a simple and extraordinary fashion. This man had loved people, people had loved him. A whole life. And she hadn’t even known his name. His body was heavy, really too heavy for her. She should’ve let the Doctor help, but she was determined to do this on her own. She needed time away from him, to think about what she’d seen. When she returned, the Doctor would probably be gone, just as quickly as he’d arrived. But – the incident with the mask could not have been all there was to this. Whatever the Doctor was here for, it was not over yet. She was almost sure of it.
The Doctor was intriguing. And terrifying as well. He’d looked disturbed when it was clear the man was dead. But he had also looked at the body as if he’d seen the same thing a hundred times before. Whoever he was, he was fundamentally a sad man. She was certain he had lost someone. So many possible interpretations of him – but that’s what intrigued her even more. Was he a mad man, or a sad man, or a bad man, or maybe all three at the same time?
The front door to the masked man’s house was unlocked, so she gently steered him inside, and through to the downstairs bedroom. With great difficulty, she managed to lie him down on the bed.
Whoever he was, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had done nothing to deserve this. It all had happened because someone had decided it should be him.
Lizzie shut the front door behind her and headed back to where she had left the Doctor.
***
When Lizzie arrived back down the road, the blue box was still waiting. The Doctor stood outside, pacing up and down, like an eccentric and impatient professor trying to sort out what was going on and must be done.
“Ah, there you are,” the Doctor said, a hint of urgency in his voice.
“Sorry, er…” she began.
“Lizzie, don’t worry, it’s not your fault. But I need you to come with me. Now.”
Of course, her first instinct was to run away from him as far and as fast as she could. And she very nearly did, since she still had very little idea who he was. And some men were dangerous.
He presented the mask to her. A message was on the front, as if the mask were a screen, in simple black font.
Facial connection compromised. Defence formation transmitted.
“I’ve done a scan,” the Doctor said, his voice quick and anxious. “Pre-residual teleportation energy. But regardless of whatever the mask was, whoever owns it is on their way, here, and soon, looking for answers.”
“… and?”
“’Defence formation,’ Lizzie. That means, whenever they do arrive, they’re going to be looking for whoever detached its face. And you were there, with me.”
Lizzie stared at him, and she saw how worried he was. He was genuinely concerned for her, and was nervously looking to his ‘TARDIS’ every few seconds, as if he were desperate to get away from whatever was coming. Whoever he was, he wanted to help. Lizzie looked at the Doctor, as he waited, just a few feet away from her, and while she looked at him, she could see the huge expanse of sky and stars behind him, like two big, black curtains, splattered in glitter, drawn across the night sky.
And she walked towards him.
The Doctor ran into the TARDIS, and Lizzie followed. But then, as she approached the wooden frame of the doors, she hesitated for a second, watching the Doctor as he disappeared into the darkness inside. It would be cramped. A very tight squeeze. But the Doctor – when he’d run inside, he’d just… kept running. As if the box had no back.
Then the lights turned on.
What Lizzie saw in front of her was impossible.
The box was, rather obviously, bigger on the inside. She poked her head back outside again, just to make sure that she definitely wasn’t imagining it or that she hadn’t fallen asleep in front of the telly, or something equally stupid. Strangely, though, she knew for certain that she wasn’t dreaming.
It was real. The bigger-on-the-inside box was real.
The chamber was huge, and gleaming white, but full of character too. It was hexagonal in shape, just like the shape of the quirky console in the middle, which was completely covered in all manner of buttons and switches and levers. The ceiling was made almost entirely of glass, but the view was not that of the sky outside. Instead, it was some other sky, with ecstatic swirling clouds of shimmering dust, an explosion of colours from all ends of the spectrum, with shining beads of golden light bursting through it all. It was a view of something so far off, and yet so close.
For a brief moment, Lizzie stood in the doorway, unsure of where to go and what to do, but the Doctor firmly hurried her in. As she stepped inside, she saw that two of the walls were lined with bookshelves crammed full of books of all kinds. As she walked past them, she recognised some of the titles, but others, she had never set her eyes upon before. Their titles spoke of the future; many were novels that, for her, had not yet been written, even though they sat there, in front of her, looking as old as the battered books that one often found in second-hand bookshops.
Beside the console was a lone armchair. The Doctor, whoever he was, clearly travelled and even lived here alone, although, partially hidden away on a bookshelf, was a black and white photograph of a woman, wearing something that looked like a make-do bridal gown. It was small photo, just a bit smaller than A5 size, but in a golden frame. Lizzie glanced at it as she walked past, her mind desperate to know who she was to the Doctor, and who else had come to know him.
There was a viewing gallery above, and just down a set of steps, was an open area where an old, antique writing table stood in the corner, covered in papers. There was a bar as well; Lizzie didn’t dare go in, but as she walked past the entrance, it looked like the bar was quite literally gathering dust. It hadn’t been used for ages.
The Doctor was looking at her, as if he knew that she would have some questions for him to answer; it was almost as if he expected it – as if she were in a position experienced by so many before her, and he was just following the script.
“We must be somewhere else,” Lizzie said as she looked up at the galaxies above her..
The Doctor smiled. He looked tired, but happy, as if he were almost pleased about something.
“Why do you think that?” the Doctor replied as he flicked some switches on the console and pulled a lever.
“Er… I guess, well … it was definitely wardrobe-sized on the outside. And then I came inside and it wasn’t. So… we must be somewhere else that isn’t within the four walls of the wooden blue bit…”
“And…the ceiling kind of also gives it away,” she added, softly, almost as an afterthought.
“Yes. Basically. It’s another dimension.”
There was a screen attached to an articulated metal armature, mounted on a turntable on top of the console, and the Doctor grabbed it, and gracefully, slid it towards him.
“We have to get away from them.”
“I guess this thing, your… TARDIS… it moves?” Lizzie stood, motionless, and slightly awkwardly, looking at the Doctor as he danced around the console. And, the way he moved was like he was doing it all again for the very first time. And yes, she was aware of the paradox at the heart of her observation.
“Oh, Lizzie,” the Doctor seemed to be smiling at her naivety, even though pretty much everyone on Earth would’ve been naïve in her situation. “It moves.”
With those words, he pulled down the lever with one emphatic move – the largest lever, the one in the middle of the console. And clearly it was the ON switch– the one that made the magic begin, the one that made the great machine burst into life.
She was right – as the Doctor’s hand left the lever, the glass column in the middle started to slide up and down, and a great, mechanical whirring, like the sound a machine would make if somehow it could breathe, echoed throughout the box.
Seconds later, the box stopped.
Lizzie was aware of how quick it had been. Most spaceships had to do the whole launching thing, and then had to fly, but it was as if the box had picked itself up, and had moved itself to wherever they were now, without any mechanical fuss.
In the blink of an eye, the Doctor was past her, looking out the doors, peering from side to side.
“It’s safe. They haven’t followed us.”
He stepped out the door and beckoned for her to follow. She did.
“Why here?” Lizzie asked.
“Set the coordinates to random, somewhere within the vicinity of the town.”
Lizzie had a startling sensation: it was as if the TARDIS had known she was in here, and Lizzie began to wonder whether the bigger-on-the-inside box could sense things, like a real, thinking person, as if the computer in the middle was the brain and the control centre of the whole thing.
“I need to find the source of this mask.” The Doctor’s words abruptly brought her out of her thoughts.
Lizzie looked at him, her expression asking him to elaborate, as he held the sonic screwdriver to the mask.
“This isn’t the only mask or even the main mask.”
His observation had not helped. She waited for more to come, and it did.
“Imagine a nervous system of masks,” he continued.
It almost made Lizzie laugh, as it was such a ridiculous notion.
“And this is just one of the nerves at the end, one of the little, tiny ones. Somewhere, there is a brain. The one that controls all the rest.”
“Oh. And you want to find it? Or … something else…”
“Exactly. I quite fancy a cup of tea,” the Doctor had made his way over to the door of a café. He was about to use the sonic screwdriver (a device that Lizzie seemed to note had featured quite heavily in their encounter so far) to open the door. Then, Lizzie reached into her coat pocket, and pulled out a set of keys.
“Where did you get those?” the Doctor looked at her in surprise.
“My manager.”
There was a look of realisation on his face. “You…”
***
It would come as no surprise to anyone, except perhaps the Doctor, that there was no one in the café at that time of night. It was gone half past two, after all, as she put the key in the lock and the Doctor followed her inside the empty shop and turned on the lights. Lizzie began to think of what it would be like the next morning if her manager found out. That is, if there ever was a next morning.
Lizzie had truly mastered the art of the perfect cup of tea – not only because she spent so much of her personal time drinking it, but because it’s what she spent so many of her work days, making it for others.
“You work here,” the Doctor distractedly stated the obvious as he looked up from the mask when she placed the mug down on the little table in front of him and sat down across from him.
“Yes.”
“That’s… a surprise.”
“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment,” she laughed nervously.
“It was meant as one. But you’re intelligent. Very intelligent. Why are you here? Living in that council flat, and working in a café making tea for the locals over 70 and for tourists passing through?”
Passing through. Like you? She smiled to herself.
She realised that the Doctor probably lived in his magic box. That it was like a home on wheels, perhaps like a caravan. He was obviously from somewhere, wherever that was, but for some reason, stayed away from it. Lizzie noticed the contrast between the two of them, especially since here she sat, stuck in the town she’d lived in since childhood.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go ….” Lizzie responded finally, and then stopped, as if she’d revealed too much.
“Go on.”
“This town is home, I suppose. And I also don’t really have much of a choice.”
“I noticed. The estate, and then this part of the town. The divide between both halves. Not even halves – the estate is sprawling, with this island of the upper class in the middle.”
Lizzie noticed the Doctor as he said this: he’d looked away from her and then down into his mug of tea. He was trying to hide his face.
“Are you…?” she began.
“Sorry. Don’t worry. I – I knew someone from your country who was meant to fix all this.”
Lizzie didn’t understand what he meant, because he sounded so certain that somebody had been going to help them.
“His vision for the country. No more poverty, or gaping inequality, or anything like that. No university tuition fees. Social care, so much better.”
Lizzie would’ve voted for him, whoever he was.
“I don’t even know your last name,” the Doctor said to her.
“I don’t even know your first,” she snapped back, rather pleased with her witty retort. “Sorry, not that I…”
But the Doctor was smiling, almost as if he were pleased with her.
“Darwin,” Lizzie said.
“As in Charles?”
“As in Charles,” she confirmed.
“I met him once. Interesting chap, to say the least.”
There was probably some kind of ‘oh my god!’ comment that Lizzie should’ve used to respond to whatever the Doctor said, but she decided just to take it as it came, because the oddness showed very little sign of stopping.
“Elizabeth Darwin,” the Doctor said, letting the name flow off his tongue. “It’s a lovely name.”
She hesitated. She’d never liked anyone to call her by her full name. It reminded her of the scary care-worker from the home, back when she was younger, who used the name like a threat or a warning. With the look on her face, she told the Doctor all he needed to know and he understood. But then she added, “Thanks, I guess-”
The Doctor, so far, had spent the entire conversation looking at her, almost like the way she chose to focus on a person’s eyes. The Doctor had been focusing on her – on everything about her. She saw something else, just for the briefest of seconds, as his eyes flicked away from her to something else.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” the Doctor dismissed it, sipping his tea and trying not to look sheepish that he’d been caught out. Lizzie thought about ignoring it, but it was as if, for just a few seconds, he’d fallen out of their conversation.
“Like, I don’t want to be weird or anything, but you were definitely – you were definitely looking behind me.”
“Lizzie, wait – ”
She’d got him.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Don’t turn around. Just – look into my eyes, Elizabeth.”
“How far away is it?”
“Approximately 10 metres, give or take.”
“Erm...”
“I’ve been scanning the mask – I think I know what it is. And this is what they do. It’s better when they take their victims by surprise, so they have no idea. Or, even better, they like to put you slightly on edge, like sowing the seeds of the bad dreams of a child lying awake in bed at night...”
The Doctor’s analogy chilled her to the bone – and he continued.
“That’s what they are, Lizzie. They are the shiver that runs down your spine. Maybe the sound of a few footsteps, here and there. Just to make you slightly wary, setting your blood to a gentle boil. Then they pounce.”
“But…,” Lizzie tried hard to think of some explanation, as if her life depended on it. Which, she just realised, it kind of actually did. “But, surely, if you’re telling me it’s there, then – then there’s no point in it killing me! Because … because if I’m aware of their existence, then there would be no point – no – no shock factor.”
“In theory,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve come to realise that theory and practise are very different things.”
Lizzie was taking slow, deep breaths, as the fear bubbled up through her, rising up her gullet and clawing its way up her throat.
“Can we get away from it?” she whispered. “I mean – this is just a drone, or something – what about the main it?”
The Doctor stuffed the sonic screwdriver and the mask into his satchel. “Okay. Lizzie, stand up.”
Lizzie pushed her chair away from her as she stood. By speaking in his slow, calm, voice, the Doctor was almost hypnotizing her into rising slower.
“Slowly, that’s it,” the Doctor smiled. “Keep looking at me – that’s it, keep looking – Lizzie, don’t look.”
She turned her head, but only an inch. She could see the shadow, where the creature lurked. She could see the outline of its mask, and the blurred, yet dark, and empty pits, where its eyes were watching her. Those eyes must’ve been the only way it sensed. Everything it was registering – her movements, the movements of the Doctor in front of her, would be streaming through the blackness of those eyes.
Lizzie was up now, and the Doctor was looking over her shoulder at the masked figure.
“Now, Lizzie … step around the table, and walk.”
She did so, and started slowly walking away. Gradually, as she got further and further away from the table and hopefully the figure she could not see, she began to speed up.
“Don’t speed up. Just … stay … calm.”
The Doctor’s words made her slow down again, made her breathe. She was frozen in the moment, but unlike the masked man, she didn’t sense everything through her eyes. She could feel the coldness of the café on her arms underneath her coat, causing the hairs on her arms to rise, and she could hear only one sound – the Doctor’s soothing voice.
She was near the door.
“Now … go outside,” the Doctor continued. She began to leave, as he said, but when she started to turn around to look back into the café, the Doctor firmly warned her, again, “Don’t.”
He strode past her, out the café door, and a few feet later, was at the doors of the TARDIS, unlocking them and stepping back inside as Lizzie followed.
Almost as soon as she’d shut the TARDIS doors, she heard the sound of a hard object slamming against the wooden doors. It was like somebody had a battering ram, and was pounding the navy blue oak as hard as they could.
The Doctor was looking at the monitor – its screen showed a view of the street outside. But … there was no battering-ram, just the masked figure thumping the doors with its fists.
“It won’t be able to get in. Nothing can get through those doors,” assured the Doctor saw her standing tentatively by the doors, watching them fearfully.
“’Nothing’ only extends to what they’ve been tested against,” she said, not taking her eyes off them for a second.
“Good point,” he walked over to her. “But, we’re leaving anyway. It won’t be able to come after us.”
“You said that before.”
“This time we’re going further afield.”
Lizzie began to protest. “You … I need to … I have to work tomorrow.”
The Doctor smiled a coy smile. Lizzie was beginning to realise he had rather a knack for surprises. So, as he had done before, he pulled the lever and the TARDIS started its husky, mechanical breathing once more. She shrugged at his impudence, and then wished she hadn’t because she was worried she’d offended him.
“Lizzie, open the doors.” the Doctor flung his satchel over his shoulder and joined her by the doors. “Trust me,” he pointed to the handle.
“But it’s still out there,” she said, and yet she had walked back to them and joined him, apparently trusting him enough to go against what her instincts were telling her.
She opened the doors.
It was daytime now. And yet they were in exactly the same place, in front of the café. She remembered Charles Darwin.
“So it – it travels in time as well?”
The Doctor’s face lit up as she said it and as he watched her realization that she had been in a time machine.
“Yes. It travels in time. And that should shake them off for a bit.”
“Erm – yeah, I guess. But,” she asked, as he reached inside his satchel, and took out a strange, mobile phone sized device. “Surely we need to look for the brain? You know? The one in the middle that controls all the rest? Or, I don’t know…”
“Yes – we do. I’m trying to lock onto a trace of the dimensional energy. That’s how they travel, I think. Bending dimensions.”
“So… what are they?”
“Hmm?” the Doctor asked.
“You said you knew.”
“Oh. No, don’t worry….”
“You can’t just tell me, and then not tell me. That’s not fair. I am part of this. Sorry, I don’t want to be a….”
There was a brief, awkward silence between the two of them, as they stood in the glinting, golden sunlight of the morning. They were on the edge of the town square: a memorial wall stood in the centre, like an island in a sea of perfectly trimmed grass, the green protected by a ring of ornamental, black metal, chains.
The Doctor looked at her, as if he were confused about something. As if nobody had spoken to him like that in a while. His eyes were kind, though, as if he appreciated her for having said it.
“Of course. I’m sorry,” he said.
The two of them walked down the cobbled pavement, beneath the lamp posts with their perfect hanging baskets, full of flowers of all kinds and colours. Lizzie checked her watch – it was wrong. It was as if she’d just walked straight out of her own time and through an open door into another. A few people were out and about – but it was quiet, and there weren’t as many tourists as usual. Just the odd villager walking their dog, or a young family out for a morning walk.
“I picked a Sunday,” the Doctor noticed her looking. She wondered why.
“There’s an old myth, Lizzie – It was a bedtime story, for me – about the mask.“ the Doctor began. “It was a story they used to tell children, back home. It involved a spectre, a ghostly figure all robed in white, with a mask, like the ones we’ve just seen. They called her the Masked Maiden. And supposedly, she’d come at night, find children, and stitch their eyes shut, so they’d never be able to see again.”
Lizzie grimaced, before realising it was really no worse than most fairy stories she had heard.
“I didn’t realise it at first,” the Doctor admitted. “I thought about the similarity – but dismissed it….”
“Because you don’t believe in fairy tales?”
Lizzie wished she could take back her words and wipe them from his mind, because they’d both stopped walking, and it was probably too sudden, too personal, too sentimental an observation. But in those few moments, something the Doctor had said – she wasn’t even sure what it was – had struck a chord in her, and made her say it, even though she hadn’t even thought it through.
“Sorry, I should just – like, not speak , or…”
r blunt observation rather than her awkward apology for it. Lizzie nodded, a sort of awkward nod, because she didn’t really know what to say.
Still beside her, the Doctor was intently reading something—dimensional energy? – with his sonic held aloft, and humming busily.
“Where are you tracking it to?”
“I’m not sure. What landmarks are in this place?”
There wasn’t anything significant Lizzie could think of. It was just a little market town, where old people came to live out their final years, and where tourists flocked to in search of the finest middle-class experience.
“Anything you’d find on a map would do,” the Doctor said.
“Erm… there’s a pub, a post office, a church,” Lizzie saw the Doctor grimace slightly at the mention of a church. “A gift shop – actually there are lots of those… And….”
“Ah, hello Elizabeth!”
Lizzie stopped her list when she saw Mrs Smith walking towards her.
“Good morning Mrs Smith!” Lizzie exclaimed a touch too cheerfully, straightening her coat and striding towards the lady with her two springer spaniels (Peter and Jasper, ages 5 and 6, respectively, Peter having recently suffered from worms) The Doctor was left looking around in confusion, as the shy and bumbling girl beside him had suddenly transformed into somebody else.
“Who’s your friend?” Mrs Smith gave a wry smile as the Doctor approached them.
“This is…,” Lizzie realised she couldn’t introduce him as a doctor without Mrs Smith reaffirming her suspicions that everyone from the estate was delusional. Speaking of which, Lizzie was expecting some kind of mocking comment right about –
“Another one from the estate, hmm?” Mrs Smith looked down at him. “I’ve not seen you around here before.”
“No. I’m –”
Mrs Smith turned to Lizzie. “He’s not an– ,” she mouthed something at her.
“No, Mrs Smith. The Doctor is not an immigrant.”
The Doctor looked at Mrs Smith in disgust.
“And, Mrs Smith,” Lizzie continued. “Would you mind not using such language– ”
“What are you looking at me like that for?” Mrs Smith frowned at the Doctor. “Honestly. My husband served our health service for a good few years. They ought to charge foreigners– ”
“Mrs Smith,” Lizzie interrupted, her voice fierce in a way that surprised even Lizzie herself. “Your husband served a health service that promises free healthcare to everyone. Including immigrants. And also including bigots. Good morning.”
And Lizzie walked away.
Mrs Smith had a lot of power in this small town, so it didn’t matter how much Lizzie could travel in time or how easily she could run away, she was probably out of a job. But it had been worth it, just to see Mrs Smith’s shocked expression as she’d turned and walked off. It was heart-warming to know that if they did cut off the heating in Lizzie’s flat she’d still have the memory of Mrs Smith’s face to treasure always!
“Where did that come from?” the Doctor whispered in awe as he appeared behind her.
“Erm ... what?” Lizzie asked, as if she had no idea what he was talking about. She did, of course, but she’d decided she’d like them both to forget about it and move on.
“All of it! First you were all small-talk and smiles, and then you completely ripped into her. I’ve – I’ve not seen that side of you before.”
Lizzie turned to him. “They’re – I mean, they – well, they’re not sides of me. I mean the scary one, yeah, that one is, but like – I don’t want to be horrible ‘cause she has children and stuff, but she deserves it and I really hate her. And the smiley one, I have to treat her like that in the café, and it genuinely makes me feel sick. So yeah.”
The Doctor looked impressed, and Lizzie still felt uncomfortable.
“It’s like acting,” Lizzie continued, then shut up. She thought about saying something else, but didn’t. Then she did. “That two-sided person, is not me. Like an actress, I can become them, and talk about the weather, and dogs, and other things like that, but it’s a performance.”
The Doctor seemed to understand. She hoped he did. Lizzie was concerned that the Doctor would expect to see more of the not-real waitress personality, which wasn’t her, at all. Lizzie had found it hard at first, finding the confidence to make small talk with people. But it had come down to the wire – she needed the job, and so she had to learn. And when she finally developed a way of making it like pretending to be a different character, an alter-ego of sorts, it had made it so much easier. She was just playing the role of a happy, confident and outgoing young woman, while knowing, all the time, that she wasn’t. She still got shaky whenever she had to make phone calls to people.
Suddenly she realised the Doctor’s face had changed from kind and understanding to shocked. He was looking down the road, where a masked figure stood. It was an old woman, who looked like she’d just come out of her house.
Lizzie turned and looked behind herself: at the far end of the road, there was another – an old man, out to collect his morning paper. There were only two of them, though. They could get away from two of them – probably. Then she looked across to the other side of the square: access to the streets on that side were blocked by two more, and standing at the head of the path to the church that also led down to the square, was the vicar, wearing a mask the same white shade as his robes.
The Doctor strode over to the old lady. She was at least a foot shorter than him, her hair permed, and she still wore her slippers, along with a thin red cardigan. A cup of tea was clutched in her hand. It looked almost comically normal – as if she were offering him a morning cuppa.
“I know who you are,” the Doctor said.
The masked figure did not respond.
“’The Masked Maiden’. A figure of Gallifreyan legend, a bedtime story. You were used to terrify me.”
Lizzie watched as the Doctor tried to… what? Intimidate the woman.
“What are you doing here?” he asked..
Still no response.
“There’s nothing for you here.”
“Ask it why does it choose those people,” Lizzie nudged the Doctor.
The masked woman turned to her. A message typed itself out onto the face of the mask, like text being entered into a word document.
These people are disposable.
Lizzie wanted to break something, preferably the mask. “Nobody’s disposable,” she answered firmly. “There’s no such thing as– ”
The Maiden is looking for the prize.
“You’ll have to talk to it,” the Doctor urged Lizzie. But she backed away, because she just couldn’t do it, she was sure of it. There was no way at all she could talk to aliens about all this stuff she didn’t understand.
“I – I –”
“You can, Lizzie! You just told that old bat Mrs. Smith where to stick it! You can do the same now.”
Lizzie sighed, like the audible ‘fine’ of a sulking teenager.
“What do I say?”
“The questions have to come from you.”
Lizzie scanned her brain as to what questions would be relevant to ask this creature. Where was it from? No. The Doctor wouldn’t need to know that anyway. Were they invading? No. Stupid. Jumping to conclusions. Then she remembered the last thing the old woman had said. Or rather, typed. Or whatever.
“What is the prize?”
Unauthorised information for drone 5:1467835.
Suddenly, Lizzie thought of an even better question, and was rather pleased with herself.
“Why are you only answering my questions?”
You are authorised.
In her brain, she ran through what she’d just learned. For some reason, she was authorised to talk to this drone. But the Doctor wasn’t. Maybe the Doctor was alien – it was possible – no, it was probable, with a box like that – and perhaps, as a human, she had special authorisation?
“Well … clearly … they like authorising people. Including their human drones,” Lizzie said. “And – for some reason, I’m authorised for certain information that the drone isn’t, which I guess means that the Maiden keeps some information exclusively to herself – maybe so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands? Or, am I just reading too much into this?”
“No,” the Doctor gave her a reassuring look. “I think you might be right.”
“I guess the Maiden herself,” Lizzie began, spooked at what she was saying because it sounded too fictional to her liking, “is probably where the prize is? Whatever that is...”
“Yes – I believe you’re right there as well. Think, Lizzie, think. When I asked you for locations – what other landmarks are there? In fact – even better– think of locations in relation to you. Places that relate to you and to people you know. Because you have authorisation, for some reason.”
Lizzie thought, thought, and thought. There was the café, but the masked figures had already been there, and found nothing. There was a school, but she didn’t see what they’d be able to find there either. Then again – they were probably looking for something obscure. There was her former home, obviously, but –
Oh.
“Erm … Doctor, a question for you, I think?”
The Doctor was eyeing the area around them. The TARDIS was still in reach.
“No,” Lizzie dismissed it. “No. Don’t worry. Stupid idea –”
“Elizabeth Darwin, listen to me. Your ideas aren’t stupid.”
Lizzie breathed, and continued. “I – I grew up in a care home, long story. Well, not really that long but… anyway … you did say it was a fairy story, used to scare small children. Well –”
The Doctor stared at her, suddenly realizing what she was saying. Lizzie saw his look – it was the look of somebody putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and beginning to understand what they meant.
“Lizzie,” the Doctor said, still looking at the figures out of the corner of one eye. The one word that would describe the look on his face was “ominous,” as if he were about to say something really big or really important. He kept her in suspense, for a beat, as he watched the creatures in silence. They were beginning to advance now, one by one, slowly making their way towards them. Lizzie hoped he’d just hurry up and finish whatever he was going to say because second by second she was growing ever more concerned for her life... and his.
“On three, we run … to the TARDIS!”
***
The care home had not changed much over the years, apart from the fact most of the people there were different. The older residents now had been the youngest during Lizzie’s time. But as she had done, they too had grown up, and yet there they were still here.
Pat opened the door and looked out as the two of them approached on foot – they thought it best to park the TARDIS outside and at a distance instead of just popping up, despite the urgency of their visit. Lizzie looked at the outside. She wondered if people looked at the houses of their parents the way she looked at the front of this home. She thought probably not.
It was sad, for the reason that things are just sad when they’re over. People are automatically entitled to feel sad about things from their childhood, because the things and moment from happier times aren’t around anymore. They had been good to her – really good to her. But there were still the emotions that kids in care went through, that it was almost impossible to protect kids from. But the four walls ahead of her had protected her when she needed it, even though sometimes the home itself was the reason she needed protecting.
Although she frequently passed it, she was looking at it close up now, for the first time in years, and getting ready to go in for the first time in years. She took a deep breath, and followed the Doctor.
Pat, the guy who opened the door, had taken over as head care worker when she was 15, and had been there throughout her last few years at the place. He was a broad-shouldered Irishman, with a heart of gold. He was, to be fair, one of the kindest people she’d ever met.
“Lizzie,” he seemed shocked at her suddenly turning up. It probably was a bit of a shock, considering she hadn’t been back in so long.
“Hey, Pat,” she smiled warmly.
“Come in! Who’s this?” he asked, as he shut the door behind them. A staircase ran up beside the door – Lizzie looked at it, and remembered the days when, as a six or seven-year-old, she’d want to be taller, and would try as hard as possible to get up those stairs two at a time, hoping it would increase her height.
“Oh,” the Doctor gave one of his mysterious smiles. “I’m an inspector,” the Doctor flashed a strange, blank bit of paper. But Pat clearly bought it – because he seemed to believe him. He’s also very immoral, Lizzie wanted to say, as she saw that Doctor was clearly faking his credentials with a magic bit of paper. She couldn’t believe that she was letting a weird spaceman into this care home, but because he was presenting himself as an ‘inspector’, Pat would stay with him, so she felt reassured.
“Listen, Lizzie – sorry about this,” Pat said to her. “I’ll deal with the inspector. Ah – Carmen.”
A girl walked down the stairs – she looked like she was about 16, and she had somehow managed the remarkable art of being able to traverse stairs and look at a mobile’s screen at the same time.
“Yeah,” Carmen said as she didn’t look up.
“Go and make Lizzie some tea, would you?”
Then, Carmen did look up, and saw Lizzie standing there. “Oh my god! Lizzie! Heeey!” she almost ran up to her, and the two of them hugged. Carmen had only been about… 11, the last time they’d seen each other. The little girl Lizzie had left behind had become a young woman. How things changed.
“Oh, Pat,” Carmen said, as Lizzie followed her into the kitchen. “I have some forms for you to sign, or… something.”
***
After Carmen had made Lizzie her tea, they’d sat around the table in the kitchen (which was not meant to be a place where one ate or drank, unless special permission had been given). At one point, a few kids passed her - some she recognised, some she didn’t. The ones that recognised her said hi. She suddenly realised, that she was missed.
The conversation went as many of Lizzie’s conversations did. She was worried she’d be a little too honest about her situation, because she didn’t want to scare Carmen about the world, and was worried that by telling her about her own situation, she’d make her extremely anxious. But she couldn’t lie to her – and perhaps Carmen had her head screwed on a little better than Lizzie.
“That guy,” Carmen obviously meant the Doctor. “He’s not really an inspector, is he?”
Lizzie hesitated. She didn’t actually know.
“Lizzie. He’s not – oh my god, he’s not a paedo-”
“Look,” Lizzie hushed her. “Something… I don’t know… something weird is going on.”
As Lizzie told her story, Carmen looked increasingly sickened by what she was hearing. And then, Lizzie realised that Carmen was crying, and she felt really guilty because she had wanted more than anything else to avoid upsetting her.
“I – I’m really sorry,” Lizzie said. “I – I didn’t mean to– ”
Carmen looked up at Lizzie, wiping tears from her eyes. “You haven’t heard, have you?”
Carmen told Lizzie her story: there was a kid from the home who’d been found dead a few weeks ago, with a mask on his face. And when Pat had prised it off, they’d found exactly what Lizzie had just described to Carmen: his eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils had all been sewn shut. Lizzie felt terrible for her, especially about how she’d had to face that actually happening, in reality, at only 16.
“Pat tried to keep it as quiet as possible,” Carmen shrugged. “But a few of us found out, and he made us swear that we wouldn’t tell any of the younger kids. Obviously, they know the kid died – but they don’t know… you know… how he was found.”
Lizzie could not believe that something she’d become mixed up in, already had led to something so terrible for the children of the home she’d grown up in. And yet somehow, the Doctor remained mostly unfazed. Why go to the children first? After all, if that’d happened weeks ago, before anything like it had happened in the rest of the town, why would the creatures go for the innocent before anyone else?
“Carmen – I don’t – I mean, I don’t really know much about the Doctor. Not much at all. But I believe he knows what he’s talking about, mostly. And I think he genuinely wants to help here.”
“How did you even meet him?” Carmen asked.
“He just sort of… turned up, over there, on the street corner.”
***
Lizzie knocked on the door to Pat’s office, and heard his deep Irish voice call out “Come in!” She did so, leaving the door open, as a matter of long-ingrained habit. As she entered, Pat was there, talking to the Doctor.
She didn’t want to get him embroiled in all this. It wasn’t fair on him – he was already dealing with the death of one. For someone so nice, who had treated her well, and so many others well, he didn’t deserve being involved in this horrific matter any further. “Pat, can you leave us quickly?”
“But, why – ?” Pat looked between the two of them.
“Please,” she said, a more insistent this time. Pat did as he was asked.
“There was…” Lizzie gulped, as she tried to tell the Doctor what she had learned from Carmen. She didn’t think she could continue. But she did. “There was a child, and the mask did its thing, and– ”
“I know. Pat told me,” the Doctor said, his face grim. Lizzie could see he was just as disgusted as her – but he did a better job at hiding it. Perhaps too well? “It’s here, Lizzie. You were right. The Maiden is here, somewhere.”
“But – Doctor,” she began. “A child is dead.”
“I know. And I’m going to do everything in my power to stop the Maiden from killing again, doing whatever it is she’s doing, because– ”
“It’s just – like – I don’t think it’s fair, that she’s focusing on children,” she said.
“No. It isn’t.”
“And you’re kind of… you seem…. pretty relaxed about it all. Just because the child was from a care home, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t loved. He was, a lot, so don’t just treat it like another casualty, like you’ve treated everyone else so far. It’s been a bit like – “oh no, there’s another one.” And you’ve not shown much understanding that these are people who have their own lives. Apart from the boy. He was meant to have a life – and now he won’t. And, I think that’s …”
The Doctor sat on top of the desk, in silence, looking at his feet, ashamed.
“You care,” he said.
She held herself back from stating the obvious, like he’d just done. Of course she cared. People were precious; they didn’t come along often. But all of this came out rather awkwardly when she finally spoke, “Erm, yeah. Like. Quite a bit.”
The Doctor looked at her and smiled. “Thank you.”
She didn’t really know what he was thanking her for – was it just one of those ambiguous thank yous that people say when they’ve finally understood something that was confusing them before? Or, was it from the heart, stated awkwardly, and incompletely, like she had just done?
“Thank you, so mu-”
But the Doctor’s words stopped with the scream that came from outside.
***
Loads of kids were standing at the French windows, looking out into the garden.
It was a huge garden – a heaven for children, an immense playground for their imagination. Lizzie had memories of walking around this very garden when she was really small, wearing little red welly boots, and a bright yellow mackintosh that was just a little bit too big. Sometimes the bottom part of the garden got really muddy, and became swamp-like, and it had to be closed off. But Lizzie used to duck under the safety tape that they’d put around it, and walk out into the bog, and just to walk around in it, enjoying the feel of the soft, squishy mud through the protective layer of bright red rubber.
And she thought of how, years later, when in the dog days of summer, she would sit out on the patio, reading while she watched the younger children just… enjoying themselves, without a care, and she wished that she could be like that again. It was a force so powerful that sometimes, while lying in bed at night, thinking of it, the memory would become real again, almost touchable.
The memory shattered now in the face of a new and dangerous reality, as she watched the Doctor push through the crowd of children to get to the French window.
Lizzie joined him and the children as they looked out at a spectral figure, draped in white, with a veil covering the now iconic mask. And there was a little girl – not very old – backing away from the figure as it raised its veil with a single skeletal finger, revealing an ornate azure floral pattern on the right side of its face. It seemed to smile at them, and then vanished into the trees behind it.
After it had gone, the Doctor opened the doors and ran down into the garden – with Lizzie close behind him. When he arrived at the little girl, she seemed fine, but shaken. The Doctor, as if he had done his job, stood up and walked over to the trees, following the direction of the figure. Lizzie, in his place, knelt down beside the little girl. She didn’t recognise her; the girl could only have been about as old as Lizzie had been when she had come down here to play as a little girl.
Pat was running towards them, like a father would run to see if his children were all right. Lizzie gave the shivering girl the kindest and most genuine of smiles.
“Don’t be scared.”
And the little girl nodded in understanding as Lizzie hugged her.
“Tell Pat to make sure he keeps the other children in the house. Yeah?”
“Yes,” the girl agreed.
“Good girl.”
Pat arrived and scooped the girl up in his arms, thanking Lizzie, before he ran over to the other children.
Lizzie wished for nothing more than for Pat to be able to help her, to give her the advice she needed now, or for Maggie to suddenly appear and give her a few comforting words. But Maggie was off doing what she did best, and Pat had somebody else who needed his help more.
Her life here had been calm. It hadn’t been easy, but nothing much had happened. Well, quite a bit had happened. But in comparison to whatever was going on now, it seemed simple and trivial, when in fact that’s the one thing it hadn’t been. Once upon a time, she had feared not being liked in school. Then she’d feared exam results. Then she feared debt, and then eviction, and more recently, a masked creature that wanted to kill her.
Now, she couldn’t think of anything more to be scared about. She couldn’t see anything except some very scared children. And her words would not allow her to arrange them in a way that could describe how she felt, but she wanted to help protect the little girl as much as she possibly could, no matter what it took.
The world around her seemed to pass by in slow-motion, as she turned and stumbled over ground that had once marked her childhood, down to the gap in the trees where she knew she could pass through and into the woods.
All of the children up there, looking at all this from behind the windows of the French doors, would remember this day – it would haunt them. The memory would be passed down to their children and to their children’s children, and eventually it would become a story, a fairy tale, for the simple purpose of scaring children before they went to sleep.
Just as she had when she met the Doctor, Lizzie now had another choice to make: she could run and be with him or she could stay here and run away from him.
Lizzie promised the little girl she wouldn’t be long, as she turned and ran into the trees.
***
The Doctor was waiting for her on the other side, beyond the trees.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
She wanted to shout at him, to tell him that of course she wasn’t alright. Her whole life had just changed forever, all within the space of a couple of hours, and he was asking her the sort of pointless question that he might’ve also asked a stranger on the street.
“Yes,” she lied, and she could tell that he knew she was lying. “You?”
“Yes,” he lied, and she could tell he was lying.
They continued down the pathway for a second in silence, before the Doctor asked the most obvious question.
“Where does this path go?”
Lizzie knew this place like the back of her hand. She’d walked it so many times, when she was younger, because it was where she came when she wanted to be alone.
They had arrived.
It was a woodland clearing, surrounded by old trees – and in the middle, was the oldest, a beautiful old oak that held inside its trunk hundreds and hundreds of rings, etched into its many layers, like the lines on the face of an old, wise man. It stood before them, calm and peaceful, with the beautiful summer sunlight streaming through its leaves.
Dangling from one of its largest branches was a rope swing, tied on as if it were being gripped tightly and kindly by the tree itself; as if the oak would never let the occupant fall, and would keep them safe forever. Its trunk and branches and leaves were all reflected in a small and clear pool of water near its base; it was like a mirror, and when Lizzie looked into it, she saw herself looking back.
16, 17, or something years ago, not long after Lizzie had first arrived at the home that had seemed so big and scary, filled with big and scary people, including scary Jenny, the woman who was meant to be looking after her, Lizzie had gone walking down to the bottom of the garden with Maggie. They hadn’t known each other long – but Maggie had helped Lizzie into her little red wellies, and she’d made sure her mackintosh was on and zipped up, and when Lizzie had pretended to do the same with Maggie, and Maggie just went along with it. And they walked, and Lizzie, at the bottom of the garden, saw the trees. She knew she wasn’t allowed to, and normally she would follow the rules to the letter. But she was intrigued, and so once, when nobody was looking, she went down there, ducked through the trees, followed the path – and discovered this place.
She had come here a lot when she was young.. When nobody was looking, she would sneak out the back of the care home, and walk to the end of the path, where she had her tree and her rope swing and her pond. Nobody else knew about it… well, someone, once, must’ve known about it, otherwise there wouldn’t have been the rope swing. But whoever that person was, they were long forgotten, and now the only one to know about its existence was Lizzie. It was her escape.
When the world got too tough and the people too difficult, she would just run into the woods, like the woods in a fairy story, and eventually she would meet the oak, and its mighty canopy of leaves that protected her like a warm blanket, and be calmed by the way the one branch would hold her and her swing, no matter what. And there, Lizzie would sit on the swing, and gently sway above the ground, and if she felt daring, swing out above the pond itself.
When she was a child, and she had first discovered it, she held the rope so hard that her hands bled when she finally let go. As she grew older, she held on as hard as she had as a child, but as a teenager, she no longer felt the need to hold so tightly; she knew she would be safe.
In a way, when she stepped back in here, looking for the Masked Maiden, it was like coming home.
But now someone else was here too, and that scared her. Someone or something that was murdering people, had found her place where she escaped to. A creature of nightmares had found her home.
Lizzie could see it, motionless, watching them, from the other side of the pond. it was a nice summer’s day, with almost no breeze, although even if there were a breeze, Lizzie sensed that some quality of the crisp, white, cloth, was helping it stay in exactly the same position.
“You’re not real,” the Doctor said to its “face.” That confused Lizzie, because he was a man who flew around time and space in a phone box. The only reason he didn’t want to believe that this creature was real, was because it had come from his nightmares.
The Maiden didn’t reply at first, although it did lift its veil and revealed more of the artwork on the mask underneath. It was perfect, like exquisite painting.
“Not real to you, perhaps.”
It spoke in a clear, female voice, as pure as the white robes and veils it wore, and with an air of unwavering confidence.
The Doctor shrugged, as if in partial agreement. “Then why are you here? Why take the children?”
Although the Maiden did not move perceptibly, something inside it seemed to bristle for a second, as if the Doctor had said something that had disturbed something deep within.
“I am looking for the prize.”
“What prize?”
“I bring peace and tranquillity,” the Maiden whispered, the words leaving its lips which were non-existent, and yet its words floated through the air to them, clearly, unmuffled by the mask.
“By stitching their faces up?” the Doctor responded, his voice quivering with anger and contempt.
“It is for their protection, so that they do not have to see how barbaric the world is. If you will not understand, Doctor – then I shall speak to someone who does.”
“You don’t bring peace and protection! You trap them, you force them to conform! Turning them into nothing,” the Doctor protested.
The Maiden turned towards Lizzie.
And Lizzie realised something.
“Not seeing the world doesn’t make it any easier. It makes it harder.” Lizzie wasn’t quite sure where she’d got that from, but she stuck with it. The Doctor sighed and was going to say something, but didn’t.
“But what you’re doing,” Lizzie decided to continue. “You’re taking their identity, their faces – you’re not protecting them from the real world, you are the real world. You just turn children into... drones.”
“Such a terrified little girl,” the Maiden’s voice was heavy and sad as she spoke. She ignored Lizzie. “So nervous and anxious. The world scared you. The world still scares you.”
Lizzie found herself amused by the essential irony of the Maiden’s statements. Its intention was to protect people from the horrors of the world, and yet in doing so, it had become a horror story for children that had scared even the Doctor.
“And are you, I don’t know, erm …attempting to do what you do… to every child?”
If the Maiden’s mask did not always show a faint smile, then it might have smiled now.
“There is one child in particular. But she sleeps, now. She sleeps so very far away, and her dreams are not dreams, but they are plagued by the fuel of nightmares.”
Lizzie wanted to find the child, “the prize,” the Maiden was looking for– she wanted to find them and save them, and stop the Maiden from its twisted donation of ‘peace and tranquillity’, or whatever it had said.
“Why?” Lizzie suddenly asked. “Sorry… to be so…”
But the Doctor was nodding in support of Lizzie and her question and then gestured for the Maiden to answer.
“I bring good to the world.”
“No,” the Doctor said. “You don’t.”
. “I’m really sorry,” Lizzie began, “…. But … you won’t find your prize here. We’re happy here, and…. we don’t need you … to protect us, as you say. You don’t offer us protection, you offer us a way to bury our heads in the sand.”
Lizzie looked to the Doctor, not because she was looking for support, but because he reminded her of something
“Fairy tales are good,” she continued. “Adults think fairy tales are just for kids but they’re wrong... fairy tales are just... cracked mirrors of the real world. Not just means of escape but… means of understanding too. Anyway… I could be wrong so– “
“No, Lizzie,” said the Doctor. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Very well,” the Maiden sighed. It was almost like an admission of guilt – but the Maiden remained motionless, watching Lizzie.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor said.
“The prize,” the Maiden said again.
“We’ve literally just said, you can’t have ‘the prize.”
“But I already have her.”
Lizzie knew, at that moment, without even needing to be told, who the prize was. For some reason, the Maiden had decided it was her.
But it didn’t make sense to Lizzie, why such a creature would traverse galaxies just to find her. Lizzie. She didn’t mean anything. She was tiny, in comparison to the rest of the universe.
“No. No, that doesn’t make sense,” the Doctor was beginning to realise as well – and he looked just as bemused as Lizzie.
“It makes… perfect sense,” the Maiden said as she reached out a hand, beckoning Lizzie to come toward her. “So scared, Elizabeth. So very scared. But I can help you. I can save you.”
“I – I -,” Lizzie suddenly realised she was crying. “I don’t want to just – I don’t want to give up…”
“I will help you, Elizabeth. Come to me.”
Lizzie hated herself for admitting that there was even a tiny part of her wanting to go to her. There had been more than a few times in her life when she would have given in, accepted this invitation and even would have run towards the Maiden and her promise of protection and support. But now, she realized that even though the rest of the universe scared her, there would always be the stars, and she could face all the demons of the world and beyond, when the stars were watching her like they had all her life.
And she knew that hiding from them would not bring the peace that the Maiden promised. She could stay, and she could and should face it.
Lizzie backed away slowly, and the Doctor followed her. The Maiden did not move – it just stood watching Lizzie in silence. It had failed to claim its prize. Lizzie began to wonder – what happens now? Did it stay and find someone else to prey upon?
Then, the Maiden placed a bony hand to its face and gently it pulled off its mask.
Underneath, where a face should’ve been, there was nothing. No hair, no eyes, no mouth, no nostrils, no ears.
Lizzie assumed that the Maiden had been with the mask for so long, it had done what it did to everyone else and closed her eyes for good; that she had been like that for so many years, that the “wounds” had all healed up.
“It doesn’t have a mission anymore,” the Doctor explained as he watched the blank face looking at them. “It’s realised that people are not afraid. And so – it no longer sees itself as necessary.”
Lizzie just felt sorry for her, whoever she was. Perhaps the Maiden been scared once too, and Lizzie wished that somebody had been there to help her.
***
Dangling from one of its largest branches was a rope swing, tied on as if it were being gripped tightly and kindly by the tree itself; as if the oak would never let the occupant fall, and would keep them safe forever. Its trunk and branches and leaves were all reflected in a small and clear pool of water near its base; it was like a mirror, and when Lizzie looked into it, she saw herself looking back.
16, 17, or something years ago, not long after Lizzie had first arrived at the home that had seemed so big and scary, filled with big and scary people, including scary Jenny, the woman who was meant to be looking after her, Lizzie had gone walking down to the bottom of the garden with Maggie. They hadn’t known each other long – but Maggie had helped Lizzie into her little red wellies, and she’d made sure her mackintosh was on and zipped up, and when Lizzie had pretended to do the same with Maggie, and Maggie just went along with it. And they walked, and Lizzie, at the bottom of the garden, saw the trees. She knew she wasn’t allowed to, and normally she would follow the rules to the letter. But she was intrigued, and so once, when nobody was looking, she went down there, ducked through the trees, followed the path – and discovered this place.
She had come here a lot when she was young.. When nobody was looking, she would sneak out the back of the care home, and walk to the end of the path, where she had her tree and her rope swing and her pond. Nobody else knew about it… well, someone, once, must’ve known about it, otherwise there wouldn’t have been the rope swing. But whoever that person was, they were long forgotten, and now the only one to know about its existence was Lizzie. It was her escape.
When the world got too tough and the people too difficult, she would just run into the woods, like the woods in a fairy story, and eventually she would meet the oak, and its mighty canopy of leaves that protected her like a warm blanket, and be calmed by the way the one branch would hold her and her swing, no matter what. And there, Lizzie would sit on the swing, and gently sway above the ground, and if she felt daring, swing out above the pond itself.
When she was a child, and she had first discovered it, she held the rope so hard that her hands bled when she finally let go. As she grew older, she held on as hard as she had as a child, but as a teenager, she no longer felt the need to hold so tightly; she knew she would be safe.
In a way, when she stepped back in here, looking for the Masked Maiden, it was like coming home.
But now someone else was here too, and that scared her. Someone or something that was murdering people, had found her place where she escaped to. A creature of nightmares had found her home.
Lizzie could see it, motionless, watching them, from the other side of the pond. it was a nice summer’s day, with almost no breeze, although even if there were a breeze, Lizzie sensed that some quality of the crisp, white, cloth, was helping it stay in exactly the same position.
“You’re not real,” the Doctor said to its “face.” That confused Lizzie, because he was a man who flew around time and space in a phone box. The only reason he didn’t want to believe that this creature was real, was because it had come from his nightmares.
The Maiden didn’t reply at first, although it did lift its veil and revealed more of the artwork on the mask underneath. It was perfect, like exquisite painting.
“Not real to you, perhaps.”
It spoke in a clear, female voice, as pure as the white robes and veils it wore, and with an air of unwavering confidence.
The Doctor shrugged, as if in partial agreement. “Then why are you here? Why take the children?”
Although the Maiden did not move perceptibly, something inside it seemed to bristle for a second, as if the Doctor had said something that had disturbed something deep within.
“I am looking for the prize.”
“What prize?”
“I bring peace and tranquillity,” the Maiden whispered, the words leaving its lips which were non-existent, and yet its words floated through the air to them, clearly, unmuffled by the mask.
“By stitching their faces up?” the Doctor responded, his voice quivering with anger and contempt.
“It is for their protection, so that they do not have to see how barbaric the world is. If you will not understand, Doctor – then I shall speak to someone who does.”
“You don’t bring peace and protection! You trap them, you force them to conform! Turning them into nothing,” the Doctor protested.
The Maiden turned towards Lizzie.
And Lizzie realised something.
“Not seeing the world doesn’t make it any easier. It makes it harder.” Lizzie wasn’t quite sure where she’d got that from, but she stuck with it. The Doctor sighed and was going to say something, but didn’t.
“But what you’re doing,” Lizzie decided to continue. “You’re taking their identity, their faces – you’re not protecting them from the real world, you are the real world. You just turn children into... drones.”
“Such a terrified little girl,” the Maiden’s voice was heavy and sad as she spoke. She ignored Lizzie. “So nervous and anxious. The world scared you. The world still scares you.”
Lizzie found herself amused by the essential irony of the Maiden’s statements. Its intention was to protect people from the horrors of the world, and yet in doing so, it had become a horror story for children that had scared even the Doctor.
“And are you, I don’t know, erm …attempting to do what you do… to every child?”
If the Maiden’s mask did not always show a faint smile, then it might have smiled now.
“There is one child in particular. But she sleeps, now. She sleeps so very far away, and her dreams are not dreams, but they are plagued by the fuel of nightmares.”
Lizzie wanted to find the child, “the prize,” the Maiden was looking for– she wanted to find them and save them, and stop the Maiden from its twisted donation of ‘peace and tranquillity’, or whatever it had said.
“Why?” Lizzie suddenly asked. “Sorry… to be so…”
But the Doctor was nodding in support of Lizzie and her question and then gestured for the Maiden to answer.
“I bring good to the world.”
“No,” the Doctor said. “You don’t.”
. “I’m really sorry,” Lizzie began, “…. But … you won’t find your prize here. We’re happy here, and…. we don’t need you … to protect us, as you say. You don’t offer us protection, you offer us a way to bury our heads in the sand.”
Lizzie looked to the Doctor, not because she was looking for support, but because he reminded her of something
“Fairy tales are good,” she continued. “Adults think fairy tales are just for kids but they’re wrong... fairy tales are just... cracked mirrors of the real world. Not just means of escape but… means of understanding too. Anyway… I could be wrong so– “
“No, Lizzie,” said the Doctor. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Very well,” the Maiden sighed. It was almost like an admission of guilt – but the Maiden remained motionless, watching Lizzie.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor said.
“The prize,” the Maiden said again.
“We’ve literally just said, you can’t have ‘the prize.”
“But I already have her.”
Lizzie knew, at that moment, without even needing to be told, who the prize was. For some reason, the Maiden had decided it was her.
But it didn’t make sense to Lizzie, why such a creature would traverse galaxies just to find her. Lizzie. She didn’t mean anything. She was tiny, in comparison to the rest of the universe.
“No. No, that doesn’t make sense,” the Doctor was beginning to realise as well – and he looked just as bemused as Lizzie.
“It makes… perfect sense,” the Maiden said as she reached out a hand, beckoning Lizzie to come toward her. “So scared, Elizabeth. So very scared. But I can help you. I can save you.”
“I – I -,” Lizzie suddenly realised she was crying. “I don’t want to just – I don’t want to give up…”
“I will help you, Elizabeth. Come to me.”
Lizzie hated herself for admitting that there was even a tiny part of her wanting to go to her. There had been more than a few times in her life when she would have given in, accepted this invitation and even would have run towards the Maiden and her promise of protection and support. But now, she realized that even though the rest of the universe scared her, there would always be the stars, and she could face all the demons of the world and beyond, when the stars were watching her like they had all her life.
And she knew that hiding from them would not bring the peace that the Maiden promised. She could stay, and she could and should face it.
Lizzie backed away slowly, and the Doctor followed her. The Maiden did not move – it just stood watching Lizzie in silence. It had failed to claim its prize. Lizzie began to wonder – what happens now? Did it stay and find someone else to prey upon?
Then, the Maiden placed a bony hand to its face and gently it pulled off its mask.
Underneath, where a face should’ve been, there was nothing. No hair, no eyes, no mouth, no nostrils, no ears.
Lizzie assumed that the Maiden had been with the mask for so long, it had done what it did to everyone else and closed her eyes for good; that she had been like that for so many years, that the “wounds” had all healed up.
“It doesn’t have a mission anymore,” the Doctor explained as he watched the blank face looking at them. “It’s realised that people are not afraid. And so – it no longer sees itself as necessary.”
Lizzie just felt sorry for her, whoever she was. Perhaps the Maiden been scared once too, and Lizzie wished that somebody had been there to help her.
***
“So… why was it after me? The universe is huge…” Lizzie looked at the Doctor sitting on the swing beside her. Upon Dunsworth hill there used to stand a castle. It was ruins, now. There was a set of swings, though, just nearby, so the children of today would play in the grounds. The sun was setting over the town – they could see it all from where they sat. Lizzie could see home. There was a breeze, and Lizzie rocked on the swing, gently, back and forth, letting the gentle motion lead her into a state of calm and serenity.
“I don’t know. But you’re right, Lizzie, the universe is huge. And it will go and find someone else, I should think,” the Doctor replied.
“How can you be so natural about that? There could be another child who’s going to die.”
“I can’t save everyone, Lizzie.”
“But we can try.”
The Doctor didn’t really know what to say to that because he knew, at heart, she was right. He’d also heard her say “we.” But his only response was, “Why were you so sad?” The Doctor had changed the subject.
“I was scared. Perhaps just nervous. And I still am. But, yeah, I guess, I’m fine. Probably. And … I could ask you the same.”
“I’m sorry?”
Shouldn’t have said that. Really, definitely, shouldn’t have said it out loud.
“No, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter,” she tried desperately to dig herself out of the hole she was digging herself into.
“No – seriously. I’m interested.”
“I mean – no, it’s stupid.”
“Lizzie, please. Stop putting yourself down. It’s not fair on yourself.”
“Well” she began, “You just seemed upset. Subdued, kind of. And then when we first got talking, it was kind of like the way people are when they’re close to crying but not actually crying, as if you were reminded of something. And then, after a while, when you were back in the TARDIS, and it was like there was a different person there – as if you were back, doing something you loved, for the first time in… ages.”
The Doctor looked at her, his eyes were tinged with sadness. She realised that she was right, and he was grieving for someone.
“You don’t need to worry about it,” the Doctor said.
Lizzie disagreed. She knew he needed help, and she felt… responsible. As if she were the one who to give it to him.
“I want to.”
“It’s just – it’s not a great time right now.”
She knew that. But she also knew from experience that not talking about it wasn’t a good thing, and she didn’t want that to happen to the Doctor. The incredulous look she gave him was enough to keep him talking.
“I had a friend. Well – yes. I had a friend. Her name was Jasmine, and we travelled together, in time and space. But then – she died. Saving the universe.”
“I’ve travelled with other people as well,” the Doctor continued. “But …. always…. I end up on my own.”
Of course… The lonely old man. Lizzie had seen it from the start. And when he got into his TARDIS, and started showing off for her – that was when he felt as if he were back there, in the past, travelling with…
“There was someone else, as well. Tommy. He was the one meant to become Prime Minister, and then… couldn’t.”
Lizzie remembered. This was the person who was meant to help her country.
“And then – another old, old friend of mine. Robin, she found her own life – and she lived it.”
But not with you, Lizzie realized. The Doctor had lost so many people, and she felt guilty that he was the one who had to go back in time to stop the Maiden from getting her, to save her, to save Lizzie – when, in fact, the person who needed saving more than anyone else, was sitting opposite her.
“And up there,” the Doctor pointed at the orange-tinted sky, which felt the final frontier between their swings and the universe, as the sun was setting over the town around them. “There’s a war.”
She hadn’t dared to ask about what things were like beyond Earth. She certainly knew about strange things happening here, but had wondered what it was like in space…and time. She knew that in the grand scheme of things, her life was tiny, and the universe around her was so much bigger – and because of that, she’d always believed in aliens. But she hadn’t wanted to pry.
“It’s only just beginning,” he continued. “it’s a war between my people and a race called the Daleks. And it’s not the sort of war that’s going to be over quickly. It is going to become the most vicious, and cruel, and barbaric and prolonged conflict the universe has ever faced.”
Lizzie looked up at the beautiful sky – it seemed unnatural that such a war could be happening in a universe so pretty. But she also knew all about masks.
“My wife is up there,” the Doctor caught Lizzie’s flicker of recognition, as she realised that he was referring to the woman she had seen in the monochrome photo, the woman in the wedding dress. “She’s a doctor. An actual doctor.”
Lizzie hadn’t even realised he wasn’t an actual doctor.
“And she’s helping people.” The Doctor was smiling the wistful. prideful sort of smile that people have when they think about their loved ones that are far, far away, but are still doing something brilliant. “The places that are damaged in the war, the people who are hurt – she helps them.”
“She sounds really lovely.”
“She is.”
Lizzie now saw him as he truly was.. The mystery was gone – she knew who he was, whom he’d lost, why he was sad. The man with the bigger-on-the-inside box. And they sat there, the two of them, lost in the moment, as a war raged on in the universe above their heads, while a world of fear still existed around them.
He turned to her.
“Come with me.” It wasn’t a question, but as a plea. She could hear the touch of desperation in his voice.
But she couldn’t just run from all her problems and pretend they didn’t exist. She knew it. He knew it too, and she could see he was worried that she’d say no. But just as the best way to handle her fears and anxieties had been to face them head on, maybe the best way to face the rest of the universe was to face it head on as well.
She wouldn’t be running away with the Doctor. She’d be facing the universe with him. Wasn’t that a fairytale in itself?
All her life, she’d watched the stars, and realised how tiny she was. And they’d been comforting to her, those great big lights in the dark. But at the same time – there was that darkness. And that scared her, more than anything else: that the universe was just a huge sprawling mass of everything, with their tiny, tiny, tiny, little world marooned in the middle. That feeling of being so small wasn’t scary – it was being terrified by what was so big.
But ultimately, there was no hesitation for Lizzie.
“Okay.” That’s all she said.
The TARDIS was waiting for her, not far away.
She left the swing – Lizzie had always loved swings; her childhood-self had found them very comforting. Now, she glanced behind her to see it rocking sadly in the breeze. Through the warm air of this summer evening, she strode. The Doctor was inside, waiting for her, ready to dance around the console again, and ready to rediscover good all over again. They had the whole of the universe ahead of them, tens of hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of stars and times and worlds and galaxies, all within reach of the doors of the box. She was right outside it now, with all of that ahead of her.
Elizabeth Darwin took one last look at the town she called home.
She stepped inside the TARDIS.
And their lives began again.
NEXT TIME -
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