It was, for sure, an absolutely beautiful day.
The sky of wherever it was Iris sat was a deep burnt orange, like it was lit up by a million, billion flames all at once. It reminded her of home – of Gallifrey. The sky there always burned, as if it was always on fire, like a permanent sunset. As if the day was always dying, but there was always the hope of a new day rising again. There was an old Gallifreyan idiom that said during the darkest days on Gallifrey, when there was no hope to be found, the sky would stop burning, as if there was no hope to be found.
Thankfully, Iris had never seen any of those days.
However… Gallifrey was not truly home for her. Home would always be TARDIS-bound, drifting somewhere through space with her parents. When she thought back to her childhood, she remembered the days of never stopping and never saying, just travelling, all the time. It made her happy, to think back to that simple time, when the world was so simple, and so… not complex. No expectations, nobody wanting her to be something she wasn’t. It was just perfect.
Wherever she was now, the day had a magical quality to it. And, as if it had heard her, and decided to outdo its previous displays of beauty, Iris looked up, to see snowflakes, floating down in the light of the golden sun, against the flaming sky. It didn’t quite fit, the ice and cold of the snow juxtaposed against the orange above her. Though, at the same time, it seemed to work as well.
Iris was sat on a chair – a white, wrought iron, garden seat, with a table in front of her looking as if it were from the same set. She wore the same clothes she’d worn –
Oh. That she’d worn when she left the world.
That had been her last memory. Her, Dad, and Lizzie. They’d arrived on Earth, tracking down… what was it? A thing, a monster, something that when she heard about, her skin crawled, as if there were a million tiny bugs underneath –
That was it. The Bug.
Dad, Lizzie, and herself, had been tracking down the Bug, and had arrived at the most magical pond, secluded in a forest, the water sleeping under the shadow of a grand old oak. Her dad had waved his screwdriver thing around for a bit, as men often did, and had eventually deduced that the Bug had somehow crossed through into another dimension, and that to catch him, they had to do the same. And so they all took hands, and stepped towards the edge of the Pond.
And they fell. Forwards. Into the water. But there had been no splash, they hadn’t fallen into an icy cascade as she’d expected. Instead, from that moment, her memory stopped. It wasn’t like going to sleep, where gradually you nod off, and the next morning, if you try and think back to those final moments before entering your repose, you cannot remember the exact moment that you fell asleep. No, it wasn’t like that at all. This time, Iris could remember exactly the moment her memory had stopped.
She’d fallen into the water. It was then.
Then, she looked opposite her, and saw the White Rabbit. He wore a waistcoat, and had a fob watch attached to his lapel, and he wore a top hat.
“A’right, ‘guvnor!”
That wasn’t right.
Iris remembered the White Rabbit. A scientist at heart, Iris also had a fondness of literature as well, although not quite as passionate. It had been Lizzie who’d got her into books. And Alice in Wonderland had been her favourite for a great many years. She had read it so many times, she knew half of it off by heart.
So she was certain that the White Rabbit did not speak in a cockney accent.
“Where… am……,” what was the next bit of the sentence. “I?”
“Welcome to the Memory Graveyard!” the White Rabbit chirped, as if it were introducing her to the local pub and preparing to buy her a drink.
“You’re…”
“A talking rabbit! You wouldn’t Adam and Eve it, I know.”
“But you’re from Alice in Wonderland?”
“You what? Not a clue what you’re on about, love.”
“Right…”
“Oh, bugger me. I’m late! Bloody late, it’s an important date, as well. Come on!”
The White Rabbit hopped off his chair, and started trotting off over the grass. Iris stood up to follow him, before realising that she was standing up to follow a talking rabbit, after which she hesitated.
“Who are you?”
The White Rabbit glanced at his watch, and sighed. “I’m the Memory Keeper. I’m the one responsible for keeping this ol’ place ticking over! Bloomin’ hard work, lemmie tell you!”
Iris still hesitated, though she was intrigued by the funny little rabbit – by this funny anthropomorphised aspect of her childhood. It was oddly comforting, in fact.
“Come on, now!” the Memory Keeper hopped back to her. He was quite large for a rabbit, about as tall as her knees. “Time to go! Places to go, memories to see. Y’see, Iris, you’re special. For all sorts of reasons, I ain’t quite sure myself yet! But we’ll find out, me and you! So, love, let’s go!”
Iris followed the White Rabbit, who was hopping off into the horizon. She accidentally tripped over a clump of grass, but regained herself and did a quick recce to make sure nobody saw. Smoothing herself down, she continued on into the distance.
The sky of wherever it was Iris sat was a deep burnt orange, like it was lit up by a million, billion flames all at once. It reminded her of home – of Gallifrey. The sky there always burned, as if it was always on fire, like a permanent sunset. As if the day was always dying, but there was always the hope of a new day rising again. There was an old Gallifreyan idiom that said during the darkest days on Gallifrey, when there was no hope to be found, the sky would stop burning, as if there was no hope to be found.
Thankfully, Iris had never seen any of those days.
However… Gallifrey was not truly home for her. Home would always be TARDIS-bound, drifting somewhere through space with her parents. When she thought back to her childhood, she remembered the days of never stopping and never saying, just travelling, all the time. It made her happy, to think back to that simple time, when the world was so simple, and so… not complex. No expectations, nobody wanting her to be something she wasn’t. It was just perfect.
Wherever she was now, the day had a magical quality to it. And, as if it had heard her, and decided to outdo its previous displays of beauty, Iris looked up, to see snowflakes, floating down in the light of the golden sun, against the flaming sky. It didn’t quite fit, the ice and cold of the snow juxtaposed against the orange above her. Though, at the same time, it seemed to work as well.
Iris was sat on a chair – a white, wrought iron, garden seat, with a table in front of her looking as if it were from the same set. She wore the same clothes she’d worn –
Oh. That she’d worn when she left the world.
That had been her last memory. Her, Dad, and Lizzie. They’d arrived on Earth, tracking down… what was it? A thing, a monster, something that when she heard about, her skin crawled, as if there were a million tiny bugs underneath –
That was it. The Bug.
Dad, Lizzie, and herself, had been tracking down the Bug, and had arrived at the most magical pond, secluded in a forest, the water sleeping under the shadow of a grand old oak. Her dad had waved his screwdriver thing around for a bit, as men often did, and had eventually deduced that the Bug had somehow crossed through into another dimension, and that to catch him, they had to do the same. And so they all took hands, and stepped towards the edge of the Pond.
And they fell. Forwards. Into the water. But there had been no splash, they hadn’t fallen into an icy cascade as she’d expected. Instead, from that moment, her memory stopped. It wasn’t like going to sleep, where gradually you nod off, and the next morning, if you try and think back to those final moments before entering your repose, you cannot remember the exact moment that you fell asleep. No, it wasn’t like that at all. This time, Iris could remember exactly the moment her memory had stopped.
She’d fallen into the water. It was then.
Then, she looked opposite her, and saw the White Rabbit. He wore a waistcoat, and had a fob watch attached to his lapel, and he wore a top hat.
“A’right, ‘guvnor!”
That wasn’t right.
Iris remembered the White Rabbit. A scientist at heart, Iris also had a fondness of literature as well, although not quite as passionate. It had been Lizzie who’d got her into books. And Alice in Wonderland had been her favourite for a great many years. She had read it so many times, she knew half of it off by heart.
So she was certain that the White Rabbit did not speak in a cockney accent.
“Where… am……,” what was the next bit of the sentence. “I?”
“Welcome to the Memory Graveyard!” the White Rabbit chirped, as if it were introducing her to the local pub and preparing to buy her a drink.
“You’re…”
“A talking rabbit! You wouldn’t Adam and Eve it, I know.”
“But you’re from Alice in Wonderland?”
“You what? Not a clue what you’re on about, love.”
“Right…”
“Oh, bugger me. I’m late! Bloody late, it’s an important date, as well. Come on!”
The White Rabbit hopped off his chair, and started trotting off over the grass. Iris stood up to follow him, before realising that she was standing up to follow a talking rabbit, after which she hesitated.
“Who are you?”
The White Rabbit glanced at his watch, and sighed. “I’m the Memory Keeper. I’m the one responsible for keeping this ol’ place ticking over! Bloomin’ hard work, lemmie tell you!”
Iris still hesitated, though she was intrigued by the funny little rabbit – by this funny anthropomorphised aspect of her childhood. It was oddly comforting, in fact.
“Come on, now!” the Memory Keeper hopped back to her. He was quite large for a rabbit, about as tall as her knees. “Time to go! Places to go, memories to see. Y’see, Iris, you’re special. For all sorts of reasons, I ain’t quite sure myself yet! But we’ll find out, me and you! So, love, let’s go!”
Iris followed the White Rabbit, who was hopping off into the horizon. She accidentally tripped over a clump of grass, but regained herself and did a quick recce to make sure nobody saw. Smoothing herself down, she continued on into the distance.
the eighth doctor adventures
series 5 - episode 7
the memory graveyard
written by Peter Darwin
“Oi!” Iris chased after the rabbit as it steadily hopped away. The Memory Keeper turned to her, and then stopped, as the sound of a phone ringing interrupted them. It was an electronic, slightly fuzzy version of the traditional Nokia ringtone.
“Hold on love,” the rabbit raised a foot to halt her. Iris stopped, and then pointed at the furry creature.
“Don’t call me love!” she complained, her hopes that in this strange place casual sexism would not be a thing.
The rabbit had taken a little mobile phone out of its pocket – it was a weirdly adorable representation of a Nokia Brick, the sort of thing a doll would wield. It pressed a button, and put the phone to its ear.
“What is it?” the rabbit grumbled. “I’m in the middle of something, mate.”
There was a brief silence, and Iris tried to pick out what was going on down the other end of the phone. She couldn’t hear anything, apart from a quiet mumbling (she couldn’t even distinguish anything from the mumbling). After a while, the rabbit sighed.
“Thanks for nothing. Now piss off before you make me say something I regret!”
The phone went dead, and the rabbit pocketed it. When he shook his head in distaste, his floppy ears flapped from side to side. “Idiots,” he spat.
“Who was it?” Iris asked.
“Sorry love,” the Memory Keeper started to hop back to the little table the two of them had originally sat at. “Turns out our little date is off!”
“That was not a date.” She didn’t usually go for rabbits.
The rabbit raised its feet. “Whatever you say,” he hopped back onto his chair. “Want a cuppa?”
Iris sat down opposite him. “No thanks. Everyone I know seems to drink it. Dad drinks it. Lizzie and Mum drink the hell out of it. So much so it’s got weird now. If I had to go for a hot drink, hot chocolate all the way.”
The rabbit waved a foot, and a silver platter appeared in the middle of the garden table. On top, was a glass jug. There was a glass dish, piled high with mini marshmallows, and a little glass pot, almost like a powder keg, brimming with chocolate sprinkles. A smaller glass jug contained cream, and there were two glass mugs, presumably for her, and the Memory Keeper. He reached out, poured a glass of hot chocolate for her, and another for himself.
“Cream? Marshmallows? Choccie sprinkles?”
“I’ll help myself,” Iris gratefully took her mug, before dolloping in some whipped cream, and dusting a few chocolate sprinkles on top. She took a few marshmallows, and after popping one in her mouth, she dropped the rest into the mug. When she put it to her lips, it was heavenly. If one could imagine the finest hot chocolate they had ever drunk, they would have to forget it, for this was far creamier, far more chocolatey, and as the thick heaven passed through her lips, and crept down her gullet, Iris was taken to better place.
“This is delicious,” she nodded. “Best hot chocolate I’ve ever drunk. Which doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” the Memory Keeper took a sip from his glass, whipping off a chocolate stain on his white fur when he slammed the glass back on the table as if it were a tankard of beer.
“Because it doesn’t. None of this does. I’m a scientist, this doesn’t add up.”
Yes, that felt good. She was sure of herself then, when she proudly declared who she was. She knew that about herself, and it was good to have something she could be certain of.
“Oi, don’t want to be listening to them scientists. Utter rubbish, you hear?”
“Where am I, then?”
“I’ve told ya!”
“Specifically,” Iris said, unwaveringly, staring the white rabbit dead on in the face, not even a hint of irony in her expression.
“The Memory Graveyard is basically –
***
“Hell,” the Doctor helped Lizzie up from the stone-cold ground. They’d both woken up there, lying next to each other, in a room in which the interior designers had gone slightly overkill on the charcoal grey colour-scheme. They were in a sort of junction – a crossroads, between several extremely tall shelves. When they looked upwards, they saw the shelves on either side of them ran right upwards to the very high ceiling. Wherever they were, it was more like a hall, with a great maze in the middle of it – and they were in the middle of that maze.
“… hell?” Lizzie asked.
“No,” the Doctor rubbished his previous statement. “No, I’ve been to hell, and it’s nothing like this. This is like Hell’s broom cupboard. The lost property section.”
The shelves were a mess – and they weren’t all ceiling-high shelves either. There were shorter bookcases as well, and chests of drawers, and cupboard units, and filing cabinets, and wardrobes, and any kind of storage furnishing one could possibly imagine, all crammed in close together. They were crammed with a mass of everything – there were ancient, dusty books, and there were ring-binders with aged papers clipped inside, and lever-arch files, and display booklets. On some of the shelves were wrought metal frames, or antique wooden ones, pictures pressed inside, some in monochrome, and some in the brightest of colours. There were no links between the pictures – they were all from different places all over the universe, and from times all in history. When Lizzie poked her head inside a wardrobe, there were summer dresses, and woolly winter jumpers, and frock coats like the Doctor’s, and trench coats, and tweed jackets, and tin-foil like spacesuits. The Doctor had pulled out a filing cabinet, and had gone rifling through the mass of files inside, to see if he could find anything. It was all just miscellaneous documentation, from all over the universe. Bank statements, phone bills, death certificates, divorce papers, murder reports, mugshots, letters to and from loved ones.
Lizzie looked at some ornaments in a glass display case – a skull, an ancient globe, a rattle, a silver knife and fork. There were no links between any of it, it was all random. And it wasn’t all contained within storage. The walkways were awash with random clutter, with lamps, and circular window frames, gardening tools, curtain rails, sunglasses, mugs, rabbit hutches, bottles of wine, beer and spirits. There were stuffed moose heads, woks, union jacks, gongs, harmonicas, padlocks, paperclips – if it existed, it was lightly somewhere within 10 square metres of them.
“I’ve read about this place. Not much, mind, but I know roughly what it is. It’s an idea, a, a… concept, more than anything else. Gallifreyan philosophy journals, they mention it a few times. It’s not a well-known theory, though.”
“I did A level philosophy and… it never came up,” Lizzie walked over to the Doctor, who was busy examining a shoe rack, and playing with a solitary flipflop.
“No, it wouldn’t, it’s beyond that. It’s beyond Earth philosophy, science, literature, everything.”
Lizzie looked at the Doctor, as he awkwardly tried to re-lace an abandoned walking boot.
“It’s your theory, isn’t it?”
The Doctor was not a good liar.
“Okay. When I was going through a rough patch, I came up with the idea. A place, somewhere in the universe, where every bad memory goes. You know... memories and dreams can manifest themselves in objects? Well, the manifestations end up here. Or, at least, I think.”
Lizzie suddenly thought back to all the clothes she saw in the wardrobe and the stuff in the drawers and cabinets and felt sad that all that stuff would be sad for people. Then she thought of the scale of the entire universe, and realised how absolutely massive the place had to be.
“Here,” the Doctor pointed to a polished, engraved plaque on top of a pedestal.
THESE POSSESSIONS ARE PROPERTY OF THE MEMORY GRAVEYARD.
DO NOT TOUCH OTHERWISE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
PROBABLY.
It was a bit casual. Actually it didn’t make any sense because it was the least threatening thing either of them had ever seen.
“It’s got a name as well!” the Doctor danced away from the pedestal. “The Memory Graveyard. What a name, too.”
“Hmm…” Lizzie nodded, still trying to take in the scale of this place, if it was where the Doctor thought it was.
“Everything bad in the universe,” he continued, scanning the books and ornaments and CDs and toys. “Every bad memory, every nightmare, every phobia, every rotten day at the office – it’s all here.”
“I guess… that some of this stuff is linked to bad memories more than anything else. Cause all these old books and stuff,” Lizzie ran her hands over an old copy of Danny, the Champion of the World. She loved that book.
“Exactly. It might mean something… something so wonderful, to you. But for someone, it could be corrupted with the worst days of their lives.”
When Lizzie thought of it like that, she realised that… that everything that ever existed could be in here. Because dark memories could creep, and could contaminate everything, and could bury it deep within this huge depository of items. After all… grief was not something that went away, it would cast a shadow forever.
Then she remembered something very important. In fact, she hated herself for forgetting it - but she couldn't help it. It felt as if only half of her mind was focussed on the current situation, as if the majority of her brainpower was being... delegated for something else, something she didn't understand.
“Iris…”
“She’s here, somewhere,” the Doctor was sonic-ing a blue panel attached to the front of one of the shelves. “When we fell through the gap between the dimensions, somehow she got pulled to another part of the graveyard. We just need to work out where…”
Lizzie could hear the concern in his voice – he too, had grasped the scale of the Memory Graveyard, and knew that Iris could be anywhere.
Anywhere in the nightmares of everything that ever existed.
***
“You’re… alright, though,” Iris observed the Memory Keeper, who was licking at another white stain on his fur.
“Yeah. Well, love, I’m ‘ere, I just have to like it or lump it.”
“That expression is really annoying,” Iris finished off her hot chocolate, and pinched another mini marshmallow, tossing it into her mouth. “It implies that you have to live with things you don’t like.”
“Sometimes, love…”
“Firstly, stop calling me love. Also, you can change things.”
The rabbit raised its feet defensively, and Iris gave it a sassy look. Beyond her sassy looks, however, she was not sure she was correct about that expression. Sometimes, you do just have to deal with things, and she assumed that the reason she didn’t like the expression was because it was truthful. However, she maintained the philosophy of her father. And although she didn’t know it, she also maintained his optimism.
The rabbit winked back, and Iris hoped she wasn’t accidentally flirting with a rabbit. And a male rabbit at that. Especially one as sleazy as the Memory Keeper.
“Have you got a name?”
“The Memory Keeper! I said!”
“I mean one that’s a bit easier for my internal monologue to keep up with.”
“How about… Keith?” the rabbit suggested.
“A bit Australian?” Iris shook her head.
“It sounds like ‘keeper’, dunnit?”
“Hmm. I like the alliteration thing. How about… Martin? No – Melvyn. That’s it, definitely. Melvyn.”
The rabbit repeated it back to himself a few times, in his distinct cockney accent. “I like it.”
“As I was saying, Melvyn. Where, in the universe, actually am I?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m a scientist, I was made to understand.”
Melvyn sighed an incredibly patronising sigh, and Iris had to resist the increasingly strong urge to kill then rabbit and take it back to the TARDIS to put into a stew.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Melvyn waved around him. “We’re in another dimension! You’ve got time, you’ve got space – and you’ve got memory. Memory or dreams, they blur a bit.”
Iris, who, as her Dad insisted on reminding her all the time, had a scholarship for some really good physics thing, knew that Melvyn was not attuned to recent scientific studies. “Scientifically, that doesn’t make sense.”
“We’re in memory,” Melvyn poured himself another hot chocolate. “Who says memories have to make sense?”
Iris nodded. She couldn’t fault him. And, it perhaps provided some reason why a perfectly normal mammal from Earth was talking to her like a character from EastEnders (a soap opera from Earth she’d watched a few episodes of with Lizzie, before coming to the conclusion that it was a bit depressing).
“You know there’s a thing here?” Iris assumed Melvyn probably knew, but just wanted to make sure. Not that Melvyn was going to be able to take much action against the most effective terrorist in the history of history, but she felt some kind of moral obligation to tell the funny little rabbit.
“You’ll ‘ave to be more specific.”
“A terrorist.”
“Oh, yeah. That thing. That’s why I was on the phone, the big cheeses all telling me to batten down the hatches, and all that. They said it’d be fine, though.”
“The universe’s greatest terrorist? Fine?”
“That sounded better in my head.”
“I did wonder…”
The rabbit was a bit too calm for Iris’ liking, especially because she felt increasingly concerned about the fact she was alone, with nothing but this rabbit for protection, with a white supremacist anti-gay thug on the loose. As she’d grown up, she’d heard stories about the Bug, on the news. About how he caught gay people, and did things to them. She couldn’t bring herself to thing about the things they mentioned, but it was gruesome. Assaults, murders, everything. Iris looked around, concerned. Melvyn had told her how her worst nightmares were all in here with her, how they’d all be coming after her. The fact the Bug was definitely in there with them was confirmation of what the rabbit had said.
Then, she heard a voice.
***
As Lizzie paced the corridor, looking at the orb far above her head, casting the area with a silver light, she wondered who was in charge of this place. How could anyone… build something like this. It would be impossible to manage, to keep track of. It chilled her, though, to realise how much fear was in the universe. Finally, she was beginning to get to grips with the geography of the place – as much as she could. It was just like a huge library, with all sorts of storage units filled with all sorts of stuff, in a kind of labyrinthine layout. Occasionally, there would be a screen, upon which the Doctor assumed should be some kind of information. He found nothing, however. Lizzie, on the other hand, was just trying to take in the vast masses of stuff around her, at one point nearly falling over a hat stand, and again, nearly putting her foot through an old painting balanced carelessly up against a wardrobe. There were white goods – dishwashers, tumble dryers, washing machines. There were lanyards and keyrings and twiglets and DVD boxsets and calendars and locks and chains and maps and briefcases and drums and coathangers and engines and rulers and tissues and cable-ties and textbooks and masks and
“A chicken,” Lizzie watched as the poultry squawked and dashed in front of her. It was vaguely amusing to imagine the nightmares one could have over a chicken. The Doctor saw it dart off towards the end of the corridor, babbling away to itself, feathers flying upwards as it ran.
“People have phobias about all sorts of things,” the Doctor observed. Lizzie looked at him, and back at the chicken, and they both burst into fits of laughter.
“Come on, now. People do have nightmares about all sorts!” Lizzie scolded him, as they heard the faint cluckings of the chicken echoing in the grand hall.
“If I ever have grandchildren,” the Doctor laughed. “I’ll tell them this story. How I went to the place where all the bad dreams in the universe go. And I met a chicken.”
“It’s probably a very sad chicken...”
“Though on a serious note,” the Doctor walked over to the nearest screen. “Therefore, there must be… live exhibits.”
Lizzie shuddered to think of the sheer number of spiders they would be surrounded by.
“Map,” the Doctor told the screen, as if he were in an episode of Dora the Explorer (he’d watched the 52nd century reboot with Iris, in which Dora explored the newly discovered Herylton Cluster). The screen did nothing.
“I don’t think there’s any kind of order to this place,” Lizzie looked over his shoulder. The Doctor moved out the way so she could see the blankness of the ever-blank screens. “Maybe you just haven’t been using it properly.”
She thought about the map, hoping it would appear on screen. And low and behold, it did. The Doctor looked at her, his face the picture of confusion, despite the fact it was the exact same mechanism that worked in his TARDIS.
“Telepathy. It’s a memory graveyard,” Lizzie made it sound as if it were obvious. Suddenly, as if by magic, a map appeared on the screen. The Doctor’s face lit up, in a kind of curious way, and his gaze poured all over the new information.
“Interesting,” he admitted. “Each level is infinite. And, think it through – makes sense, the universe is infinite.”
“But there are… levels,” Lizzie saw that the schematic – it was divided into four tiers, of some kind. They were at the top.
“Yes. Question is, what’s on each level?”
He tapped the lower level on the screen – red text flashed up.
Emotion harvest.
“Ominous,” he said. He selected the other two levels – the one below them read ‘frequent’ and the third level down read ‘haunting’. “My guess,” he continued. “Is that as you progress lower down, the, I don’t know, ‘intensity’ of the memory, or dream, or fear, increases. As if it gets more specific as you go down. And 'emotion harvest'... that's the connection station. This place, it thrives on memory, and... when I developed the theory, I thought that to have something to huge and sprawling, it would have to be powered with something human.”
“Iris could be anywhere,” Lizzie observed, ignoring what he was saying about the Memory Graveyard having to be powered by something human, perhaps because she was just trying to avoid thinking of the worst possible outcome.
“I’ve placed a scan on Gallifreyan life. To be honest, I could place the scan on humanoid life in general, and I’d still get the same results. Four of us. You, me, Iris, and the Bug.”
“And... where’s Iris?” When she said it, she sort of knew what the answer was going to be, as she’d noticed that their adventures tended to form a bit of a pattern that involved them falling into as much danger as possible.
The scan completed.
“One guess…”
“‘Emotion harvest’,” Lizzie was certain.
“No surprises there…”
“The Bug is here,” she glanced at the screen. “On our level, I mean.”
“Yes. We’re going to speak to him, in a minute. Find out what he’s planning, and then we can panic. Firstly, Iris. I can rig up a communications loop with her – if we’re doing telepathy, it should be easy.”
The Doctor placed two fingers from both hands on his forehead, and Lizzie looked at him weirdly because it was, in fact, completely unnecessary (as if she were somehow the expert in telepathy).
***
“Iris!” her Dad’s voice rushed into her head. She jumped, knocking the garden table with her legs, and nearly knocking half a jug of hot chocolate into Melvyn’s lap.
“Oi, love! Nearly scolded my manhood, as it were,” he sniggered to himself, and Iris glared at him.
“Dad!” she said, aloud. “Where are you?”
“Lizzie and I have looked at the schematics – we’re on the top floor.”
“Where am I? It doesn’t look like what I’d call a floor, though,” Iris glanced around her at the truly magnificent landscape, with its golden sunsets and glittering snowflakes.
“Bottom floor,” the Doctor’s disembodied voice said. “And each level is infinite. Though we can travel through each – I would guess wherever you are is on a different… dimensional plain, or – I don’t know. The physics of this place, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me about it…”
“Anyway, don’t go anywhere.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. I’ve made a friend.”
Something changed in the Doctor’s voice. He suddenly sounded curious – if slightly worried. She wondered why – though she expected it was probably just her Dad being fatherly as to who she was mixing with.
“Who?”
When she eventually overcame her irritation that he was trying to vet her life completely, she told him.
“It’s a rabbit. And he talks.”
“Oi oi!” Melvyn called over. The Doctor did not respond to Melvyn.
“A talking rabbit? Well – nothing is impossible, as we’ve proved today. Look – Lizzie and I are going to get you. We’re keeping an eye on the Bug as well.”
“Okay… yeah. I am… slightly concerned about him.”
“He’s on our floor now. And he doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the cross-dimensional abstract memory graveyard, so he won’t be able to work out how to get down to you.”
“Stay safe, Dad.”
“I will.”
The Doctor’s disembodied voice stopped.
“Was that your dad?” Melvyn asked, not a hint of any kind of sympathy in his voice.
“Yep.”
“Sounds like a right posh-boy.”
“You’re a talking rabbit, shut up.”
***
The Doctor began rooting through the midst of stuff, as if he were looking for something.
“What are you looking for?” Lizzie asked him, wanting to help. Sometimes the Doctor would get so distracted about something, he would forget about everyone else, and just focus all of his efforts on the task at hand. Now, she could tell he was worried about Iris. Any concern for anyone else was gone – she was his priority. He was a good dad, like that. Fiercely protective of his own. She could see it, as he watched him go – he was quicker, and more agitated, desperate to find her.
“What if I can’t?” the Doctor turned to Lizzie.
“Wha – what do you mean, if you can’t?” she walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“What if I’ve lost her, Lizzie?” His voice shook, and it always hurt her when he was like this. It was like watching a parent cry – seeing somebody that should always be the one to pull things together break down was always the most difficult thing.
“You haven’t lost her. She’s here, somewhere. And we’ll get to her.”
“But if we don’t. I’d have… brought my daughter to such a dangerous place, just for a laugh. What kind of parent does that make me?”
“She’s, like… old enough to look after herself-”
“She’s not, though, she’s just a girl-”
“You’re a good dad, Doctor. Just… let her be her.”
The Doctor stood over a jumbo crate of Jaffa cakes, looking down at them with a grim affection.
Lizzie continued. “You know, you could have… run and stuff, and left her. You nearly did, but you didn’t-”
“Because you were there to stop me.”
“You wouldn’t have done, though.”
Lizzie was surprised by how sure she was, that the Doctor wouldn’t have run. But she knew, when she looked at him, that he wouldn’t, because she could see the love for his family in his eyes, and she knew he wouldn’t ever be able to bring himself to leave them. Though he liked to pretend he was all enigmatic and mysterious, he was, in fact, very easy to see through.
“I saw you three… you know, on that bus, and – you really love them, Cioné and Iris, I mean. You’d never leave them. And so… I guess I know that you’ll never leave Iris here. Because she is here, and I know we’ll find her. I know that you won’t stop until we have.”
There was silence, as he looked up, and back at her, his eyes still filled his anxiety.
“What are you looking for?” Lizzie asked him again.
“A microphone.”
She looked around briefly, and pointed to the one right by his left foot. He looked down at it, and then back up at her, and he couldn’t help but smile. And neither could he.
There was something odd, about smiling in such a place. It wasn’t as if there was anything there specifically to drag the mood down – it was all such a random collection of objects, some of which Lizzie saw and thought would make lovely furniture (she had a thing for interior designing). It was as if, at the same time, there was a constant negative energy. It was as if both her and the Doctor could feel all the sadness towards the memories, as if it were still stuck to the objects like dust, and they were inhaling it.
The Doctor had wired the vintage microphone into the screen, with a clever bit of fiddling around with the wires. He tapped it, and there was the sudden pop as the speakers burst into life. Then came a squeak, and the Doctor tested it.
“Testing, 1, 2, 3.”
No response, other than static. It echoed, though. It was as if he were talking into a microphone in some kind of valley, and it the sound was reverberating off miles of land.
“Calling the Bug…”
The static stopped. The Doctor turned to Lizzie, as if he were signifying to her that the Bug had intercepted them.
“I know you can hear me. I want to know why you’re here, and what you want with the Memory Graveyard.”
There was nothing for a few moments, but those few moments, in which the Bug was presumably deciding what he was going to say, seemed to drag on forever.
The Doctor was about to speak again, when suddenly –
“How did you find me here? Who are you?”
The Doctor was hesitant. “Intergalactic anti-terrorism. We’ve been watching you for some time.”
“Nobody watches me.”
It was just proof that the Bug had become rather accustomed to getting away with what he liked.
“We do. Sorry – your reign of terror has come to an end.”
“As if you could find me here,” the Bug hissed. It wasn’t really a hiss – his voice was deep, and reverberating, but with a sort of clicking sound running alongside it – like the scuttling of insectoid legs. “This dimension is infinite.”
“What do you want with it, then?”
Silence for a while.
“Who are you?” it repeated again. Confusion was in its voice. They could tell that the Bug had never been confronted like it before – and that it had gained no wind of who they were.
“As I said. Intergalactic anti-terrorism. We were on a stake out, we saw you, and we were concerned you’d accidentally fallen in the pond, so we just dived in to check. Turns out, there’s a whole dimension here!”
“You are contradicting yourself,” the Bug snarled.
“Which one’s true?” the Doctor winked at Lizzie, who laughed/cringed in response. “Here’s how this is going to work,” the Doctor’s voice turned serious. “You’re going to leave. Now.”
The Bug laughed, a deep, mocking laugh. “And what will you do, puny, little man? You are but a petulant snowflake, and I could crush you simply with a biology textbook on gender.”
The Doctor’s voice turned very sour, then. “I’m coming to find you.”
“I can trigger you without even needing to open my eyes. And when I set the memories here alight, I will dowse the universe in fear, and in terror. The liberal cause will lose all momentum, when I hold them to ransom against everything they fear the most.”
Lizzie sighed. Neoliberalism and the left, the right seemed to have a compulsion for getting them mixed up. Meanwhile the Doctor walked back from the screen in disgust, and took a deep breath, calming himself down.
“I will find you, and I will make sure that this is the last time you could ever threaten anyone with such an attack.”
The Doctor cut the connection. Stupid little man, Lizzie thought of the Bug.
“Lizzie,” he turned to her. “Look, I don’t want to have to ask this of you, but… I need you to go and find Iris. I’ll be here, guiding you every step of the way – but I need to stay on this floor, in case the Bug makes another move.”
He was talking as if he were trying to justify what he was saying. As if he felt he needed to justify what he was saying.
“You don’t even need to ask,” she nodded. He was gripping the edge of the screen, and his hands had turned red with the force.
“I can follow you on the screen,” the Doctor reassured her, and she nodded.
“It’s fine – we’ll find her, don’t worry.”
The Doctor was picking through a pile of cardboard boxes that contained bundles of old cables and wires and webcams and mice (mouses? Neither of them were sure what the plural was of the technological input device), and eventually, an earpiece. He tossed it to her, and she slipped it in her ear.
“Lizzie, you’re-”
She could see he felt guilty, but she understood that she had to be the one to go.
“Doctor, stop worrying about it,” she laughed. “I’m fine with going, ha ha. I love Iris and I want her to be safe too.” And she knew that she would do anything for her sister if ever she needed it
“I know, I know, and I love you for that, but – I just can’t help but feel that this should be me. I’m meant to be her father.”
“You are her father.”
“And this is my responsibility.”
“I guess – you’ve changed so much since we first met,” she said to him. He looked at her, honesty in his eyes. Sadness in his eyes, sadness like the time she had first met him. Except… unlike that time, when she had found him on her doorstep, he did not seem lost. He had found him. Iris had found him.
“I was so… empty, for so long,” the Doctor said. “And I still get like that, but you, Lizzie Darwin, save me, every time. When Iris was growing up, and I just couldn’t cope, you were always there, to help me. To look after Iris, if need be. You always listened, no matter… how stupid it was. Even now, you just listen, and usually I don’t have a clue what’s going on in your head. But all the time, I know that you, just listening to me, helps me more than I could ever know.”
She shrugged it off.
“And you shrug it off,” the Doctor said. “As if it means nothing – but it does.”
Lizzie really wanted to tell him that it meant so much, hearing him say that, but she couldn’t find the words that matched up to what she was thinking. Hearing him say that, though, meant so much to her – to know that somehow she had helped, brought her so much happiness. She smiled at him.
“Why the enigmatic smile?”
“I, er, don’t know,” she laughed. “It’s just… like, I’m so happy you think that…”
“Please don’t ever go anywhere.”
“I won’t.”
There was a period of silence, as the Doctor pressed a few buttons on the screen, and Lizzie stood loitering beside one of the bookcases. Eventually he stepped back, and walked over to Lizzie.
“It’s telepathic,” the Doctor said. “You just need to think.”
She was getting pretty scared about the place now – and about the power of thought in general. She had always been scared that bad thoughts meant that she was a bad person, and whenever something bad entered her head, she would always try as hard as possible to stop it before she properly thought of it. It sounded stupid, when explaining it out loud, because thoughts were only thoughts. But it was bad enough anyway – and even more terrifying when the realisation that those thoughts could become truths finally dawned on her.
The Doctor kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you.”
“I’ll be back in like… half an hour.”
“No, but – this isn’t something you should have to do, and you’re doing it anyway. And that means a lot.”
“Yeah, but… do you really think I’d have said no?”
She thought.
***
Lizzie opened the door. She was not sure that there was a door in front of her, and she didn’t see it or feel it in front of her. All she knew was that she opened one, to get to wherever she was now. And she remembered putting her hand on a freezing cold handle – it was not a door that had been opened in a very long time. But it opened well, with an ease indicating that the door had been well designed. And when it did swing open, she realised that she was standing in some metal box, like a lift of some kind. Except there were no buttons on the walls or anything – she had thought her way down here.
As soon as the door opened, however, one of the first things she noticed was the silence. Not that it was any more silent than the previous floor – apart from the fact there was no conversation between the Doctor, Lizzie, or any intergalactic space terrorists. Bar said conversations, there hadn’t been any noise at all. Though, in a very strange way, it had felt as if the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ had somehow led to the feeling that there was some kind of constant sound. Relics of so many bright and noisy lives all laid to rest in the same room, providing a soundtrack to silence. The same went for the light as well – it felt darker. Ahead of her, she saw the corridor she was to walk down.
And so she started walking.
And nothing happened.
She was more surprised at the absence of anything than she would’ve been had a monster or a villain jumped out to try and scare her. She was more scared of nothing than she was of stuff. Progress, she thought to herself – before she’d started travelling with the Doctor, she’d been scared of nothing and stuff. She had since learned the benefits and drawbacks to both. When there was nothing, there was room for ‘thing’. But there was also loneliness, and a lack of any hope at all. When there was stuff, there was familiarity – but also the fear that stuff could be holding something so dark and terrifying. Basically, she’d been scared of everything, and had loathed herself for it, and had ridiculed herself, and laughed at herself, and she still spent most of her time doing it anyway. She was, at least, distracted, as she watched the end of the corridor ahead of her, stepping, one step at a time.
As she went, she wondered what emotion harvesting meant. The whole place was sort of one huge crop of emotion. She theorised that, perhaps, emotion harvesting meant ‘raw emotions’, as if one could see sadness or joy or emptiness and could net it and bottle it up. Perhaps that was what the Doctor had meant, when he spoke about the human component... a human mind, powerful enough to harvest emotions. She thought about who had built the place – because who would build a place like this? Unless it was naturally occurring, or something, but that seemed even more unlikely – as if the universe just plucked random things out of space and time for the sake of it. Still. It had proved itself pretty good at doing that anyway.
Emotion farmers. But why? Lizzie often found herself asking why. She was a naturally inquisitive person, and was always looking for some kind of deeper meaning in things. She read way too much into things, which sometimes was good – she saw what people missed. But it reduced her to a socially awkward ruin who was always worried that she’d upset someone or that something she’d done wasn’t good enough or was awful. Paradoxical emotions. There didn’t seem to be much deep meaning here, though. It was bad things. If something bad touched someone, it would go here. It was simple. Maybe there was a meaning, but it was so hidden that she was missing it. Perhaps it was completely obvious, and just going over her head. She sighed, and kept on going. There was another door at the end of the corridor – she was nearing it now.
Her mind was driving her crazy. Sometimes it would go into overdrive, when there were to many stimuli surrounding her, it was like she couldn’t cope and just went into shut down. Everything was felt so deeply, that eventually, the feeling got too much.
And she would become numb.
She told herself to shut up, over and over again. But all the time, the constant feeling that the place didn’t make sense, constantly nagging at her. It wasn’t even on a scientific level – the Doctor talked about it like that, and so had Iris. But Lizzie saw something else wrong with it, in a completely different way. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle, but with one, lone, piece missing. A piece right in the middle, the one that brings the whole picture together.
For some reason, it had been linked to her home. To her den, to her escape. But why? Why, why, why? It made no sense. No sense, no sense, nonsense, nonsense,
Nonsense.
She was at the end of the corridor now. She thought. The door opened, as expected.
“Lizzie?”
She wasn’t hearing voices in her head, was she? It felt as if everything was falling apart, and for the briefest of seconds, she panicked.
“Iris?” she realised who the voice was. Telepathy. Of course. She’d said it over and over to herself, how simple it was. She’d told the Doctor how simple it was.
“How’s tricks?” Iris asked, as Lizzie stepped into the next corridor. It was wider than the previous – by quite a margin. More like an atrium of some kind, perhaps. Again, there was nothing there. Now that she could hear Iris, the silence was not quite as bugging. But still she could feel it.
“Weird…” Lizzie continued. “I’m on your level. And there’s nothing…”
“Nothing?”
“It’s just corridors and halls and stuff. And that’s it…” she was hesitant about being so sure about it being ‘it’, because it very rarely was ‘it’.
“Somewhere there’ll be a door that’ll take you outside.”
Lizzie stopped walking. “You’re outside?”
“… yeah?”
She looked around at the corridors. It all seemed too dark and too claustrophobic for an outside to even exist in wherever they were.
“No, it’s fine,” Lizzie started walking again, forgetting about it. “Everything in here just feels so manmade, that’s all. The idea of an outside just feels… different.”
“There’s fields for as far as I can see.”
“But you can’t see any buildings?” Lizzie asked.
“Nope.”
Bit of a trek, then.
“It’s fine, though,” Iris was laughing. “I’ve met someone.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Melvyn. He’s a talking rabbit. I’ve turned straight.”
“All it took was an anthropomorphic rabbit…”
“He’s like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, except he speaks in a cockney accent, and he’s a chauvinist pig.”
Lizzie loved that book. A little girl who got taken to some strange and magical land. “I love that book…”
“So do I. It’s one of my favourites. Honestly, Lizzie, it’s just… stunning here. The sun is setting, and I can see the stars in the sky. Daaaamn gurl. Bring me my telescope.”
Lizzie was reminded of how different the two of them were. Lizzie saw sunsets and saw beauty, but she saw it through colour and emotion and poetry, and words and song lyrics that all seemed to come at once. Iris saw beauty as well – but saw it through science. That somehow, the great clock that was the universe, had aligned its hands at that precise moment, leading to a great explosion of burning light in the sky – and the fact that the chances of her being there at those exact moments must be so, so tiny, that became beautiful as well.
I’d love to be out there, Lizzie thought.
“Yeah,” Iris nodded. “You would. It’s very ‘you’.”
Lizzie stopped when she realised that Iris had somehow heard that. Then she remembered. Telepathy. And then she realised that Iris could hear –
“Yes, Lizzie. I can hear everything. Well, I don’t know if ‘hear’ is the right word. I can sense it, I can… see it. Science just isn’t working for me right now and it’s messing with my head.”
She stepped back against the wall, her head flopping backwards in embarrassment.
“Why are you embarrassed?” Iris asked.
“Wouldn’t you be, if somebody could read your thoughts?” Lizzie was surprised. She kept all sorts of stuff in her head, and this idea that somebody could hear it was like realising that somebody was filming you constantly in your own house. Except… worse. They were her thoughts, hers to hold onto and nobody else’s. There was stuff she needed to tell people, for sure. But she would do that in her own time.
“… nope, not really. If they want lesbian porn and reruns of House, then that’s up to them.”
Lizzie smiled and kept on walking. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Look, big sis. Your mind is amazing. And I knew that cause you’re such a closeted gal you’d shut it off as soon as I told you.”
You can’t shut off thoughts…
“No, but you can try and think about other things,” Iris heard her think. Lizzie sighed again, and tried to close off her mind, as Iris had said. “See!” Iris cried. “You’re doing it! Shutting up. Please don’t.”
“I don’t like you nosing in my head…”
“Okay – it’s up to you. Your thoughts, you get to choose. But seriously – you’ve got so much to say,” Iris’ voice was reassuring. She was not malicious at all – she was so chilled out, all the time. Lizzie envied her for that. “Honestly,” Iris continued. “All those thoughts that you always say ‘uhhh I can’t find words for them’. They’re amazing thoughts. Scary sometimes. Sometimes hilarious. You’re quite funny, actually. And so clever. But you won’t do anything about it cause you’re a piece of anxious trash.”
“This is true,” Lizzie agreed. It was reassuring, the more she thought about it. And the more she thought about it, the more reassured she became, as she became more aware that Iris was seeing more and more of her thoughts. “Fine. Go on, have a look through.”
For so many years, there had been thoughts that she hadn’t been able to find words for, and finally, she didn’t have to. She could communicate them to someone, so somebody could understand her for how she wanted to be understood. It was like talking to someone about all the problems she’d faced over the years, without even needing to talk about them. There was just somebody there to understand. “Like… I don’t know.”
“Oh my god Liiiiizzz. Why don’t you tell anyone about this stuff…”
“Because I don’t think...,” she sighed when she realised that she could conduct this entire conversation in her head without even needing to open her mouth. “I don’t think people want to know. And well… um, they really don’t need to listen to me… whining.”
“You need to whine! Whining is good, whine to me, please.”
“You don’t want to hear about… me, and the weird stuff in my head –”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do!” Iris insisted.
“I’m nearly at the next door,” Lizzie changed the subject.
“I can literally see you changing the subject!”
She thought about something else. Maggie. Maggie was a good place to start – one day it’d be hilarious if she came on the TARDIS, and they went travelling, or something. It’d probably be all bloody this and bloody that, but it’d be a laugh.
“Who’s Maggie?”
“My support worker,” Lizzie didn’t even try and fight the fact that she was thinking.
“But you left care years ago?”
“Yeah but... as you said. Anxious trash here.”
***
Iris took a sip from her hot chocolate, having poured herself another – she was on glass number three now. The jug seemed to be bigger on the inside, for there was a seemingly infinite supply of hot chocolate. Melvyn had long grown bored and was mucking about with some kind of intergalactic Tinder on his phone.
“Jesus! That tail…”
Iris had overheard all sorts of vile comments from Melvyn in the last half an hour.
“Sorry,” she said to Lizzie. “He’s a bit of a – anyway.”
“Oi!” Melvyn looked up. “I’ll have you know I’m the one who’s looking out for you! So button it!”
Iris giggled, and sat back, sipping her hot chocolate, and listening in to Lizzie’s thoughts. She found herself so concerned for the girl that was like a sister to her. She wondered what it would be like if everyone could hear the thoughts of everyone else, whether it would be so much better, or so much worse. It was spooky, though – seeing the contents of someone’s thoughts, as if they were box, and you could simply search through its contents.
There was something beautiful in the way that life worked. How trillions of cells could somehow come together and build such a complex and magnificent thing capable of something so much more than the simple cell that it had come from. People often stereotyped scientists for being cold and distant and detached people, but Iris saw more beauty in science than anything else. The way that random bits of simplicity that had nothing to do with each other could somehow work in unison and harmony meant more to her than anything else. Sometimes, she didn’t even need to be especially curious – she could just sit, and watch, a scene. Lizzie once told her how she did the same – but, of course, for different reasons. No… Iris liked to watch for the science. For all the hearts beating at once, supporting everything, keeping life pumping through, keeping it fuelled and always ready to go. The way engines roared from a simple spark of light, and brought light and motion to the universe. She would sit and watch a city, life bleeding through it, and think that it all came from a few scientific scribbles on a bit of paper.
Simplicity becoming so much more.
She was so similar to Lizzie, and yet so different at the same time. That’s why she always called Lizzie her sister – because that’s what siblings were. People that are so close, but so different, and best friends as well.
It only then dawned on her that Melvyn had stopped making sanctimonious and vaguely sexist remarks.
She looked over, and the rabbit was gone.
“Melvyn?” she called. “Melvyn?!”
“Is this… the rabbit?” Lizzie said, telepathically.
“He’s gone… just vanished.”
As she looked around her, she knew that – well, she didn’t know anything. By all logic, he should be within sight – the fields stretched for miles around, and she could see for a great distance. A rabbit dressed like Melvyn would stick out from quite a distance as well.
“He was stupid, but… he was company.”
Iris suddenly felt very alone, sat in the middle of the fields stretching on for as far as her eyes could see. And suddenly, there was a chill in the air. She looked down, and her hot chocolate didn’t seem quite as appealing as it had done a few seconds ago. Iris pulled her jacket, trying to block out the chill, but it was as if it reached further than that, and pulling her jacket made no difference at all. Something had changed – it was something very minor, but it had made the once-beautiful landscape turn into something so much… eerier.
“Lizzie…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t. Are you alright?”
“Mmhmm,” Iris murmured, glancing around her. She was not just ‘mmhmm’, she was a lot more scared than that. Rationally, there was very little to be scared of. If anything did come to get her, she’d be able to spot it from ages away. However, she had already established that wherever she was, it had very little compliance with science, and so was not willing to leave it to chance. “Logically, there’s nothing to be scared of. But I can just feel it…”
Story of my life, she heard Lizzie thought.
“You feel everything so… goddam deeply…,” Iris muttered, in a way slightly envious, and also in a way slightly glad, that she didn’t feel like Lizzie did. Iris looked up, and the stars in the sky were gone. “I’ve just realised why I’ve been confused, right from the start.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t mean anything, now I think about it. But I just suddenly realised, that the stars in the sky were completely different to anything I’ve seen before.”
“This place is… well… completely different, I guess…”
“Yes. A whole new dimension, supposedly. Physics-defying, according to Melvyn. Damn, I already miss his woman-hating white fluffy arse. Point is – the stars that didn’t make any sense have gone.”
Do stars do that? She heard Lizzie think. I’ve spent so long looking at stars, and I’ve never seen them do that – not nearly as long as Iris, though’.
“No, stars don’t do that,” Iris zipped up her jacket. “And it’s…”
The lights went out.
***
Again, another corridor. This one was thinner, a bit like the first one. Lizzie felt as if she was getting closer to something – as she walked, there was a deep, reverberating pulse, somewhere inside her. It was as if somehow, her heart was being pulled towards something. Her occasionally-superstitious streak bleeding through, she wondered if it was some kind of sign…
“Lizzie, okay, I know I asked before, but please, don’t go anywhere. At all.”
The words were quick, and desperate. Iris was scared. Terrified. She was not a good liar, and when Lizzie heard the fear, her pace increased.
“What’s happened, Iris?”
“It’s dark.”
“Okay… I don’t think I’m far away now.”
“Please, Lizzie, you have to – have to –”
Iris’ voice was rushing, and Lizzie could hear her breathing – it was as if she was clawing for air that just kept scrabbling away from her. It reminded Lizzie of panic attacks from days-gone-by: and so she ran, now, through the narrow corridor. The fear of absence that had once spooked her no longer bothered her – she just had to get to Iris, wherever she was, no matter what she would have to go through.
They were like family.
They were family.
It was then that Lizzie fully grasped it – they didn’t just bear similarities to siblings – they were siblings. Blood related they may not be, but the desperation that Lizzie had to find Iris was reminiscent of nothing she had ever felt before – and she knew, from that moment, that they were siblings.
“I can’t see anything,” Iris wept. “Please, Lizzie, please, please, just –”
The door was ahead of her – Lizzie was getting closer. She knew – she felt the internal reverberance of all the pain and suffering and phobias and fears and dreams, all beating inside her at once, as if they were the blood pumping through her, and as if her heart was beating for all of these things at once.
The door grew closer.
It was almost unbearable now, all of it running through her. But she couldn’t stop – she could hear Iris’ voice, the fear and the tears, all at once. Everything she felt, physically, did not matter, because at that moment, she was beyond any of that. Lizzie had once been a terrified little girl – and she remembered Iris, when she was so small. As she listened to the Doctor’s daughter weep – to her sister weep – she was just remembered of those days.
And so she ran.
And she reached the door.
She pushed it open, and stepped into a room.
What she saw changed everything.
***
Now, she stood in a hall. It was quite sizeable, but empty, bar another door at the end. Except, the other door at the end was like that of a portcullis – grandiose, and powerful, and definitely intended for keeping things in, or keeping things out. Lizzie was not sure which. The reverberations died down – she didn’t feel the same pressure forcing her heart as she did before. However – it was still there, pulsing away, somewhere, hidden away. There was something drawing her to that door. She wanted to know what was inside – she had to know what was inside. Humans were naturally curious animals, and all her instincts were clawing towards the great door.
She remembered reading once that human instinct was almost impossible to overrule. She’d always thought that if that were the case, then it would be possible to somehow overrule it with an instinct that was more powerful.
Her theory was proven, as her desire to see what was on the other side of this great, opaque portcullis was usurped.
Iris was slumped in the middle of the hall. It all looked so impossible – because in the mass of cold, grey walls and floors, and in front of this huge great door, beyond which Lizzie knew lay something powerful, there was the simple, lying body of a girl. She was vulnerable – like the little girl that so many years ago (so many days ago for Lizzie), she had held, when she was just a new-born baby. Juxtaposed against death and badness and sadness, the girl looked even more alive than she had done, even when she was consciousness.
Iris looked even more alive.
Everything down to the clothes she wore, and her silky, flowing brunette hair, was contrasted against all this emptiness. It was unbearable.
“Iris? Can you – can you still hear me?”
“Yes? Lizzie, please don’t go anywhere. It’s all gone dark, I, I can’t see. Please.”
Iris relied on science, and that logic was gone. Any concept of understanding could not be found for her – Iris had said that to her once. That she found beauty in the randomness of science, and somehow finding some explanation to that randomness. But they had been thrown into a land where there was no such explanation, where the rules of the universe did not apply. This was a land of emotion, a land of people, captured at single moments. Memories, in single moments.
And science didn’t work in memories.
“Doctor,” Lizzie put a finger to her earpiece. She’d expected to need the Doctor, for… moral support, or something, as she traversed down to the bottom of the graveyard.
She did not think she would have to tell him this.
“Lizzie?” his voice came back through.
She tried to find the words – but she didn’t know what they were. She was alive – Lizzie had checked her pulse. But she was unconscious. But she was still thinking. Still hearing. Still feeling. She could, somehow, see into Lizzie’s thoughts. But she was not awake, she was asleep. It was like Iris was trapped inside her own head. There was that thing – locked-in syndrome. Quite a chilling idea – that one could not undertake any kind of human action, and yet still be thinking, constantly, all the time.
“Lizzie, what is it? Is it Iris, is she alright?”
Lizzie still didn’t say anything.
“Lizzie!” his voice was getting more and more urgent. She’d have to say something. “Lizzie! Please, what is it? Lizzie!”
She eventually replied.
“You need to come down here.”
“What’s happened? Is Iris okay?”
“I – I don’t know. She’s still… alive, in some way or another,” Lizzie could still hear Iris pleading with her, in her ear, as they were still communicating telepathically. “I’ve been talking to her. But she’s in this… huge room, just lying there, in the middle of the floor, and she’s not responding to anything.”
The Doctor’s silence indicated his bemusement.
“Right… I’m coming down.”
***
Via a quick bit of techno-babbling, the Doctor had shown Lizzie how to set up a teleport link between the two of them, making use of Lizzie’s earpiece. Before long, he appeared in front of her, and dashed straight over to his daughter.
“Oh… this was a stupid, stupid idea,” he picked her up, cradling her in her arms, just as he’d done when she was small. “Iris, please. Please, come back.”
There was no response.
“Iris? Your dad is here…,” Lizzie was still talking to her telepathically.
“Please, Lizzie,” Iris’ voice came through. “Tell him to actually do something useful for once.”
“Iris?” the Doctor said, even though he knew it was a telepathic link. “It’s like… like she’s created some sort of dream state for herself.”
It made sense. The planet thing, with the bright orange skies, and the stars. Gallifrey had a burned orange sky, and Iris had always loved the science behind the stars. And Melvyn the White Rabbit – Alice in Wonderland was Iris’ favourite book. She’d been inside her own memories. As if she was inside an account of her own life.
The Doctor knew what he had to do.
Still holding Iris in his arms, he placed two fingers on her forehead.
“What are you going to do?” Lizzie asked him. Bring her back?
“Exactly what you did,” the Doctor smiled up at her, and then looked down at his daughter. “Except… I’m going to go one step further.”
The Doctor, just like that, fell asleep.
***
“Hold on love,” the rabbit raised a foot to halt her. Iris stopped, and then pointed at the furry creature.
“Don’t call me love!” she complained, her hopes that in this strange place casual sexism would not be a thing.
The rabbit had taken a little mobile phone out of its pocket – it was a weirdly adorable representation of a Nokia Brick, the sort of thing a doll would wield. It pressed a button, and put the phone to its ear.
“What is it?” the rabbit grumbled. “I’m in the middle of something, mate.”
There was a brief silence, and Iris tried to pick out what was going on down the other end of the phone. She couldn’t hear anything, apart from a quiet mumbling (she couldn’t even distinguish anything from the mumbling). After a while, the rabbit sighed.
“Thanks for nothing. Now piss off before you make me say something I regret!”
The phone went dead, and the rabbit pocketed it. When he shook his head in distaste, his floppy ears flapped from side to side. “Idiots,” he spat.
“Who was it?” Iris asked.
“Sorry love,” the Memory Keeper started to hop back to the little table the two of them had originally sat at. “Turns out our little date is off!”
“That was not a date.” She didn’t usually go for rabbits.
The rabbit raised its feet. “Whatever you say,” he hopped back onto his chair. “Want a cuppa?”
Iris sat down opposite him. “No thanks. Everyone I know seems to drink it. Dad drinks it. Lizzie and Mum drink the hell out of it. So much so it’s got weird now. If I had to go for a hot drink, hot chocolate all the way.”
The rabbit waved a foot, and a silver platter appeared in the middle of the garden table. On top, was a glass jug. There was a glass dish, piled high with mini marshmallows, and a little glass pot, almost like a powder keg, brimming with chocolate sprinkles. A smaller glass jug contained cream, and there were two glass mugs, presumably for her, and the Memory Keeper. He reached out, poured a glass of hot chocolate for her, and another for himself.
“Cream? Marshmallows? Choccie sprinkles?”
“I’ll help myself,” Iris gratefully took her mug, before dolloping in some whipped cream, and dusting a few chocolate sprinkles on top. She took a few marshmallows, and after popping one in her mouth, she dropped the rest into the mug. When she put it to her lips, it was heavenly. If one could imagine the finest hot chocolate they had ever drunk, they would have to forget it, for this was far creamier, far more chocolatey, and as the thick heaven passed through her lips, and crept down her gullet, Iris was taken to better place.
“This is delicious,” she nodded. “Best hot chocolate I’ve ever drunk. Which doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” the Memory Keeper took a sip from his glass, whipping off a chocolate stain on his white fur when he slammed the glass back on the table as if it were a tankard of beer.
“Because it doesn’t. None of this does. I’m a scientist, this doesn’t add up.”
Yes, that felt good. She was sure of herself then, when she proudly declared who she was. She knew that about herself, and it was good to have something she could be certain of.
“Oi, don’t want to be listening to them scientists. Utter rubbish, you hear?”
“Where am I, then?”
“I’ve told ya!”
“Specifically,” Iris said, unwaveringly, staring the white rabbit dead on in the face, not even a hint of irony in her expression.
“The Memory Graveyard is basically –
***
“Hell,” the Doctor helped Lizzie up from the stone-cold ground. They’d both woken up there, lying next to each other, in a room in which the interior designers had gone slightly overkill on the charcoal grey colour-scheme. They were in a sort of junction – a crossroads, between several extremely tall shelves. When they looked upwards, they saw the shelves on either side of them ran right upwards to the very high ceiling. Wherever they were, it was more like a hall, with a great maze in the middle of it – and they were in the middle of that maze.
“… hell?” Lizzie asked.
“No,” the Doctor rubbished his previous statement. “No, I’ve been to hell, and it’s nothing like this. This is like Hell’s broom cupboard. The lost property section.”
The shelves were a mess – and they weren’t all ceiling-high shelves either. There were shorter bookcases as well, and chests of drawers, and cupboard units, and filing cabinets, and wardrobes, and any kind of storage furnishing one could possibly imagine, all crammed in close together. They were crammed with a mass of everything – there were ancient, dusty books, and there were ring-binders with aged papers clipped inside, and lever-arch files, and display booklets. On some of the shelves were wrought metal frames, or antique wooden ones, pictures pressed inside, some in monochrome, and some in the brightest of colours. There were no links between the pictures – they were all from different places all over the universe, and from times all in history. When Lizzie poked her head inside a wardrobe, there were summer dresses, and woolly winter jumpers, and frock coats like the Doctor’s, and trench coats, and tweed jackets, and tin-foil like spacesuits. The Doctor had pulled out a filing cabinet, and had gone rifling through the mass of files inside, to see if he could find anything. It was all just miscellaneous documentation, from all over the universe. Bank statements, phone bills, death certificates, divorce papers, murder reports, mugshots, letters to and from loved ones.
Lizzie looked at some ornaments in a glass display case – a skull, an ancient globe, a rattle, a silver knife and fork. There were no links between any of it, it was all random. And it wasn’t all contained within storage. The walkways were awash with random clutter, with lamps, and circular window frames, gardening tools, curtain rails, sunglasses, mugs, rabbit hutches, bottles of wine, beer and spirits. There were stuffed moose heads, woks, union jacks, gongs, harmonicas, padlocks, paperclips – if it existed, it was lightly somewhere within 10 square metres of them.
“I’ve read about this place. Not much, mind, but I know roughly what it is. It’s an idea, a, a… concept, more than anything else. Gallifreyan philosophy journals, they mention it a few times. It’s not a well-known theory, though.”
“I did A level philosophy and… it never came up,” Lizzie walked over to the Doctor, who was busy examining a shoe rack, and playing with a solitary flipflop.
“No, it wouldn’t, it’s beyond that. It’s beyond Earth philosophy, science, literature, everything.”
Lizzie looked at the Doctor, as he awkwardly tried to re-lace an abandoned walking boot.
“It’s your theory, isn’t it?”
The Doctor was not a good liar.
“Okay. When I was going through a rough patch, I came up with the idea. A place, somewhere in the universe, where every bad memory goes. You know... memories and dreams can manifest themselves in objects? Well, the manifestations end up here. Or, at least, I think.”
Lizzie suddenly thought back to all the clothes she saw in the wardrobe and the stuff in the drawers and cabinets and felt sad that all that stuff would be sad for people. Then she thought of the scale of the entire universe, and realised how absolutely massive the place had to be.
“Here,” the Doctor pointed to a polished, engraved plaque on top of a pedestal.
THESE POSSESSIONS ARE PROPERTY OF THE MEMORY GRAVEYARD.
DO NOT TOUCH OTHERWISE BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.
PROBABLY.
It was a bit casual. Actually it didn’t make any sense because it was the least threatening thing either of them had ever seen.
“It’s got a name as well!” the Doctor danced away from the pedestal. “The Memory Graveyard. What a name, too.”
“Hmm…” Lizzie nodded, still trying to take in the scale of this place, if it was where the Doctor thought it was.
“Everything bad in the universe,” he continued, scanning the books and ornaments and CDs and toys. “Every bad memory, every nightmare, every phobia, every rotten day at the office – it’s all here.”
“I guess… that some of this stuff is linked to bad memories more than anything else. Cause all these old books and stuff,” Lizzie ran her hands over an old copy of Danny, the Champion of the World. She loved that book.
“Exactly. It might mean something… something so wonderful, to you. But for someone, it could be corrupted with the worst days of their lives.”
When Lizzie thought of it like that, she realised that… that everything that ever existed could be in here. Because dark memories could creep, and could contaminate everything, and could bury it deep within this huge depository of items. After all… grief was not something that went away, it would cast a shadow forever.
Then she remembered something very important. In fact, she hated herself for forgetting it - but she couldn't help it. It felt as if only half of her mind was focussed on the current situation, as if the majority of her brainpower was being... delegated for something else, something she didn't understand.
“Iris…”
“She’s here, somewhere,” the Doctor was sonic-ing a blue panel attached to the front of one of the shelves. “When we fell through the gap between the dimensions, somehow she got pulled to another part of the graveyard. We just need to work out where…”
Lizzie could hear the concern in his voice – he too, had grasped the scale of the Memory Graveyard, and knew that Iris could be anywhere.
Anywhere in the nightmares of everything that ever existed.
***
“You’re… alright, though,” Iris observed the Memory Keeper, who was licking at another white stain on his fur.
“Yeah. Well, love, I’m ‘ere, I just have to like it or lump it.”
“That expression is really annoying,” Iris finished off her hot chocolate, and pinched another mini marshmallow, tossing it into her mouth. “It implies that you have to live with things you don’t like.”
“Sometimes, love…”
“Firstly, stop calling me love. Also, you can change things.”
The rabbit raised its feet defensively, and Iris gave it a sassy look. Beyond her sassy looks, however, she was not sure she was correct about that expression. Sometimes, you do just have to deal with things, and she assumed that the reason she didn’t like the expression was because it was truthful. However, she maintained the philosophy of her father. And although she didn’t know it, she also maintained his optimism.
The rabbit winked back, and Iris hoped she wasn’t accidentally flirting with a rabbit. And a male rabbit at that. Especially one as sleazy as the Memory Keeper.
“Have you got a name?”
“The Memory Keeper! I said!”
“I mean one that’s a bit easier for my internal monologue to keep up with.”
“How about… Keith?” the rabbit suggested.
“A bit Australian?” Iris shook her head.
“It sounds like ‘keeper’, dunnit?”
“Hmm. I like the alliteration thing. How about… Martin? No – Melvyn. That’s it, definitely. Melvyn.”
The rabbit repeated it back to himself a few times, in his distinct cockney accent. “I like it.”
“As I was saying, Melvyn. Where, in the universe, actually am I?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m a scientist, I was made to understand.”
Melvyn sighed an incredibly patronising sigh, and Iris had to resist the increasingly strong urge to kill then rabbit and take it back to the TARDIS to put into a stew.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Melvyn waved around him. “We’re in another dimension! You’ve got time, you’ve got space – and you’ve got memory. Memory or dreams, they blur a bit.”
Iris, who, as her Dad insisted on reminding her all the time, had a scholarship for some really good physics thing, knew that Melvyn was not attuned to recent scientific studies. “Scientifically, that doesn’t make sense.”
“We’re in memory,” Melvyn poured himself another hot chocolate. “Who says memories have to make sense?”
Iris nodded. She couldn’t fault him. And, it perhaps provided some reason why a perfectly normal mammal from Earth was talking to her like a character from EastEnders (a soap opera from Earth she’d watched a few episodes of with Lizzie, before coming to the conclusion that it was a bit depressing).
“You know there’s a thing here?” Iris assumed Melvyn probably knew, but just wanted to make sure. Not that Melvyn was going to be able to take much action against the most effective terrorist in the history of history, but she felt some kind of moral obligation to tell the funny little rabbit.
“You’ll ‘ave to be more specific.”
“A terrorist.”
“Oh, yeah. That thing. That’s why I was on the phone, the big cheeses all telling me to batten down the hatches, and all that. They said it’d be fine, though.”
“The universe’s greatest terrorist? Fine?”
“That sounded better in my head.”
“I did wonder…”
The rabbit was a bit too calm for Iris’ liking, especially because she felt increasingly concerned about the fact she was alone, with nothing but this rabbit for protection, with a white supremacist anti-gay thug on the loose. As she’d grown up, she’d heard stories about the Bug, on the news. About how he caught gay people, and did things to them. She couldn’t bring herself to thing about the things they mentioned, but it was gruesome. Assaults, murders, everything. Iris looked around, concerned. Melvyn had told her how her worst nightmares were all in here with her, how they’d all be coming after her. The fact the Bug was definitely in there with them was confirmation of what the rabbit had said.
Then, she heard a voice.
***
As Lizzie paced the corridor, looking at the orb far above her head, casting the area with a silver light, she wondered who was in charge of this place. How could anyone… build something like this. It would be impossible to manage, to keep track of. It chilled her, though, to realise how much fear was in the universe. Finally, she was beginning to get to grips with the geography of the place – as much as she could. It was just like a huge library, with all sorts of storage units filled with all sorts of stuff, in a kind of labyrinthine layout. Occasionally, there would be a screen, upon which the Doctor assumed should be some kind of information. He found nothing, however. Lizzie, on the other hand, was just trying to take in the vast masses of stuff around her, at one point nearly falling over a hat stand, and again, nearly putting her foot through an old painting balanced carelessly up against a wardrobe. There were white goods – dishwashers, tumble dryers, washing machines. There were lanyards and keyrings and twiglets and DVD boxsets and calendars and locks and chains and maps and briefcases and drums and coathangers and engines and rulers and tissues and cable-ties and textbooks and masks and
“A chicken,” Lizzie watched as the poultry squawked and dashed in front of her. It was vaguely amusing to imagine the nightmares one could have over a chicken. The Doctor saw it dart off towards the end of the corridor, babbling away to itself, feathers flying upwards as it ran.
“People have phobias about all sorts of things,” the Doctor observed. Lizzie looked at him, and back at the chicken, and they both burst into fits of laughter.
“Come on, now. People do have nightmares about all sorts!” Lizzie scolded him, as they heard the faint cluckings of the chicken echoing in the grand hall.
“If I ever have grandchildren,” the Doctor laughed. “I’ll tell them this story. How I went to the place where all the bad dreams in the universe go. And I met a chicken.”
“It’s probably a very sad chicken...”
“Though on a serious note,” the Doctor walked over to the nearest screen. “Therefore, there must be… live exhibits.”
Lizzie shuddered to think of the sheer number of spiders they would be surrounded by.
“Map,” the Doctor told the screen, as if he were in an episode of Dora the Explorer (he’d watched the 52nd century reboot with Iris, in which Dora explored the newly discovered Herylton Cluster). The screen did nothing.
“I don’t think there’s any kind of order to this place,” Lizzie looked over his shoulder. The Doctor moved out the way so she could see the blankness of the ever-blank screens. “Maybe you just haven’t been using it properly.”
She thought about the map, hoping it would appear on screen. And low and behold, it did. The Doctor looked at her, his face the picture of confusion, despite the fact it was the exact same mechanism that worked in his TARDIS.
“Telepathy. It’s a memory graveyard,” Lizzie made it sound as if it were obvious. Suddenly, as if by magic, a map appeared on the screen. The Doctor’s face lit up, in a kind of curious way, and his gaze poured all over the new information.
“Interesting,” he admitted. “Each level is infinite. And, think it through – makes sense, the universe is infinite.”
“But there are… levels,” Lizzie saw that the schematic – it was divided into four tiers, of some kind. They were at the top.
“Yes. Question is, what’s on each level?”
He tapped the lower level on the screen – red text flashed up.
Emotion harvest.
“Ominous,” he said. He selected the other two levels – the one below them read ‘frequent’ and the third level down read ‘haunting’. “My guess,” he continued. “Is that as you progress lower down, the, I don’t know, ‘intensity’ of the memory, or dream, or fear, increases. As if it gets more specific as you go down. And 'emotion harvest'... that's the connection station. This place, it thrives on memory, and... when I developed the theory, I thought that to have something to huge and sprawling, it would have to be powered with something human.”
“Iris could be anywhere,” Lizzie observed, ignoring what he was saying about the Memory Graveyard having to be powered by something human, perhaps because she was just trying to avoid thinking of the worst possible outcome.
“I’ve placed a scan on Gallifreyan life. To be honest, I could place the scan on humanoid life in general, and I’d still get the same results. Four of us. You, me, Iris, and the Bug.”
“And... where’s Iris?” When she said it, she sort of knew what the answer was going to be, as she’d noticed that their adventures tended to form a bit of a pattern that involved them falling into as much danger as possible.
The scan completed.
“One guess…”
“‘Emotion harvest’,” Lizzie was certain.
“No surprises there…”
“The Bug is here,” she glanced at the screen. “On our level, I mean.”
“Yes. We’re going to speak to him, in a minute. Find out what he’s planning, and then we can panic. Firstly, Iris. I can rig up a communications loop with her – if we’re doing telepathy, it should be easy.”
The Doctor placed two fingers from both hands on his forehead, and Lizzie looked at him weirdly because it was, in fact, completely unnecessary (as if she were somehow the expert in telepathy).
***
“Iris!” her Dad’s voice rushed into her head. She jumped, knocking the garden table with her legs, and nearly knocking half a jug of hot chocolate into Melvyn’s lap.
“Oi, love! Nearly scolded my manhood, as it were,” he sniggered to himself, and Iris glared at him.
“Dad!” she said, aloud. “Where are you?”
“Lizzie and I have looked at the schematics – we’re on the top floor.”
“Where am I? It doesn’t look like what I’d call a floor, though,” Iris glanced around her at the truly magnificent landscape, with its golden sunsets and glittering snowflakes.
“Bottom floor,” the Doctor’s disembodied voice said. “And each level is infinite. Though we can travel through each – I would guess wherever you are is on a different… dimensional plain, or – I don’t know. The physics of this place, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me about it…”
“Anyway, don’t go anywhere.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. I’ve made a friend.”
Something changed in the Doctor’s voice. He suddenly sounded curious – if slightly worried. She wondered why – though she expected it was probably just her Dad being fatherly as to who she was mixing with.
“Who?”
When she eventually overcame her irritation that he was trying to vet her life completely, she told him.
“It’s a rabbit. And he talks.”
“Oi oi!” Melvyn called over. The Doctor did not respond to Melvyn.
“A talking rabbit? Well – nothing is impossible, as we’ve proved today. Look – Lizzie and I are going to get you. We’re keeping an eye on the Bug as well.”
“Okay… yeah. I am… slightly concerned about him.”
“He’s on our floor now. And he doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the cross-dimensional abstract memory graveyard, so he won’t be able to work out how to get down to you.”
“Stay safe, Dad.”
“I will.”
The Doctor’s disembodied voice stopped.
“Was that your dad?” Melvyn asked, not a hint of any kind of sympathy in his voice.
“Yep.”
“Sounds like a right posh-boy.”
“You’re a talking rabbit, shut up.”
***
The Doctor began rooting through the midst of stuff, as if he were looking for something.
“What are you looking for?” Lizzie asked him, wanting to help. Sometimes the Doctor would get so distracted about something, he would forget about everyone else, and just focus all of his efforts on the task at hand. Now, she could tell he was worried about Iris. Any concern for anyone else was gone – she was his priority. He was a good dad, like that. Fiercely protective of his own. She could see it, as he watched him go – he was quicker, and more agitated, desperate to find her.
“What if I can’t?” the Doctor turned to Lizzie.
“Wha – what do you mean, if you can’t?” she walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“What if I’ve lost her, Lizzie?” His voice shook, and it always hurt her when he was like this. It was like watching a parent cry – seeing somebody that should always be the one to pull things together break down was always the most difficult thing.
“You haven’t lost her. She’s here, somewhere. And we’ll get to her.”
“But if we don’t. I’d have… brought my daughter to such a dangerous place, just for a laugh. What kind of parent does that make me?”
“She’s, like… old enough to look after herself-”
“She’s not, though, she’s just a girl-”
“You’re a good dad, Doctor. Just… let her be her.”
The Doctor stood over a jumbo crate of Jaffa cakes, looking down at them with a grim affection.
Lizzie continued. “You know, you could have… run and stuff, and left her. You nearly did, but you didn’t-”
“Because you were there to stop me.”
“You wouldn’t have done, though.”
Lizzie was surprised by how sure she was, that the Doctor wouldn’t have run. But she knew, when she looked at him, that he wouldn’t, because she could see the love for his family in his eyes, and she knew he wouldn’t ever be able to bring himself to leave them. Though he liked to pretend he was all enigmatic and mysterious, he was, in fact, very easy to see through.
“I saw you three… you know, on that bus, and – you really love them, Cioné and Iris, I mean. You’d never leave them. And so… I guess I know that you’ll never leave Iris here. Because she is here, and I know we’ll find her. I know that you won’t stop until we have.”
There was silence, as he looked up, and back at her, his eyes still filled his anxiety.
“What are you looking for?” Lizzie asked him again.
“A microphone.”
She looked around briefly, and pointed to the one right by his left foot. He looked down at it, and then back up at her, and he couldn’t help but smile. And neither could he.
There was something odd, about smiling in such a place. It wasn’t as if there was anything there specifically to drag the mood down – it was all such a random collection of objects, some of which Lizzie saw and thought would make lovely furniture (she had a thing for interior designing). It was as if, at the same time, there was a constant negative energy. It was as if both her and the Doctor could feel all the sadness towards the memories, as if it were still stuck to the objects like dust, and they were inhaling it.
The Doctor had wired the vintage microphone into the screen, with a clever bit of fiddling around with the wires. He tapped it, and there was the sudden pop as the speakers burst into life. Then came a squeak, and the Doctor tested it.
“Testing, 1, 2, 3.”
No response, other than static. It echoed, though. It was as if he were talking into a microphone in some kind of valley, and it the sound was reverberating off miles of land.
“Calling the Bug…”
The static stopped. The Doctor turned to Lizzie, as if he were signifying to her that the Bug had intercepted them.
“I know you can hear me. I want to know why you’re here, and what you want with the Memory Graveyard.”
There was nothing for a few moments, but those few moments, in which the Bug was presumably deciding what he was going to say, seemed to drag on forever.
The Doctor was about to speak again, when suddenly –
“How did you find me here? Who are you?”
The Doctor was hesitant. “Intergalactic anti-terrorism. We’ve been watching you for some time.”
“Nobody watches me.”
It was just proof that the Bug had become rather accustomed to getting away with what he liked.
“We do. Sorry – your reign of terror has come to an end.”
“As if you could find me here,” the Bug hissed. It wasn’t really a hiss – his voice was deep, and reverberating, but with a sort of clicking sound running alongside it – like the scuttling of insectoid legs. “This dimension is infinite.”
“What do you want with it, then?”
Silence for a while.
“Who are you?” it repeated again. Confusion was in its voice. They could tell that the Bug had never been confronted like it before – and that it had gained no wind of who they were.
“As I said. Intergalactic anti-terrorism. We were on a stake out, we saw you, and we were concerned you’d accidentally fallen in the pond, so we just dived in to check. Turns out, there’s a whole dimension here!”
“You are contradicting yourself,” the Bug snarled.
“Which one’s true?” the Doctor winked at Lizzie, who laughed/cringed in response. “Here’s how this is going to work,” the Doctor’s voice turned serious. “You’re going to leave. Now.”
The Bug laughed, a deep, mocking laugh. “And what will you do, puny, little man? You are but a petulant snowflake, and I could crush you simply with a biology textbook on gender.”
The Doctor’s voice turned very sour, then. “I’m coming to find you.”
“I can trigger you without even needing to open my eyes. And when I set the memories here alight, I will dowse the universe in fear, and in terror. The liberal cause will lose all momentum, when I hold them to ransom against everything they fear the most.”
Lizzie sighed. Neoliberalism and the left, the right seemed to have a compulsion for getting them mixed up. Meanwhile the Doctor walked back from the screen in disgust, and took a deep breath, calming himself down.
“I will find you, and I will make sure that this is the last time you could ever threaten anyone with such an attack.”
The Doctor cut the connection. Stupid little man, Lizzie thought of the Bug.
“Lizzie,” he turned to her. “Look, I don’t want to have to ask this of you, but… I need you to go and find Iris. I’ll be here, guiding you every step of the way – but I need to stay on this floor, in case the Bug makes another move.”
He was talking as if he were trying to justify what he was saying. As if he felt he needed to justify what he was saying.
“You don’t even need to ask,” she nodded. He was gripping the edge of the screen, and his hands had turned red with the force.
“I can follow you on the screen,” the Doctor reassured her, and she nodded.
“It’s fine – we’ll find her, don’t worry.”
The Doctor was picking through a pile of cardboard boxes that contained bundles of old cables and wires and webcams and mice (mouses? Neither of them were sure what the plural was of the technological input device), and eventually, an earpiece. He tossed it to her, and she slipped it in her ear.
“Lizzie, you’re-”
She could see he felt guilty, but she understood that she had to be the one to go.
“Doctor, stop worrying about it,” she laughed. “I’m fine with going, ha ha. I love Iris and I want her to be safe too.” And she knew that she would do anything for her sister if ever she needed it
“I know, I know, and I love you for that, but – I just can’t help but feel that this should be me. I’m meant to be her father.”
“You are her father.”
“And this is my responsibility.”
“I guess – you’ve changed so much since we first met,” she said to him. He looked at her, honesty in his eyes. Sadness in his eyes, sadness like the time she had first met him. Except… unlike that time, when she had found him on her doorstep, he did not seem lost. He had found him. Iris had found him.
“I was so… empty, for so long,” the Doctor said. “And I still get like that, but you, Lizzie Darwin, save me, every time. When Iris was growing up, and I just couldn’t cope, you were always there, to help me. To look after Iris, if need be. You always listened, no matter… how stupid it was. Even now, you just listen, and usually I don’t have a clue what’s going on in your head. But all the time, I know that you, just listening to me, helps me more than I could ever know.”
She shrugged it off.
“And you shrug it off,” the Doctor said. “As if it means nothing – but it does.”
Lizzie really wanted to tell him that it meant so much, hearing him say that, but she couldn’t find the words that matched up to what she was thinking. Hearing him say that, though, meant so much to her – to know that somehow she had helped, brought her so much happiness. She smiled at him.
“Why the enigmatic smile?”
“I, er, don’t know,” she laughed. “It’s just… like, I’m so happy you think that…”
“Please don’t ever go anywhere.”
“I won’t.”
There was a period of silence, as the Doctor pressed a few buttons on the screen, and Lizzie stood loitering beside one of the bookcases. Eventually he stepped back, and walked over to Lizzie.
“It’s telepathic,” the Doctor said. “You just need to think.”
She was getting pretty scared about the place now – and about the power of thought in general. She had always been scared that bad thoughts meant that she was a bad person, and whenever something bad entered her head, she would always try as hard as possible to stop it before she properly thought of it. It sounded stupid, when explaining it out loud, because thoughts were only thoughts. But it was bad enough anyway – and even more terrifying when the realisation that those thoughts could become truths finally dawned on her.
The Doctor kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you.”
“I’ll be back in like… half an hour.”
“No, but – this isn’t something you should have to do, and you’re doing it anyway. And that means a lot.”
“Yeah, but… do you really think I’d have said no?”
She thought.
***
Lizzie opened the door. She was not sure that there was a door in front of her, and she didn’t see it or feel it in front of her. All she knew was that she opened one, to get to wherever she was now. And she remembered putting her hand on a freezing cold handle – it was not a door that had been opened in a very long time. But it opened well, with an ease indicating that the door had been well designed. And when it did swing open, she realised that she was standing in some metal box, like a lift of some kind. Except there were no buttons on the walls or anything – she had thought her way down here.
As soon as the door opened, however, one of the first things she noticed was the silence. Not that it was any more silent than the previous floor – apart from the fact there was no conversation between the Doctor, Lizzie, or any intergalactic space terrorists. Bar said conversations, there hadn’t been any noise at all. Though, in a very strange way, it had felt as if the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ had somehow led to the feeling that there was some kind of constant sound. Relics of so many bright and noisy lives all laid to rest in the same room, providing a soundtrack to silence. The same went for the light as well – it felt darker. Ahead of her, she saw the corridor she was to walk down.
And so she started walking.
And nothing happened.
She was more surprised at the absence of anything than she would’ve been had a monster or a villain jumped out to try and scare her. She was more scared of nothing than she was of stuff. Progress, she thought to herself – before she’d started travelling with the Doctor, she’d been scared of nothing and stuff. She had since learned the benefits and drawbacks to both. When there was nothing, there was room for ‘thing’. But there was also loneliness, and a lack of any hope at all. When there was stuff, there was familiarity – but also the fear that stuff could be holding something so dark and terrifying. Basically, she’d been scared of everything, and had loathed herself for it, and had ridiculed herself, and laughed at herself, and she still spent most of her time doing it anyway. She was, at least, distracted, as she watched the end of the corridor ahead of her, stepping, one step at a time.
As she went, she wondered what emotion harvesting meant. The whole place was sort of one huge crop of emotion. She theorised that, perhaps, emotion harvesting meant ‘raw emotions’, as if one could see sadness or joy or emptiness and could net it and bottle it up. Perhaps that was what the Doctor had meant, when he spoke about the human component... a human mind, powerful enough to harvest emotions. She thought about who had built the place – because who would build a place like this? Unless it was naturally occurring, or something, but that seemed even more unlikely – as if the universe just plucked random things out of space and time for the sake of it. Still. It had proved itself pretty good at doing that anyway.
Emotion farmers. But why? Lizzie often found herself asking why. She was a naturally inquisitive person, and was always looking for some kind of deeper meaning in things. She read way too much into things, which sometimes was good – she saw what people missed. But it reduced her to a socially awkward ruin who was always worried that she’d upset someone or that something she’d done wasn’t good enough or was awful. Paradoxical emotions. There didn’t seem to be much deep meaning here, though. It was bad things. If something bad touched someone, it would go here. It was simple. Maybe there was a meaning, but it was so hidden that she was missing it. Perhaps it was completely obvious, and just going over her head. She sighed, and kept on going. There was another door at the end of the corridor – she was nearing it now.
Her mind was driving her crazy. Sometimes it would go into overdrive, when there were to many stimuli surrounding her, it was like she couldn’t cope and just went into shut down. Everything was felt so deeply, that eventually, the feeling got too much.
And she would become numb.
She told herself to shut up, over and over again. But all the time, the constant feeling that the place didn’t make sense, constantly nagging at her. It wasn’t even on a scientific level – the Doctor talked about it like that, and so had Iris. But Lizzie saw something else wrong with it, in a completely different way. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle, but with one, lone, piece missing. A piece right in the middle, the one that brings the whole picture together.
For some reason, it had been linked to her home. To her den, to her escape. But why? Why, why, why? It made no sense. No sense, no sense, nonsense, nonsense,
Nonsense.
She was at the end of the corridor now. She thought. The door opened, as expected.
“Lizzie?”
She wasn’t hearing voices in her head, was she? It felt as if everything was falling apart, and for the briefest of seconds, she panicked.
“Iris?” she realised who the voice was. Telepathy. Of course. She’d said it over and over to herself, how simple it was. She’d told the Doctor how simple it was.
“How’s tricks?” Iris asked, as Lizzie stepped into the next corridor. It was wider than the previous – by quite a margin. More like an atrium of some kind, perhaps. Again, there was nothing there. Now that she could hear Iris, the silence was not quite as bugging. But still she could feel it.
“Weird…” Lizzie continued. “I’m on your level. And there’s nothing…”
“Nothing?”
“It’s just corridors and halls and stuff. And that’s it…” she was hesitant about being so sure about it being ‘it’, because it very rarely was ‘it’.
“Somewhere there’ll be a door that’ll take you outside.”
Lizzie stopped walking. “You’re outside?”
“… yeah?”
She looked around at the corridors. It all seemed too dark and too claustrophobic for an outside to even exist in wherever they were.
“No, it’s fine,” Lizzie started walking again, forgetting about it. “Everything in here just feels so manmade, that’s all. The idea of an outside just feels… different.”
“There’s fields for as far as I can see.”
“But you can’t see any buildings?” Lizzie asked.
“Nope.”
Bit of a trek, then.
“It’s fine, though,” Iris was laughing. “I’ve met someone.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Melvyn. He’s a talking rabbit. I’ve turned straight.”
“All it took was an anthropomorphic rabbit…”
“He’s like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, except he speaks in a cockney accent, and he’s a chauvinist pig.”
Lizzie loved that book. A little girl who got taken to some strange and magical land. “I love that book…”
“So do I. It’s one of my favourites. Honestly, Lizzie, it’s just… stunning here. The sun is setting, and I can see the stars in the sky. Daaaamn gurl. Bring me my telescope.”
Lizzie was reminded of how different the two of them were. Lizzie saw sunsets and saw beauty, but she saw it through colour and emotion and poetry, and words and song lyrics that all seemed to come at once. Iris saw beauty as well – but saw it through science. That somehow, the great clock that was the universe, had aligned its hands at that precise moment, leading to a great explosion of burning light in the sky – and the fact that the chances of her being there at those exact moments must be so, so tiny, that became beautiful as well.
I’d love to be out there, Lizzie thought.
“Yeah,” Iris nodded. “You would. It’s very ‘you’.”
Lizzie stopped when she realised that Iris had somehow heard that. Then she remembered. Telepathy. And then she realised that Iris could hear –
“Yes, Lizzie. I can hear everything. Well, I don’t know if ‘hear’ is the right word. I can sense it, I can… see it. Science just isn’t working for me right now and it’s messing with my head.”
She stepped back against the wall, her head flopping backwards in embarrassment.
“Why are you embarrassed?” Iris asked.
“Wouldn’t you be, if somebody could read your thoughts?” Lizzie was surprised. She kept all sorts of stuff in her head, and this idea that somebody could hear it was like realising that somebody was filming you constantly in your own house. Except… worse. They were her thoughts, hers to hold onto and nobody else’s. There was stuff she needed to tell people, for sure. But she would do that in her own time.
“… nope, not really. If they want lesbian porn and reruns of House, then that’s up to them.”
Lizzie smiled and kept on walking. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Look, big sis. Your mind is amazing. And I knew that cause you’re such a closeted gal you’d shut it off as soon as I told you.”
You can’t shut off thoughts…
“No, but you can try and think about other things,” Iris heard her think. Lizzie sighed again, and tried to close off her mind, as Iris had said. “See!” Iris cried. “You’re doing it! Shutting up. Please don’t.”
“I don’t like you nosing in my head…”
“Okay – it’s up to you. Your thoughts, you get to choose. But seriously – you’ve got so much to say,” Iris’ voice was reassuring. She was not malicious at all – she was so chilled out, all the time. Lizzie envied her for that. “Honestly,” Iris continued. “All those thoughts that you always say ‘uhhh I can’t find words for them’. They’re amazing thoughts. Scary sometimes. Sometimes hilarious. You’re quite funny, actually. And so clever. But you won’t do anything about it cause you’re a piece of anxious trash.”
“This is true,” Lizzie agreed. It was reassuring, the more she thought about it. And the more she thought about it, the more reassured she became, as she became more aware that Iris was seeing more and more of her thoughts. “Fine. Go on, have a look through.”
For so many years, there had been thoughts that she hadn’t been able to find words for, and finally, she didn’t have to. She could communicate them to someone, so somebody could understand her for how she wanted to be understood. It was like talking to someone about all the problems she’d faced over the years, without even needing to talk about them. There was just somebody there to understand. “Like… I don’t know.”
“Oh my god Liiiiizzz. Why don’t you tell anyone about this stuff…”
“Because I don’t think...,” she sighed when she realised that she could conduct this entire conversation in her head without even needing to open her mouth. “I don’t think people want to know. And well… um, they really don’t need to listen to me… whining.”
“You need to whine! Whining is good, whine to me, please.”
“You don’t want to hear about… me, and the weird stuff in my head –”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do!” Iris insisted.
“I’m nearly at the next door,” Lizzie changed the subject.
“I can literally see you changing the subject!”
She thought about something else. Maggie. Maggie was a good place to start – one day it’d be hilarious if she came on the TARDIS, and they went travelling, or something. It’d probably be all bloody this and bloody that, but it’d be a laugh.
“Who’s Maggie?”
“My support worker,” Lizzie didn’t even try and fight the fact that she was thinking.
“But you left care years ago?”
“Yeah but... as you said. Anxious trash here.”
***
Iris took a sip from her hot chocolate, having poured herself another – she was on glass number three now. The jug seemed to be bigger on the inside, for there was a seemingly infinite supply of hot chocolate. Melvyn had long grown bored and was mucking about with some kind of intergalactic Tinder on his phone.
“Jesus! That tail…”
Iris had overheard all sorts of vile comments from Melvyn in the last half an hour.
“Sorry,” she said to Lizzie. “He’s a bit of a – anyway.”
“Oi!” Melvyn looked up. “I’ll have you know I’m the one who’s looking out for you! So button it!”
Iris giggled, and sat back, sipping her hot chocolate, and listening in to Lizzie’s thoughts. She found herself so concerned for the girl that was like a sister to her. She wondered what it would be like if everyone could hear the thoughts of everyone else, whether it would be so much better, or so much worse. It was spooky, though – seeing the contents of someone’s thoughts, as if they were box, and you could simply search through its contents.
There was something beautiful in the way that life worked. How trillions of cells could somehow come together and build such a complex and magnificent thing capable of something so much more than the simple cell that it had come from. People often stereotyped scientists for being cold and distant and detached people, but Iris saw more beauty in science than anything else. The way that random bits of simplicity that had nothing to do with each other could somehow work in unison and harmony meant more to her than anything else. Sometimes, she didn’t even need to be especially curious – she could just sit, and watch, a scene. Lizzie once told her how she did the same – but, of course, for different reasons. No… Iris liked to watch for the science. For all the hearts beating at once, supporting everything, keeping life pumping through, keeping it fuelled and always ready to go. The way engines roared from a simple spark of light, and brought light and motion to the universe. She would sit and watch a city, life bleeding through it, and think that it all came from a few scientific scribbles on a bit of paper.
Simplicity becoming so much more.
She was so similar to Lizzie, and yet so different at the same time. That’s why she always called Lizzie her sister – because that’s what siblings were. People that are so close, but so different, and best friends as well.
It only then dawned on her that Melvyn had stopped making sanctimonious and vaguely sexist remarks.
She looked over, and the rabbit was gone.
“Melvyn?” she called. “Melvyn?!”
“Is this… the rabbit?” Lizzie said, telepathically.
“He’s gone… just vanished.”
As she looked around her, she knew that – well, she didn’t know anything. By all logic, he should be within sight – the fields stretched for miles around, and she could see for a great distance. A rabbit dressed like Melvyn would stick out from quite a distance as well.
“He was stupid, but… he was company.”
Iris suddenly felt very alone, sat in the middle of the fields stretching on for as far as her eyes could see. And suddenly, there was a chill in the air. She looked down, and her hot chocolate didn’t seem quite as appealing as it had done a few seconds ago. Iris pulled her jacket, trying to block out the chill, but it was as if it reached further than that, and pulling her jacket made no difference at all. Something had changed – it was something very minor, but it had made the once-beautiful landscape turn into something so much… eerier.
“Lizzie…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t. Are you alright?”
“Mmhmm,” Iris murmured, glancing around her. She was not just ‘mmhmm’, she was a lot more scared than that. Rationally, there was very little to be scared of. If anything did come to get her, she’d be able to spot it from ages away. However, she had already established that wherever she was, it had very little compliance with science, and so was not willing to leave it to chance. “Logically, there’s nothing to be scared of. But I can just feel it…”
Story of my life, she heard Lizzie thought.
“You feel everything so… goddam deeply…,” Iris muttered, in a way slightly envious, and also in a way slightly glad, that she didn’t feel like Lizzie did. Iris looked up, and the stars in the sky were gone. “I’ve just realised why I’ve been confused, right from the start.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t mean anything, now I think about it. But I just suddenly realised, that the stars in the sky were completely different to anything I’ve seen before.”
“This place is… well… completely different, I guess…”
“Yes. A whole new dimension, supposedly. Physics-defying, according to Melvyn. Damn, I already miss his woman-hating white fluffy arse. Point is – the stars that didn’t make any sense have gone.”
Do stars do that? She heard Lizzie think. I’ve spent so long looking at stars, and I’ve never seen them do that – not nearly as long as Iris, though’.
“No, stars don’t do that,” Iris zipped up her jacket. “And it’s…”
The lights went out.
***
Again, another corridor. This one was thinner, a bit like the first one. Lizzie felt as if she was getting closer to something – as she walked, there was a deep, reverberating pulse, somewhere inside her. It was as if somehow, her heart was being pulled towards something. Her occasionally-superstitious streak bleeding through, she wondered if it was some kind of sign…
“Lizzie, okay, I know I asked before, but please, don’t go anywhere. At all.”
The words were quick, and desperate. Iris was scared. Terrified. She was not a good liar, and when Lizzie heard the fear, her pace increased.
“What’s happened, Iris?”
“It’s dark.”
“Okay… I don’t think I’m far away now.”
“Please, Lizzie, you have to – have to –”
Iris’ voice was rushing, and Lizzie could hear her breathing – it was as if she was clawing for air that just kept scrabbling away from her. It reminded Lizzie of panic attacks from days-gone-by: and so she ran, now, through the narrow corridor. The fear of absence that had once spooked her no longer bothered her – she just had to get to Iris, wherever she was, no matter what she would have to go through.
They were like family.
They were family.
It was then that Lizzie fully grasped it – they didn’t just bear similarities to siblings – they were siblings. Blood related they may not be, but the desperation that Lizzie had to find Iris was reminiscent of nothing she had ever felt before – and she knew, from that moment, that they were siblings.
“I can’t see anything,” Iris wept. “Please, Lizzie, please, please, just –”
The door was ahead of her – Lizzie was getting closer. She knew – she felt the internal reverberance of all the pain and suffering and phobias and fears and dreams, all beating inside her at once, as if they were the blood pumping through her, and as if her heart was beating for all of these things at once.
The door grew closer.
It was almost unbearable now, all of it running through her. But she couldn’t stop – she could hear Iris’ voice, the fear and the tears, all at once. Everything she felt, physically, did not matter, because at that moment, she was beyond any of that. Lizzie had once been a terrified little girl – and she remembered Iris, when she was so small. As she listened to the Doctor’s daughter weep – to her sister weep – she was just remembered of those days.
And so she ran.
And she reached the door.
She pushed it open, and stepped into a room.
What she saw changed everything.
***
Now, she stood in a hall. It was quite sizeable, but empty, bar another door at the end. Except, the other door at the end was like that of a portcullis – grandiose, and powerful, and definitely intended for keeping things in, or keeping things out. Lizzie was not sure which. The reverberations died down – she didn’t feel the same pressure forcing her heart as she did before. However – it was still there, pulsing away, somewhere, hidden away. There was something drawing her to that door. She wanted to know what was inside – she had to know what was inside. Humans were naturally curious animals, and all her instincts were clawing towards the great door.
She remembered reading once that human instinct was almost impossible to overrule. She’d always thought that if that were the case, then it would be possible to somehow overrule it with an instinct that was more powerful.
Her theory was proven, as her desire to see what was on the other side of this great, opaque portcullis was usurped.
Iris was slumped in the middle of the hall. It all looked so impossible – because in the mass of cold, grey walls and floors, and in front of this huge great door, beyond which Lizzie knew lay something powerful, there was the simple, lying body of a girl. She was vulnerable – like the little girl that so many years ago (so many days ago for Lizzie), she had held, when she was just a new-born baby. Juxtaposed against death and badness and sadness, the girl looked even more alive than she had done, even when she was consciousness.
Iris looked even more alive.
Everything down to the clothes she wore, and her silky, flowing brunette hair, was contrasted against all this emptiness. It was unbearable.
“Iris? Can you – can you still hear me?”
“Yes? Lizzie, please don’t go anywhere. It’s all gone dark, I, I can’t see. Please.”
Iris relied on science, and that logic was gone. Any concept of understanding could not be found for her – Iris had said that to her once. That she found beauty in the randomness of science, and somehow finding some explanation to that randomness. But they had been thrown into a land where there was no such explanation, where the rules of the universe did not apply. This was a land of emotion, a land of people, captured at single moments. Memories, in single moments.
And science didn’t work in memories.
“Doctor,” Lizzie put a finger to her earpiece. She’d expected to need the Doctor, for… moral support, or something, as she traversed down to the bottom of the graveyard.
She did not think she would have to tell him this.
“Lizzie?” his voice came back through.
She tried to find the words – but she didn’t know what they were. She was alive – Lizzie had checked her pulse. But she was unconscious. But she was still thinking. Still hearing. Still feeling. She could, somehow, see into Lizzie’s thoughts. But she was not awake, she was asleep. It was like Iris was trapped inside her own head. There was that thing – locked-in syndrome. Quite a chilling idea – that one could not undertake any kind of human action, and yet still be thinking, constantly, all the time.
“Lizzie, what is it? Is it Iris, is she alright?”
Lizzie still didn’t say anything.
“Lizzie!” his voice was getting more and more urgent. She’d have to say something. “Lizzie! Please, what is it? Lizzie!”
She eventually replied.
“You need to come down here.”
“What’s happened? Is Iris okay?”
“I – I don’t know. She’s still… alive, in some way or another,” Lizzie could still hear Iris pleading with her, in her ear, as they were still communicating telepathically. “I’ve been talking to her. But she’s in this… huge room, just lying there, in the middle of the floor, and she’s not responding to anything.”
The Doctor’s silence indicated his bemusement.
“Right… I’m coming down.”
***
Via a quick bit of techno-babbling, the Doctor had shown Lizzie how to set up a teleport link between the two of them, making use of Lizzie’s earpiece. Before long, he appeared in front of her, and dashed straight over to his daughter.
“Oh… this was a stupid, stupid idea,” he picked her up, cradling her in her arms, just as he’d done when she was small. “Iris, please. Please, come back.”
There was no response.
“Iris? Your dad is here…,” Lizzie was still talking to her telepathically.
“Please, Lizzie,” Iris’ voice came through. “Tell him to actually do something useful for once.”
“Iris?” the Doctor said, even though he knew it was a telepathic link. “It’s like… like she’s created some sort of dream state for herself.”
It made sense. The planet thing, with the bright orange skies, and the stars. Gallifrey had a burned orange sky, and Iris had always loved the science behind the stars. And Melvyn the White Rabbit – Alice in Wonderland was Iris’ favourite book. She’d been inside her own memories. As if she was inside an account of her own life.
The Doctor knew what he had to do.
Still holding Iris in his arms, he placed two fingers on her forehead.
“What are you going to do?” Lizzie asked him. Bring her back?
“Exactly what you did,” the Doctor smiled up at her, and then looked down at his daughter. “Except… I’m going to go one step further.”
The Doctor, just like that, fell asleep.
***
Iris looked up, at the small light ahead of her.
There was a light switch, floating in thin air – a domestic sort of switch, found in houses. Nothing fancy – apart from the obvious fact it was just… there. Not attached to any electrics, not mounted to any walls – just a switch.
And Dad, standing next to it.
“Dad!” Iris jumped up from the garden chair and ran over to her.
“Happy birthday,” the Doctor kissed her, and took out a box with a felt cover. He presented it to his daughter.
“It’s… not my birthday,” she took it from him.
“We don’t exist! It can be what we want it to be! Now go on! Open it…”
Iris grinned up at him – always bending the laws of time and space and science in general, just to get his own way. She sighed, and opened the box. Inside, was a bracelet; a metal band, with little silver animals attached with little tiny, loops and hooks. There was an elephant, a giraffe, a cat – a few alien species. An owl, and a tiny little grasshopper.
“It’s… beautiful,” she slipped it on.
“It’s a cop-out, really,” the Doctor sighed. “Mum and I have been making it for you, ever since you were tiny. One charm a decade. We planned to give it to you for your next birthday, but I thought, there’s no time like the present. Geddit?”
Iris laughed in the way that one does when a joke is so horrendously bad it’s kind of amusing. The sort of laugh that practically goes in a buy-one-get-one-free bundle with Dad jokes. She kissed him, and stood back, pointing to the table. “Fancy a hot chocolate?”
“Oh, yes please. I’m parched,” he took a seat opposite her, and she poured it for him, from the glass jug. When he took a sip, he instantly relaxed. “This is amazing.”
“Yep.”
“You clearly invented good hot chocolate in your dream world.”
Iris stopped dead. “What?”
“You’re in your memories, Iris.”
“Impossible. I can’t be in my memories.”
“You are.”
“I’m not!”
This bickering was, clearly, going to last for a very long time, if one of them didn’t put a stop to it. They had often bickered – in a kind of jokey way. ‘Banter’, Iris had said once. When the Doctor used the same word, Iris had said something about her needing to regenerate to forget that he’d ever said it.
“Iris, you met a talking rabbit.”
“Who says rabbits can’t talk?” she couldn’t believe she was defending Melvyn.
“You. Remember the biology assignment when you started at the academy?”
“The biology assignment? As in the reason that I gave up biology? Yeah, I do, funnily enough.”
“Why did you do that?” the Doctor asked, out of sheer curiosity, despite the fact he was fine with her decision. Iris sighed, again, fed up that the Doctor seemed desperate to pick through the bones of every decision she ever made. She would, for once in her life, like to be able to make a decision and live with the consequences, whether they be good or bad.
“Because biology is impossible when we live in an ever growing, ever evolving universe such as our own. Which is why talking rabbits exist. Physics stays put. Unless you end up here.”
“Think about doughnuts.”
“I’m sorry?”
The Doctor was reminded of a trip they’d been on, years and years ago, when Iris was still young. The largest doughnut farm in the quadrant – Iris had loved it. Children loved doughnuts, though. Especially Iris – but she’d always had a sweet tooth.
Suddenly, a plate of warm, just-out-of-the-oven doughnuts, popped up in front of Iris, on the garden table.
“That was a coincidence,” Iris shrugged it off, taking a doughnut, because even if they were fictitious, they still tasted really good. “You must’ve picked doughnuts because you knew that would happen.”
“Go on then,” the Doctor sat back. Iris offered him a doughnut, and he took it. The great thing about the dream world was that they could eat as much as they wanted and wouldn’t leave with even the slightest risk of diabetes. “You think of something – and it will appear.”
Iris sighed a teenager-y sigh.
“Fine. I’m going to think about… ooh. I know!”
Iris closed her eyes, as if she were really trying to think. The Doctor laughed to himself because it would have no bearing on the situation at all, and she just looked a bit stupid.
Then, in front of her, buzzing around in front of her eyes, was a tiny, glowing insect. It glowed a bright light – the light being a colour neither of them had seen before. The Doctor blinked – it was impossible.
“What...?” he looked at the insect, as it buzzed around Iris and her hair. Iris looked up at it – it was almost butterfly like.
It was beautiful.
As the Doctor had already realised, it was a new colour. One cannot possibly comprehend what a new colour looks like, because the only colours that can possibly exist are those colours in the light spectrum that we all see day in, day out. But somehow, as they were in this strange place where science did not apply, there was a colour, that lay outside of all the other colours. Such a colour would be impossible to describe, as when describing something, you usually have to be able to compare it to something. As this colour was something brand new, there was nothing to compare it to – apart from the fact it was different.
“You told me to imagine something… so I imagined something impossible,” Iris laughed, playing with the butterfly-like insect in her hair.
“What did you imagine?” the Doctor admired it.
“I imagined a glowfly. But, a glowfly that glowed a brand-new colour. You know, Dad, I take it back. I’m in my memories. Now, have you got a thin bit of card?”
The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrunched-up bit of paper. He tossed it over to her, and she unfolded it, keeping it ready over the top of one of the glasses.
“What are you trying to do?” the Doctor asked. Iris stood up, as if she were in battle position. The glass was ready, the paper was ready.
“Well – if I’ve imagined a completely unique glowfly, I can’t let it go without letting Mum at least see it.”
The glowfly darted to her left, and Iris dived with the glass, trying to scoop it up with the glass. She missed, flying forwards, and the glowfly buzzed back around the back of her head. She waited, in a cat-like position, for the glowfly to buzz around again. She swung around, glass in hand, and in one swift motion, she caught it. Sticking the paper to the glass with some sticky tape she’d ‘thought’ out of thin air, she sat down, poked some airholes in the paper, and sat opposite her father.
“Iris,” the Doctor started, but she interrupted him.
“Dad, please let’s not do sentimentality, it irritates me.”
“No – listen, please.”
“Iris, I shouldn’t have brought you here. I’m a… reckless and irresponsible father.”
“Cool, apology accepted, let’s go.”
She looked up at the Doctor, who was looking… rather annoyed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Why are you always trying to… push me away?”
“I’m not!” Iris protested, but the Doctor wasn’t going to stop.
“Anything I do, anything I say, you just don’t care.”
“I’m just not a very… touchy-feely person,” Iris sat back, resigning herself to the fact she wouldn’t be going anywhere until they talked. She maintained that, though. Touchy-feely, far from it, she did not like being the centre of attention. Hence why she had decided to rifle through Lizzie’s memories, so Lizzie could be the protagonist and so she could sit on the sidelines being sarcastic and fun. No talking about herself, she could just… enjoy being there. Which is why whenever anyone suggested talking about herself, Iris wanted to up sticks and go as far away as possible. As did Lizzie, come to think of it, as she had seen when poking around in her head. But it would’ve been a rather uninteresting journey had none of them had any inclination to talk about anything that went on in any of their lives. Or at least, it would’ve been had Lizzie been the one doing the rifling. After all, as Iris and her darling sister used to joke, Lizzie did not speak. She merely stood awkwardy.
“I know,” the Doctor understood her. “But – sometimes it’d be nice to have a flicker of… some kind of… understanding, that we are actually. You know – related. Instead you just... hide behind jokes.”
“And I wonder where I get the bad jokes from. But anyway - I am actually my own person as well, Dad.”
“I’m not saying you’re not, and I understand, but –”
Iris knew that he did not understand. Nobody ever wondered what it would be like to have the Doctor as a parent. After all – he had a universal reputation. A reputation for all sorts. She often wondered whether it was okay that she tried to divorce herself from that reputation as much as possible. She didn’t dare tell him that it scared her, sometimes. That he scared her. When you hear stories of your father doing such impossible thing, it would be very hard not to be terrified.
In fact – she did not care about that stuff. He was her Dad – but what she wanted more than anything was for her to be her. For the way she lived to be fully, completely, the way that she wanted to live, and not the way her parents decided to dictate how she should live. She wanted to be Iris, not just a product of her parents, as much as she adored them. Iris.
“You don’t though,” she admitted. “Look – I love you, Dad. Like, super amazeballs so much. Okay? But you’ve got no idea what it’s like being me. I’m trying to live my life, and that’s really, really hard to do when you’re my Dad.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the Doctor!” She stopped, when she realised she was crying. And then she started again. “You’re – you’re the Doctor. You save planets, you save people. You make mistakes. You basically started the Time War, you defeated God. And look, right now, we came here on some kind of adrenaline-driven quest to find an intergalactic terrorist.”
The Doctor stared at the ground, as if finally, somebody had caught him out.
“And,” Iris continued. “I know you’ve always said, and that Mum has always said, that I don’t need to worry about. But people do actually know who I am, funnily enough. And they know who you are. And sometimes, just sometimes, they say things. Things about the Time War, and how you started it. And I know that what they say means nothing, but they say it because of me. And… I don’t want to be that person.”
The Doctor was looking for some words to say, but he couldn’t find any. “I’m – I’m sorry,” was all he could manage.
“It isn’t your fault,” Iris said. “It’s not even specifically you, being a kind of fairytale character – I’d want this no matter who you were. For me to be me. You can’t help it – and I can’t help it. I just… I just wanna be the sassy, gayer than heck gal that I am.”
“And you can be.”
“Sorry… it just… scares me, sometimes.”
The Doctor got off his chair, and walked over to her. She stood up, and he hugged her.
“Don’t be scared,” he whispered. “You don’t need to be.”
“I know – but I am, occasionally. Terrified. Cause you, you have so many enemies. And have done so many amazing things. And, I’m scared of your enemies, and I live in the shadow of those things. But I don’t want to.”
“Iris, please, understand this. You don’t have to live in my shadow, ever. You are your own person, you are you. Irisesisoculiesus. Be her. Embrace her.”
“Why’d you have to give me such a stupid full name…”
“Because Mum wanted to enact some of the same pain she suffered on to you.”
Iris laughed, and the Doctor laughed as well. It would take a while, for Iris to feel… better. But at least she was reassured now, by her Dad, that she could be herself, and not what anyone expected her to be. That meant a lot to her, even if she wouldn’t convey it (due to her utter detestation of sentimentality).
“Can we stay? For like… half an hour?”
The Doctor suddenly realised that Iris was holding a telescope and a notepad.
“I want to see some of the stars here… because… I didn’t recognise them.”
The Doctor glanced at his watch, before remembering that time didn’t matter here. They could be back at the Memory Graveyard just after they’d left, if they wanted to.
“Of course,” the Doctor placed a hand on her shoulder.
Iris grabbed a chair from the garden table, and dragged it over to the edge of the hill. She set up the telescope, and sat behind it. The Doctor grabbed the other chair, and joined her. Iris was silent for a minute or two, as she studied the stars above her.
“That’s why I didn’t recognise them…”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a… greatest hits compilation.”
“… what?”
Iris recognised all of the star systems now. She just didn’t recognise them all jumbled up together. They were all star systems that she’d viewed before – and these were all of her favourites. Those that somehow, because of completely random instances, had ended up more beautiful than the others. Science was random – a certain degree of randomness, combined with a certain degree of deep complexity and accuracy. And sometimes, science couldn't explain any of it - sometimes, things were just unexplainable - but so magic.
And when those things came together, they formed something impossibly stunning - Iris, seeing those stars.
But it all hinged on that random moment.
Life kind of did that as well, though.
***
“Please… let me sleep for longer.”
Lizzie was sat beside them, when Iris and the Doctor began to wake up. They looked surprisingly alike, for some reason – now more than ever before.
“Oh… erm, hey,” Lizzie said to Iris. “You alright?”
“Probably. Pfft, what do I know. Yeah, I think so,” Iris laughed, and hugged Lizzie. The Doctor was awake as well, and Lizzie smiled at him. She saw how relieved he was that Iris was okay. In fact – he seemed better than he’d done before – even before Iris had disappeared.
“Now,” the Doctor walked over to a screen on the far wall. “To business.”
Both Lizzie and Iris, in their sisterly moments of blissful reunion, had forgotten about the Bug – the intergalactic space terrorist that was, somewhere not too far away from them, on the rampage. They walked over to the Doctor, who was attaching some… USB thing to the monitor.
“When Lizzie came to find you, Iris, I did some digging. And, it turns out that there’s a lot of documentation here, regarding the Bug’s actions. Think about it – a terrorist that’s taken thousands of lives, all over the universe. Somewhere, something to do with it was obviously going to end up –”
Then the door at the side of the room opened – not the big portcullis one, but the other, smaller one, from which Lizzie had entered earlier.
It was the first time than any of them had seen the Bug in person. His image was renown across the universe, of course, having appeared on news articles for the past whoever-knows how many years. The armour he wore was like a reinforced skin, protecting him from explosions and gunfire. A teleportation device was embedded into his wrist, so he could instantly escape from the scene of the attack. Great wings were attached to his back – moth-like wings, so he could fly away from the great fires he started.
When the Doctor, Lizzie, and Iris saw it, they became locked in a Western-esque visual standoff, as the three of them moved towards the centre of the room. Then, eventually the Bug spoke.
“So – you are the petulant man I have spoken with… and who are these… girls?”
“Ah, Bug. Pleasure – this is Lizzie, my best friend, and this is Iris, my daughter. I wouldn’t get on the wrong side of them – they’re both rather clever.”
“One never heard of a woman with any rationality or logic at all,” the Bug laughed to itself, and Lizzie had to grab Iris’ hand to prevent her from dashing over to the Bug and tearing it apart limb from limb. “You will move, you disgusting worms. Give me access to the Emotion Harvest –”
So this was the harvest, Lizzie glanced at the door behind her. She assumed that’s why she’d been so drawn to it before.
“So you can do what?” the Doctor asked.
The Bug sniggered to itself. “So I can shroud the universe in a veil of ultimate fear and terror.”
“What do you think, Ladies? I mean… I’m not sure, myself.”
“Ha ha,” Iris laughed sarcastically. “Nope. Me neither.”
“Nor me,” Lizzie muttered awkwardly. She hated drama at school, and it just so happened that before the Doctor was about to be really clever he liked to show off a bit. She smiled, however, because she knew that the really clever bit was coming.
“You thrive on the fact that the media and the government do, well, basically nothing, to stop your attacks,” the Doctor explained. “They don’t, because you’re – well, a human white male – and we all know that white men are incapable of doing such things as – well…”
“Hanging gay people from gateposts?” Iris suggested.
“Exactly,” the Doctor gave his daughter a mocking pat on the back. “And burning Zygons at the stake. And setting fire to spaceships from the other clusters. My point is, everything you do, it’s ignored, firstly by the government, and secondly, by the media.”
“Because they know the people see my way is correct! Your liberal culture is dead, little man! Nobody supports it anymore. You are the minority.”
“Er – don’t think so.”
“The left are failures! You cannot win! Everyone despises this way of thinking, sick of having their mouths bound and their free speech silenced by political correctness. They are sick of having your agendas shoved down their throats, day in, and day out –”
“Our agendas shoved down their throats?”
“They tire of it! And they tire of you.”
“Do they?” the Doctor nodded, his face grim. “Well… look. How about a game?”
Lizzie looked back at the screen, the one he’d been fiddling with earlier. And she saw some letters. She realised exactly what the Doctor was doing.
And it was really clever.
The Bug nodded in agreement to the Doctor’s suggestion.
“I broadcast the full extent of your crimes all over the universe. Everything you’ve done, everything the governments and the media keep quiet about, everything that the normal people don’t know about. And if there’s not any backlash? Then okay. Fine. You win. And for good measure, you can blow this place up.”
In any normal situation, Lizzie would be concerned – the Doctor was banking quite a lot on there being a backlash. She was concerned anyway – what if people didn’t care? Where would they be then? Though, she remembered, the Doctor had faith in people. If he didn’t – he wouldn’t do this.
The Bug resisted. He was hesitant. If it was possible to see concern in those great, bulbous, insectoid eyes, it would be burning. It wasn’t sure if the game was up. So it stayed quiet, thinking of its next move. Because it seemed to believe that it did have time for a next move.
“Did I mention?”
The Doctor’s lips curled up into a smile.
“The game isn’t optional.”
Lizzie looked back over at the screen, to see what the words said then.
UPLOAD COMPLETE.
BROADCASTING.
The Bug roared.
***
The true extent of what was buried in the Memory Graveyard was huge. Due to the Bug’s almighty repertoire of terror attacks over the millennia, there was huge amounts of evidence against it. News reports, of course – but governmental reports as well. Reports that told the story the governments and the media tried to keep hidden. And there was home footage as well – footage of corpses missing faces and fingers. Broken bodies beneath old buildings. There were transcripts of interviews with police officers, with anti-terror units, interviewing survivors of disgusting, brutal culls of humanity.
And then came the phone calls. Phone calls between loved ones, the last phone calls people had made to the people they loved most of all – often nothing to do with the attacks themselves, often musing on what they were to eat for dinner – but those were the last calls that had been made. And there were voicemails too, like a footprint on the world that would be treasured forever. Emails, text messages, birthday cards and half-filled-in forms. Streaming from the Memory Graveyard came the grief from people who had lost their dearest – an infinitesimal tsunami cascading over the universe, alongside the sheer potential of the lost, and the energy of the days that never came, the days that should’ve been shared between lovers, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. Nieces and nephews and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. All of it burned with a solemn ferocity.
It was, within those few seconds, that some of the greatest atrocities ever committed, and the pain that came with them, was broadcasted to every screen, all over the universe, at exactly the same moment. Simultaneous viewing, of the Bug, and the governments and the media that had supressed the true nature of his crimes.
In the great glass spires of the ShadowStar spaceship, sat in her office, observing a majestic, burning star, Elle Mthembu was told to turn on the news. There was no other information – no indication as to what she would be witnessing when she did. She wasn’t in the mood – it had been a long day. The Doctor had just… disappeared, with no suggestion as to where he would be going. Information was still becoming available of the Bug’s next strike. She hadn’t slept in days, and just wanted to get some rest – but work needed to be done. She typed the last few sentences of her report, and then turned on the television at the far end of the room.
When she did, she smiled, and cheered (quietly, to herself – she couldn’t have any of her employees thinking she was having too much fun).
She grimaced as well – there were images visible that she’d only seen after hacking news archives and government systems. Gory pictures that were always kept hidden. There were images on the screen that truly portrayed the hatred and violence and suffering that the Bug had committed itself to over the centuries. Elle saw clips from the Dugilbih Massacres, and the Suffocations on the Hill of Blades, and more, and more. It was then, as she heard the final goodbye between a husband and a wife, that she placed a hand to her cheek, and realised that she was crying.
She knew, as well, that finally, they had him.
Meanwhile, in the heart of some strange dimension that didn’t really exist, the Doctor, his daughter, and his best friend, watched, as the Bug truly grasped the reality of what was happening. The Bug fell down, as he saw that finally, he was going to be held accountable.
“For too long, people have ignored you. Deliberately,” the Doctor walked over to the fallen creature. “They’ve brushed your crimes under the carpet, because they’d rather blame someone else. They’d rather blame someone else, just so they can hate them. But that stops, and it stops now,” the Doctor knelt down by the Bug. “So many people will never get to live the lives they deserved, because of the people you’ve murdered.”
“P – p,” it spluttered. It was trying to say something but the words were buried under the scale of what was happening.
The Doctor looked over at the screen on the far wall. There were protests, all over the universe, in every galaxy, on every planet. All sorts of people, with placards and chants and slogans and banners and a unity that hadn’t been seen before, had come out onto the streets. They were campaigning for something – they wanted the Bug to be stopped. There were news broadcasts as well – newspaper articles too – all of them determined to be on the right side of history, now spouting the vitriol the Bug deserved.
Just covering their own backs, the Doctor scowled.
“What was that?” he said to the Bug.
“Pl – puh – please.”
The Bug was pleading with him. Its deep, menacing voice was shaking, trembling, and it started to crack. Underneath that mask, there was deep, hoarse, breathing, and sniffling as well.
The Bug was crying.
“You don’t deserve mercy,” the Doctor reached behind the back of the Bug’s head, and placed two fingers on the clasps of his mask. “Time to find out who you really are…”
The Doctor’s fingers pressed, and he felt the mask come away in his hands. Lizzie and Iris had come closer. The three of them didn’t look at the Bug’s face for a few seconds. They looked away, listening to his breathing, his crying, his sobbing, and his pleading. It was no longer alien, no longer menacing.
The man beneath the mask was no more than a boy. No more than a few years fresh from puberty, he was so young. His hair was greasy and matted, his face scarred and sweaty. He cried, like the little boy he was, and the Doctor scowled at him, mercilessly.
“Go to hell.”
The boy continued to sob, as the Doctor turned, and walked away from him. He was somebody who had been bred with so much hatred and bile over the years, that he had started to do what he did. The Doctor could not look at him again. Lizzie watched him, crying on the floor, not even protesting. He knew the game was up. Even after all the life he’d taken, all it took was to reveal him for what he really was, and it had brought his reign of terror crashing down.
Iris, then, walked up to him.
“By the way, can I just mention that I’m so gay it’s on a level incomparable to anything you’ve seen before. Anyways I’m not a thespian but look, you’re literally the slimiest little weasel I’ve ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on. Capiche, bitch?”
The Bug looked up at her, but he didn’t say anything.
“Iris, leave him be,” the Doctor said. “You shouldn’t have to speak to… to that.”
“I did what I believed was –”
“Don’t even try and justify it,” the Doctor shook his head.
The Bug looked at Lizzie, as if he were looking for one, final, remnant of human kindness.
All she gave him was one, final look of pity, to someone radicalised by something horrific - someone who had been turned into a monster.
Then she left.
***
“Dimensional scoop,” Elle Mthembu was sat on the other side of a glass desk. The Doctor, Lizzie and Iris were lounging on leather chairs, in an office with a great observational window, over a great cloud of bright, colourful dust. Elle’s desk was perfect – six ballpoints were lined up in a stunningly similar formation, and a Newton’s cradle sat at the front. The three of them didn’t actually understand – a blink of an eye ago, they’d been stood in the Memory Graveyard, with the Bug crumpled down on the floor in front of them. And now they were there.
Elle was looking over at them. When the Doctor finally realised he was, he stood up. “Did you get him?” he asked her.
“He’s being held on the ship,” Elle confirmed, smiling. “Well done.”
“No… it shouldn’t have ended up like that.”
“What you on about, Dad?” Iris said. “He was a monster. A piece of… yeah, we’ve been there.”
“He was, definitely,” the Doctor stood, looking out of the window, thoughtfully. Elle waited patiently for him to continue, while Iris also waited, albeit less patiently. “He was a boy, who was raised to hate, and to despise. Somehow, he had nothing but disgust for anyone who was different to him, harboured somewhere inside of him. How could anything like that happen?”
“Because it’s allowed,” Elle shrugged, as if she were looking for an answer. “Governments don’t mention it, the media don’t care. Through their fascist coverage – it is, in a way, allowed. No more, though. You proved that, Doctor. Not a bad day’s work.”
“Not a bad hundred-years’ work,” the Doctor continued to stare, thoughtfully out the window. Elle looked at him in confusion, with no idea what on Earth the man was talking about. Though he had proved himself to be most useful, he was, also, an utter nightmare to deal with.
Lizzie knew what she meant.
She saw Iris sneakily messing up Elle’s perfect regiment of pens.
***
“Well, the Bug sounds like a jolly lovely chap,” Cioné muttered sarcastically over her mug of tea, before wrapping her shawl further around her. It was cold that night, and yet, there was a mutual warmth shared by all four of them – Cioné, the Doctor, Iris and Lizzie. Following their debrief from Elle, the Doctor had quickly picked up his wife, and taken them to the Plains of Everdreams, a huge planet that was, for as far as the eye could see, rolling pastures, over and over. It was one of the most serene spots in all the universe, as it was just grass, with the odd tree dotted around.
That night, they sat beneath a great willow tree. A gingham cloth had been spread out by the base, upon which the four of them sat, along with the Doctor’s satchel and a great flask of tea. K9 was with them, and the Doctor leaned back against his faithful hound. Also, on the far corner, providing their only illumination, was a glass jar. It gave a strange, unrecognisable light, because flickering around inside was the Glowfly, that somehow shone a brand-new colour.
The impossible, right in front of them. A living-dream.
“Right,” Iris declared, making a deliberate point of her sips from a can of Coca Cola. “This is getting beyond a joke now. The tea drinking, it needs to stop. People who look at this family but just be really bored of it.”
The Doctor gazed out at the fields ahead of them, a philosophical look leaping in his eye. “Perhaps we resort to it because it’s the only thing we know truly how to do. Drink tea.”
“Be more… creative,” Iris scowled, feeling the cold liquid sip down her throat. She felt pleased, though, even if it was a stupidly small thing to be pleased about. That she was claiming her identity.
It was also notable that because of the lack of development on the Plains of Everdreams, the sky above their heads was completely free of clouds and of light pollution, which Lizzie often thought was a ridiculous notion, calling it light pollution – how could light ever pollute? However, Iris had lectured her on the science of it all, and although Lizzie had still decided it needed another name, she understood.
“Come on then, Iris,” the Doctor stood up, holding out a hand, as if he were offering to dance with his daughter. “Show us you.”
Iris stared at him blankly. “What?”
“The stars. Show us.”
Iris grumbled. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” the Doctor ordered, gesturing out into the night.
“This is exactly what I didn’t want…”
Cioné decided she was going to have to stage an intervention to prevent this awkward confrontation from continuing, so she stood. “K9,” Cioné patted the metal dog on its head. “Look after Gerald, will you?”
“Yes Mistress!” K9 nodded with robotic obedience.
“Who’s Gerald?” the Doctor inquired.
“The Glowfly.”
It took a few seconds to register – that Cioné had named a Glowfly that shone a brand-new colour Gerald. “You called that beautiful creature Gerald?”
Cioné raised her arms in defence as she strode over to join her husband. “It’s a lovely name!”
“For my second-cousin twice removed, maybe…”
“Oh yes,” Cioné bickered back. “I forgot about The Gerald, ravisher of the universe and destroyer of worlds.”
It was not long before Iris reluctantly agreed, and followed her parents.
Lizzie hung back at first, until Iris turned. “Lizzie, please come, I think I’ll force a regeneration on otherwise.” She reached a hand down to her, and Lizzie grasped it, and together, they walked out far from beneath the cover of the trees.
As the four of them walked further and further out, they saw the sky unfurl around them. And because there was no cloud layer, and because there was no light pollution, the sky above them was a city of stars. It was bright and whizzing and a chromatic explosion all across the huge black screen of the night. The sky wasn’t just black, it was flickered with streaks of dark blue, and the little orange and gold remnants of the sunset lightly brushed over the top. The moon smiled over them – a full moon, not worried about hiding itself, and in its openness, it bathed the surface of the world in a silvery hue.
And the stars themselves – some of them remained static, while some of them burst across the horizon as if they were just happy to be alive, while those that remained unmoving watched contentedly on. Violet, magenta, azures, deep-sea green and bright neon lime. Dashing bolts of crimson dancing with passion and love, flashes of pink rushing, and white flames of gas raging in their purity, as if they were admitting to who they truly were.
And against it all, the four of them on the skin of this tiny planet, microscopic in comparison to the sprawling infinity of the universe above their heads. A universe that could be so cruel and bitter, but at the same time, was so beautiful and alive. As the four of them gazed above them in those moments, they forgot about that chilling aspect, because who knew when it would bite – instead, they treasured that moment of beauty and living, they celebrated it, and united in their love of the people and the skies above their heads, the four of them were themselves – the people they wanted be.
And at the same time, all of them were together.
***
Lizzie and Cioné had gone into the TARDIS, Lizzie because she decided the two of them probably needed some space, and Cioné because she suddenly remembered she’d left the bath running, parked not far from their willow tree, leaving just the Doctor and Iris outside under the stars. The Doctor shut the doors, and Iris leaned melancholily back against them.
“Where next?” the Doctor asked his daughter, as he looked out at the fields, at the stars ahead of them.
Iris was cycling through all the galaxies in her eyesight, identifying each of them in her head. It had become a comfort mechanism over the years, if ever she required one.
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
There was no other way to tell him, than to stay true to herself, and not mince her words.
“I’m not coming with you.”
She’d made Lizzie laugh through her bluntness once. Children always said exactly what they thought, and Iris had seemingly never changed. The Doctor felt like an idiot then, however, for being so expectant, and just thinking Iris would decide to fly away with them. Because of his idiocy he didn’t look at her, but he just stared, forwards. She could tell he was sad, though. Was it some kind of… familial telepathy? She’d heard stories of relatives who could just… know things, about their loved ones, no matter how far away they were.
“As I said earlier,” she explained. “I want to be me. I’m gonna go with Mum, go back to the Front, finish studying –”
“And you can be you. You don’t have to run away from me to be someone else, you know.”
“I know. And one day, I’ll travel with you. We’ll go see loads of cool places,” and Iris meant it. But for now, those first steps into the big wide universe had to be her own.
“So… what are you going to do?”
With a perfectly deadpan look upon her face, she said, “I’ve got to study.”
They stared forwards, in silence, just for a few seconds. Both of them were wondering what was going on inside the other’s head. Perhaps there was no such thing as familial telepathy.
However, Iris’ theories were reaffirmed when they both broke down into fits of laughter in unison.
“I’ll never forget you said that,” the Doctor’s daughter, wanting to study. Had he come back to the right dimension.
“Good,” Iris stated, a little bit awkwardly, because she didn’t really know how to say why she would only travel with him later on. All she knew was that the next few years of her life had to be hers, and she would have to brave them. Of course he could support her, of course her Mum and Lizzie could support her too.
But now it was time to grow up.
But… you get me, yeah?”
The Doctor turned to look at her, and with complete and utter understanding, he said, “Of course I do. Yes – no need to worry.”
And he did – because he had stood where she had stood. As he looked at her then in the starlight, a look of unbridled confidence as well as slight trepidation in her face, he realised that perhaps they were more similar than either of them had ever realised.
“Go and see some cool stuff. And look after my sis, hey?” Iris glanced around at the TARDIS. “She needs it, even if she doesn’t admit it.”
Lizzie had let her in – not for long, but she had. Iris had seen inside her mind, and she hoped more than anything else that Lizzie would take care of herself.
The Doctor nodded, not just determined to do right by his daughter, but also by his best friend. And then he realised.
“You’ve said exactly the same thing to her.”
Iris kicked her trainers at the ground sheepishly, because yes, she had. But two of her most precious people in her life – what should the Doctor have expected?
“You and Mum,” the Doctor still felt as if he couldn’t properly leave them and keep his mind at rest.
Iris sighed, and however mocking her answer, it managed to reassure him. “She’ll be glad that she doesn’t have to put up with you crying every time there’s a spider in the TARDIS.”
Iris turned to face her Dad, and although hugging was probably not her thing, they smiled at each other, and she walked into his arms. There was so much to say, but it was much more communicable through an action, and not through some boring sentimental words. Two of them not so different, but also their own selves – but also a family – together as one.
The two of them stepped into the TARDIS.
Here’s to more days like that.
***
It was the evening.
Or, however the evening could be described on the TARDIS. For their simulated sleep cycles, it was the evening.
Lizzie had always been one for bedtime reading. It usually felt appropriate to escape into some other world at the end of the day. She’d take herself off to the TARDIS library where she would usually end up spending the whole night slumped over a book or scribbling out some paragraphs of prose that just sprung to her. There was something amazing about libraries anyway – collections of lives, all in paper form, and all pressed together, between two other pieces of leather or paper or card or whatever. Books were memories. Except, they weren’t dead memories – they were living memories.
Her armchair was an old one, and battered, with a miscellany of cushions from all over the place. There was an antique bedside table next to the chair, where a lamp stood, illuminating her and the pages in a burned, orange glow. In a strange way, that glow brought the books to life. The only other light in the great library came from the glass ceiling – similarly to the console room, the TARDIS’ library had an observatory.
And there was nothing more comforting than reading by lamplight, and by starlight.
The library was so big, sprawling on and on and on. So many shelves, and so many books. If one lived a life as long as the Doctor’s, it would make sense that you would end up with such a library in your possession. There were times when she would just randomly walk through the maze of novels, her fingers trailing their dusty spines, just enjoying the touch of the books. And often, she would find herself stood on the balcony, looking down at the cathedral-sized space, with the blanket of stars covering the night sky, visible through the glass.
That was when she wanted to feel the life in the universe – because one could see everything then. Everything that had ever happened, through the books, and everything that could be discovered, through the stars.
Her armchair, though, was quietly tucked away in one corner, by an arched window in the wall, so she could see the night from there, as well. Lizzie sat there now, curled up in the old armchair, with the orange lamp switched on, bringing light and life to her and the pages. The starlight shone as well, and the two came together to bring some… truly beautiful illumination.
She looked up, to see the Doctor stood by one of the bookshelves, watching her.
“We never found out why,” she said. She sounded a bit awkward, but to be fair, he was just randomly watching her. “Sorry – I mean, why the Memory Graveyard was linked to my den.”
“No,” the Doctor stepped away from the shadows, and walked over towards her. The starlight shone on him, bringing him closer to her. “I don’t know why. Maybe we’ll never find out.”
Lizzie looked at him, and then out the huge arched window. Unless we do, she thought. Perhaps it wasn’t all over yet. Perhaps there was more to be discovered.
Bad memories were never lost, really. Only kept quiet.
She didn’t say that to him, though, because she suspected that he already knew it.
There was something amazing, as the two of them were there, in the library, in that bigger-on-the-inside box, amongst the huge, great, church-esque beams, with the mass of scuffed old wooden bookshelves, with battered old tomes and crumbled pieces of paper, all containing impossible and improbable stories and lives and fairytales, with the only other company being that of the stars through the window.
“I can see why you like it down here so much,” the Doctor placed a hand on the glass.
“Yeah. It’s… yeah, it’s beautiful.”
Lizzie didn’t mention Iris – the Doctor had only just dropped her off back home, and he seemed pretty sad.
“All of these books, Lizzie,” the Doctor gestured around him. “We could see any of the stories, we could walk in those pages. We could see those that were never written, and we could write new ones. All them,” he walked over to her, and she couldn’t help but smile up at him, as he smiled down at her. “This library, Lizzie, is like the universe. With so many lives and so many people, and with every single one being so different but so beautiful. And just like you get to walk through this library, we get to walk through the universe,” he turned to look out of the window again. “That won’t ever stop being amazing, Elizabeth Darwin.”
“No,” Lizzie said. “No, it won’t.”
He said they could write new stories. She couldn’t stop thinking about that.
Maybe they already were.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“What for?”
“For the library.”
Lizzie placed her bookmark in the book, and closed it, placing it on the bedside table. She walked past him, and smiled, and then vanished, into a galaxy of shelves.
The Doctor walked over to the table, to see what she was reading. The Good-Dream Girl. He’d seen her with it several times – it was the first thing she’d picked up from her flat when they’d gone back to get some things. On the inside cover, written in ink, were the words,
To Lizzie. Don’t stop dreaming.
He clasped it in his hands, feeling the weight of it, of the pages so frequently turned by Elizabeth Darwin.
Casually, he read the blurb, and looked around, and then he saw it.
And he couldn’t help but walk towards it.
For on the nearest shelf, there was a book, and he felt suddenly drawn to it. He wasn’t sure why, there was just something familiar about it.
That’s when he realised.
The Doctor looked down at the book he was holding in his hands, and then back at the book on the shelf, and saw that the two were identical.
He took the book off the shelf, and saw that not only were they the same book, they were exactly the same book. With exactly the same scuffmarks, and exactly the same tears and stains in the pages, and with exactly the same smell.
The Doctor had an exact copy of one of Lizzie’s books.
Exact, barring the enscription on the inside cover.
And he had no idea why.
There was something about her – something strange about the life of Lizzie Darwin. He’d thought it before, with the thriving of dimensional energy around a place she’d spent so much time in her childhood. He’d had his suspicions confirmed when somehow, the Memory Graveyard had been connected to the same place. Now he saw the twin books, he knew that there was something.
He wasn’t sure what. Lizzie wasn’t sure what.
But there was.
The Doctor walked over to orange lamp, and he turned it off. The flick of the switch was audible, as it echoed in the silence of the library.
The Doctor walked away from the armchair, and the only light was that of the stars.
There was a light switch, floating in thin air – a domestic sort of switch, found in houses. Nothing fancy – apart from the obvious fact it was just… there. Not attached to any electrics, not mounted to any walls – just a switch.
And Dad, standing next to it.
“Dad!” Iris jumped up from the garden chair and ran over to her.
“Happy birthday,” the Doctor kissed her, and took out a box with a felt cover. He presented it to his daughter.
“It’s… not my birthday,” she took it from him.
“We don’t exist! It can be what we want it to be! Now go on! Open it…”
Iris grinned up at him – always bending the laws of time and space and science in general, just to get his own way. She sighed, and opened the box. Inside, was a bracelet; a metal band, with little silver animals attached with little tiny, loops and hooks. There was an elephant, a giraffe, a cat – a few alien species. An owl, and a tiny little grasshopper.
“It’s… beautiful,” she slipped it on.
“It’s a cop-out, really,” the Doctor sighed. “Mum and I have been making it for you, ever since you were tiny. One charm a decade. We planned to give it to you for your next birthday, but I thought, there’s no time like the present. Geddit?”
Iris laughed in the way that one does when a joke is so horrendously bad it’s kind of amusing. The sort of laugh that practically goes in a buy-one-get-one-free bundle with Dad jokes. She kissed him, and stood back, pointing to the table. “Fancy a hot chocolate?”
“Oh, yes please. I’m parched,” he took a seat opposite her, and she poured it for him, from the glass jug. When he took a sip, he instantly relaxed. “This is amazing.”
“Yep.”
“You clearly invented good hot chocolate in your dream world.”
Iris stopped dead. “What?”
“You’re in your memories, Iris.”
“Impossible. I can’t be in my memories.”
“You are.”
“I’m not!”
This bickering was, clearly, going to last for a very long time, if one of them didn’t put a stop to it. They had often bickered – in a kind of jokey way. ‘Banter’, Iris had said once. When the Doctor used the same word, Iris had said something about her needing to regenerate to forget that he’d ever said it.
“Iris, you met a talking rabbit.”
“Who says rabbits can’t talk?” she couldn’t believe she was defending Melvyn.
“You. Remember the biology assignment when you started at the academy?”
“The biology assignment? As in the reason that I gave up biology? Yeah, I do, funnily enough.”
“Why did you do that?” the Doctor asked, out of sheer curiosity, despite the fact he was fine with her decision. Iris sighed, again, fed up that the Doctor seemed desperate to pick through the bones of every decision she ever made. She would, for once in her life, like to be able to make a decision and live with the consequences, whether they be good or bad.
“Because biology is impossible when we live in an ever growing, ever evolving universe such as our own. Which is why talking rabbits exist. Physics stays put. Unless you end up here.”
“Think about doughnuts.”
“I’m sorry?”
The Doctor was reminded of a trip they’d been on, years and years ago, when Iris was still young. The largest doughnut farm in the quadrant – Iris had loved it. Children loved doughnuts, though. Especially Iris – but she’d always had a sweet tooth.
Suddenly, a plate of warm, just-out-of-the-oven doughnuts, popped up in front of Iris, on the garden table.
“That was a coincidence,” Iris shrugged it off, taking a doughnut, because even if they were fictitious, they still tasted really good. “You must’ve picked doughnuts because you knew that would happen.”
“Go on then,” the Doctor sat back. Iris offered him a doughnut, and he took it. The great thing about the dream world was that they could eat as much as they wanted and wouldn’t leave with even the slightest risk of diabetes. “You think of something – and it will appear.”
Iris sighed a teenager-y sigh.
“Fine. I’m going to think about… ooh. I know!”
Iris closed her eyes, as if she were really trying to think. The Doctor laughed to himself because it would have no bearing on the situation at all, and she just looked a bit stupid.
Then, in front of her, buzzing around in front of her eyes, was a tiny, glowing insect. It glowed a bright light – the light being a colour neither of them had seen before. The Doctor blinked – it was impossible.
“What...?” he looked at the insect, as it buzzed around Iris and her hair. Iris looked up at it – it was almost butterfly like.
It was beautiful.
As the Doctor had already realised, it was a new colour. One cannot possibly comprehend what a new colour looks like, because the only colours that can possibly exist are those colours in the light spectrum that we all see day in, day out. But somehow, as they were in this strange place where science did not apply, there was a colour, that lay outside of all the other colours. Such a colour would be impossible to describe, as when describing something, you usually have to be able to compare it to something. As this colour was something brand new, there was nothing to compare it to – apart from the fact it was different.
“You told me to imagine something… so I imagined something impossible,” Iris laughed, playing with the butterfly-like insect in her hair.
“What did you imagine?” the Doctor admired it.
“I imagined a glowfly. But, a glowfly that glowed a brand-new colour. You know, Dad, I take it back. I’m in my memories. Now, have you got a thin bit of card?”
The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrunched-up bit of paper. He tossed it over to her, and she unfolded it, keeping it ready over the top of one of the glasses.
“What are you trying to do?” the Doctor asked. Iris stood up, as if she were in battle position. The glass was ready, the paper was ready.
“Well – if I’ve imagined a completely unique glowfly, I can’t let it go without letting Mum at least see it.”
The glowfly darted to her left, and Iris dived with the glass, trying to scoop it up with the glass. She missed, flying forwards, and the glowfly buzzed back around the back of her head. She waited, in a cat-like position, for the glowfly to buzz around again. She swung around, glass in hand, and in one swift motion, she caught it. Sticking the paper to the glass with some sticky tape she’d ‘thought’ out of thin air, she sat down, poked some airholes in the paper, and sat opposite her father.
“Iris,” the Doctor started, but she interrupted him.
“Dad, please let’s not do sentimentality, it irritates me.”
“No – listen, please.”
“Iris, I shouldn’t have brought you here. I’m a… reckless and irresponsible father.”
“Cool, apology accepted, let’s go.”
She looked up at the Doctor, who was looking… rather annoyed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Why are you always trying to… push me away?”
“I’m not!” Iris protested, but the Doctor wasn’t going to stop.
“Anything I do, anything I say, you just don’t care.”
“I’m just not a very… touchy-feely person,” Iris sat back, resigning herself to the fact she wouldn’t be going anywhere until they talked. She maintained that, though. Touchy-feely, far from it, she did not like being the centre of attention. Hence why she had decided to rifle through Lizzie’s memories, so Lizzie could be the protagonist and so she could sit on the sidelines being sarcastic and fun. No talking about herself, she could just… enjoy being there. Which is why whenever anyone suggested talking about herself, Iris wanted to up sticks and go as far away as possible. As did Lizzie, come to think of it, as she had seen when poking around in her head. But it would’ve been a rather uninteresting journey had none of them had any inclination to talk about anything that went on in any of their lives. Or at least, it would’ve been had Lizzie been the one doing the rifling. After all, as Iris and her darling sister used to joke, Lizzie did not speak. She merely stood awkwardy.
“I know,” the Doctor understood her. “But – sometimes it’d be nice to have a flicker of… some kind of… understanding, that we are actually. You know – related. Instead you just... hide behind jokes.”
“And I wonder where I get the bad jokes from. But anyway - I am actually my own person as well, Dad.”
“I’m not saying you’re not, and I understand, but –”
Iris knew that he did not understand. Nobody ever wondered what it would be like to have the Doctor as a parent. After all – he had a universal reputation. A reputation for all sorts. She often wondered whether it was okay that she tried to divorce herself from that reputation as much as possible. She didn’t dare tell him that it scared her, sometimes. That he scared her. When you hear stories of your father doing such impossible thing, it would be very hard not to be terrified.
In fact – she did not care about that stuff. He was her Dad – but what she wanted more than anything was for her to be her. For the way she lived to be fully, completely, the way that she wanted to live, and not the way her parents decided to dictate how she should live. She wanted to be Iris, not just a product of her parents, as much as she adored them. Iris.
“You don’t though,” she admitted. “Look – I love you, Dad. Like, super amazeballs so much. Okay? But you’ve got no idea what it’s like being me. I’m trying to live my life, and that’s really, really hard to do when you’re my Dad.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the Doctor!” She stopped, when she realised she was crying. And then she started again. “You’re – you’re the Doctor. You save planets, you save people. You make mistakes. You basically started the Time War, you defeated God. And look, right now, we came here on some kind of adrenaline-driven quest to find an intergalactic terrorist.”
The Doctor stared at the ground, as if finally, somebody had caught him out.
“And,” Iris continued. “I know you’ve always said, and that Mum has always said, that I don’t need to worry about. But people do actually know who I am, funnily enough. And they know who you are. And sometimes, just sometimes, they say things. Things about the Time War, and how you started it. And I know that what they say means nothing, but they say it because of me. And… I don’t want to be that person.”
The Doctor was looking for some words to say, but he couldn’t find any. “I’m – I’m sorry,” was all he could manage.
“It isn’t your fault,” Iris said. “It’s not even specifically you, being a kind of fairytale character – I’d want this no matter who you were. For me to be me. You can’t help it – and I can’t help it. I just… I just wanna be the sassy, gayer than heck gal that I am.”
“And you can be.”
“Sorry… it just… scares me, sometimes.”
The Doctor got off his chair, and walked over to her. She stood up, and he hugged her.
“Don’t be scared,” he whispered. “You don’t need to be.”
“I know – but I am, occasionally. Terrified. Cause you, you have so many enemies. And have done so many amazing things. And, I’m scared of your enemies, and I live in the shadow of those things. But I don’t want to.”
“Iris, please, understand this. You don’t have to live in my shadow, ever. You are your own person, you are you. Irisesisoculiesus. Be her. Embrace her.”
“Why’d you have to give me such a stupid full name…”
“Because Mum wanted to enact some of the same pain she suffered on to you.”
Iris laughed, and the Doctor laughed as well. It would take a while, for Iris to feel… better. But at least she was reassured now, by her Dad, that she could be herself, and not what anyone expected her to be. That meant a lot to her, even if she wouldn’t convey it (due to her utter detestation of sentimentality).
“Can we stay? For like… half an hour?”
The Doctor suddenly realised that Iris was holding a telescope and a notepad.
“I want to see some of the stars here… because… I didn’t recognise them.”
The Doctor glanced at his watch, before remembering that time didn’t matter here. They could be back at the Memory Graveyard just after they’d left, if they wanted to.
“Of course,” the Doctor placed a hand on her shoulder.
Iris grabbed a chair from the garden table, and dragged it over to the edge of the hill. She set up the telescope, and sat behind it. The Doctor grabbed the other chair, and joined her. Iris was silent for a minute or two, as she studied the stars above her.
“That’s why I didn’t recognise them…”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a… greatest hits compilation.”
“… what?”
Iris recognised all of the star systems now. She just didn’t recognise them all jumbled up together. They were all star systems that she’d viewed before – and these were all of her favourites. Those that somehow, because of completely random instances, had ended up more beautiful than the others. Science was random – a certain degree of randomness, combined with a certain degree of deep complexity and accuracy. And sometimes, science couldn't explain any of it - sometimes, things were just unexplainable - but so magic.
And when those things came together, they formed something impossibly stunning - Iris, seeing those stars.
But it all hinged on that random moment.
Life kind of did that as well, though.
***
“Please… let me sleep for longer.”
Lizzie was sat beside them, when Iris and the Doctor began to wake up. They looked surprisingly alike, for some reason – now more than ever before.
“Oh… erm, hey,” Lizzie said to Iris. “You alright?”
“Probably. Pfft, what do I know. Yeah, I think so,” Iris laughed, and hugged Lizzie. The Doctor was awake as well, and Lizzie smiled at him. She saw how relieved he was that Iris was okay. In fact – he seemed better than he’d done before – even before Iris had disappeared.
“Now,” the Doctor walked over to a screen on the far wall. “To business.”
Both Lizzie and Iris, in their sisterly moments of blissful reunion, had forgotten about the Bug – the intergalactic space terrorist that was, somewhere not too far away from them, on the rampage. They walked over to the Doctor, who was attaching some… USB thing to the monitor.
“When Lizzie came to find you, Iris, I did some digging. And, it turns out that there’s a lot of documentation here, regarding the Bug’s actions. Think about it – a terrorist that’s taken thousands of lives, all over the universe. Somewhere, something to do with it was obviously going to end up –”
Then the door at the side of the room opened – not the big portcullis one, but the other, smaller one, from which Lizzie had entered earlier.
It was the first time than any of them had seen the Bug in person. His image was renown across the universe, of course, having appeared on news articles for the past whoever-knows how many years. The armour he wore was like a reinforced skin, protecting him from explosions and gunfire. A teleportation device was embedded into his wrist, so he could instantly escape from the scene of the attack. Great wings were attached to his back – moth-like wings, so he could fly away from the great fires he started.
When the Doctor, Lizzie, and Iris saw it, they became locked in a Western-esque visual standoff, as the three of them moved towards the centre of the room. Then, eventually the Bug spoke.
“So – you are the petulant man I have spoken with… and who are these… girls?”
“Ah, Bug. Pleasure – this is Lizzie, my best friend, and this is Iris, my daughter. I wouldn’t get on the wrong side of them – they’re both rather clever.”
“One never heard of a woman with any rationality or logic at all,” the Bug laughed to itself, and Lizzie had to grab Iris’ hand to prevent her from dashing over to the Bug and tearing it apart limb from limb. “You will move, you disgusting worms. Give me access to the Emotion Harvest –”
So this was the harvest, Lizzie glanced at the door behind her. She assumed that’s why she’d been so drawn to it before.
“So you can do what?” the Doctor asked.
The Bug sniggered to itself. “So I can shroud the universe in a veil of ultimate fear and terror.”
“What do you think, Ladies? I mean… I’m not sure, myself.”
“Ha ha,” Iris laughed sarcastically. “Nope. Me neither.”
“Nor me,” Lizzie muttered awkwardly. She hated drama at school, and it just so happened that before the Doctor was about to be really clever he liked to show off a bit. She smiled, however, because she knew that the really clever bit was coming.
“You thrive on the fact that the media and the government do, well, basically nothing, to stop your attacks,” the Doctor explained. “They don’t, because you’re – well, a human white male – and we all know that white men are incapable of doing such things as – well…”
“Hanging gay people from gateposts?” Iris suggested.
“Exactly,” the Doctor gave his daughter a mocking pat on the back. “And burning Zygons at the stake. And setting fire to spaceships from the other clusters. My point is, everything you do, it’s ignored, firstly by the government, and secondly, by the media.”
“Because they know the people see my way is correct! Your liberal culture is dead, little man! Nobody supports it anymore. You are the minority.”
“Er – don’t think so.”
“The left are failures! You cannot win! Everyone despises this way of thinking, sick of having their mouths bound and their free speech silenced by political correctness. They are sick of having your agendas shoved down their throats, day in, and day out –”
“Our agendas shoved down their throats?”
“They tire of it! And they tire of you.”
“Do they?” the Doctor nodded, his face grim. “Well… look. How about a game?”
Lizzie looked back at the screen, the one he’d been fiddling with earlier. And she saw some letters. She realised exactly what the Doctor was doing.
And it was really clever.
The Bug nodded in agreement to the Doctor’s suggestion.
“I broadcast the full extent of your crimes all over the universe. Everything you’ve done, everything the governments and the media keep quiet about, everything that the normal people don’t know about. And if there’s not any backlash? Then okay. Fine. You win. And for good measure, you can blow this place up.”
In any normal situation, Lizzie would be concerned – the Doctor was banking quite a lot on there being a backlash. She was concerned anyway – what if people didn’t care? Where would they be then? Though, she remembered, the Doctor had faith in people. If he didn’t – he wouldn’t do this.
The Bug resisted. He was hesitant. If it was possible to see concern in those great, bulbous, insectoid eyes, it would be burning. It wasn’t sure if the game was up. So it stayed quiet, thinking of its next move. Because it seemed to believe that it did have time for a next move.
“Did I mention?”
The Doctor’s lips curled up into a smile.
“The game isn’t optional.”
Lizzie looked back over at the screen, to see what the words said then.
UPLOAD COMPLETE.
BROADCASTING.
The Bug roared.
***
The true extent of what was buried in the Memory Graveyard was huge. Due to the Bug’s almighty repertoire of terror attacks over the millennia, there was huge amounts of evidence against it. News reports, of course – but governmental reports as well. Reports that told the story the governments and the media tried to keep hidden. And there was home footage as well – footage of corpses missing faces and fingers. Broken bodies beneath old buildings. There were transcripts of interviews with police officers, with anti-terror units, interviewing survivors of disgusting, brutal culls of humanity.
And then came the phone calls. Phone calls between loved ones, the last phone calls people had made to the people they loved most of all – often nothing to do with the attacks themselves, often musing on what they were to eat for dinner – but those were the last calls that had been made. And there were voicemails too, like a footprint on the world that would be treasured forever. Emails, text messages, birthday cards and half-filled-in forms. Streaming from the Memory Graveyard came the grief from people who had lost their dearest – an infinitesimal tsunami cascading over the universe, alongside the sheer potential of the lost, and the energy of the days that never came, the days that should’ve been shared between lovers, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. Nieces and nephews and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. All of it burned with a solemn ferocity.
It was, within those few seconds, that some of the greatest atrocities ever committed, and the pain that came with them, was broadcasted to every screen, all over the universe, at exactly the same moment. Simultaneous viewing, of the Bug, and the governments and the media that had supressed the true nature of his crimes.
In the great glass spires of the ShadowStar spaceship, sat in her office, observing a majestic, burning star, Elle Mthembu was told to turn on the news. There was no other information – no indication as to what she would be witnessing when she did. She wasn’t in the mood – it had been a long day. The Doctor had just… disappeared, with no suggestion as to where he would be going. Information was still becoming available of the Bug’s next strike. She hadn’t slept in days, and just wanted to get some rest – but work needed to be done. She typed the last few sentences of her report, and then turned on the television at the far end of the room.
When she did, she smiled, and cheered (quietly, to herself – she couldn’t have any of her employees thinking she was having too much fun).
She grimaced as well – there were images visible that she’d only seen after hacking news archives and government systems. Gory pictures that were always kept hidden. There were images on the screen that truly portrayed the hatred and violence and suffering that the Bug had committed itself to over the centuries. Elle saw clips from the Dugilbih Massacres, and the Suffocations on the Hill of Blades, and more, and more. It was then, as she heard the final goodbye between a husband and a wife, that she placed a hand to her cheek, and realised that she was crying.
She knew, as well, that finally, they had him.
Meanwhile, in the heart of some strange dimension that didn’t really exist, the Doctor, his daughter, and his best friend, watched, as the Bug truly grasped the reality of what was happening. The Bug fell down, as he saw that finally, he was going to be held accountable.
“For too long, people have ignored you. Deliberately,” the Doctor walked over to the fallen creature. “They’ve brushed your crimes under the carpet, because they’d rather blame someone else. They’d rather blame someone else, just so they can hate them. But that stops, and it stops now,” the Doctor knelt down by the Bug. “So many people will never get to live the lives they deserved, because of the people you’ve murdered.”
“P – p,” it spluttered. It was trying to say something but the words were buried under the scale of what was happening.
The Doctor looked over at the screen on the far wall. There were protests, all over the universe, in every galaxy, on every planet. All sorts of people, with placards and chants and slogans and banners and a unity that hadn’t been seen before, had come out onto the streets. They were campaigning for something – they wanted the Bug to be stopped. There were news broadcasts as well – newspaper articles too – all of them determined to be on the right side of history, now spouting the vitriol the Bug deserved.
Just covering their own backs, the Doctor scowled.
“What was that?” he said to the Bug.
“Pl – puh – please.”
The Bug was pleading with him. Its deep, menacing voice was shaking, trembling, and it started to crack. Underneath that mask, there was deep, hoarse, breathing, and sniffling as well.
The Bug was crying.
“You don’t deserve mercy,” the Doctor reached behind the back of the Bug’s head, and placed two fingers on the clasps of his mask. “Time to find out who you really are…”
The Doctor’s fingers pressed, and he felt the mask come away in his hands. Lizzie and Iris had come closer. The three of them didn’t look at the Bug’s face for a few seconds. They looked away, listening to his breathing, his crying, his sobbing, and his pleading. It was no longer alien, no longer menacing.
The man beneath the mask was no more than a boy. No more than a few years fresh from puberty, he was so young. His hair was greasy and matted, his face scarred and sweaty. He cried, like the little boy he was, and the Doctor scowled at him, mercilessly.
“Go to hell.”
The boy continued to sob, as the Doctor turned, and walked away from him. He was somebody who had been bred with so much hatred and bile over the years, that he had started to do what he did. The Doctor could not look at him again. Lizzie watched him, crying on the floor, not even protesting. He knew the game was up. Even after all the life he’d taken, all it took was to reveal him for what he really was, and it had brought his reign of terror crashing down.
Iris, then, walked up to him.
“By the way, can I just mention that I’m so gay it’s on a level incomparable to anything you’ve seen before. Anyways I’m not a thespian but look, you’re literally the slimiest little weasel I’ve ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on. Capiche, bitch?”
The Bug looked up at her, but he didn’t say anything.
“Iris, leave him be,” the Doctor said. “You shouldn’t have to speak to… to that.”
“I did what I believed was –”
“Don’t even try and justify it,” the Doctor shook his head.
The Bug looked at Lizzie, as if he were looking for one, final, remnant of human kindness.
All she gave him was one, final look of pity, to someone radicalised by something horrific - someone who had been turned into a monster.
Then she left.
***
“Dimensional scoop,” Elle Mthembu was sat on the other side of a glass desk. The Doctor, Lizzie and Iris were lounging on leather chairs, in an office with a great observational window, over a great cloud of bright, colourful dust. Elle’s desk was perfect – six ballpoints were lined up in a stunningly similar formation, and a Newton’s cradle sat at the front. The three of them didn’t actually understand – a blink of an eye ago, they’d been stood in the Memory Graveyard, with the Bug crumpled down on the floor in front of them. And now they were there.
Elle was looking over at them. When the Doctor finally realised he was, he stood up. “Did you get him?” he asked her.
“He’s being held on the ship,” Elle confirmed, smiling. “Well done.”
“No… it shouldn’t have ended up like that.”
“What you on about, Dad?” Iris said. “He was a monster. A piece of… yeah, we’ve been there.”
“He was, definitely,” the Doctor stood, looking out of the window, thoughtfully. Elle waited patiently for him to continue, while Iris also waited, albeit less patiently. “He was a boy, who was raised to hate, and to despise. Somehow, he had nothing but disgust for anyone who was different to him, harboured somewhere inside of him. How could anything like that happen?”
“Because it’s allowed,” Elle shrugged, as if she were looking for an answer. “Governments don’t mention it, the media don’t care. Through their fascist coverage – it is, in a way, allowed. No more, though. You proved that, Doctor. Not a bad day’s work.”
“Not a bad hundred-years’ work,” the Doctor continued to stare, thoughtfully out the window. Elle looked at him in confusion, with no idea what on Earth the man was talking about. Though he had proved himself to be most useful, he was, also, an utter nightmare to deal with.
Lizzie knew what she meant.
She saw Iris sneakily messing up Elle’s perfect regiment of pens.
***
“Well, the Bug sounds like a jolly lovely chap,” Cioné muttered sarcastically over her mug of tea, before wrapping her shawl further around her. It was cold that night, and yet, there was a mutual warmth shared by all four of them – Cioné, the Doctor, Iris and Lizzie. Following their debrief from Elle, the Doctor had quickly picked up his wife, and taken them to the Plains of Everdreams, a huge planet that was, for as far as the eye could see, rolling pastures, over and over. It was one of the most serene spots in all the universe, as it was just grass, with the odd tree dotted around.
That night, they sat beneath a great willow tree. A gingham cloth had been spread out by the base, upon which the four of them sat, along with the Doctor’s satchel and a great flask of tea. K9 was with them, and the Doctor leaned back against his faithful hound. Also, on the far corner, providing their only illumination, was a glass jar. It gave a strange, unrecognisable light, because flickering around inside was the Glowfly, that somehow shone a brand-new colour.
The impossible, right in front of them. A living-dream.
“Right,” Iris declared, making a deliberate point of her sips from a can of Coca Cola. “This is getting beyond a joke now. The tea drinking, it needs to stop. People who look at this family but just be really bored of it.”
The Doctor gazed out at the fields ahead of them, a philosophical look leaping in his eye. “Perhaps we resort to it because it’s the only thing we know truly how to do. Drink tea.”
“Be more… creative,” Iris scowled, feeling the cold liquid sip down her throat. She felt pleased, though, even if it was a stupidly small thing to be pleased about. That she was claiming her identity.
It was also notable that because of the lack of development on the Plains of Everdreams, the sky above their heads was completely free of clouds and of light pollution, which Lizzie often thought was a ridiculous notion, calling it light pollution – how could light ever pollute? However, Iris had lectured her on the science of it all, and although Lizzie had still decided it needed another name, she understood.
“Come on then, Iris,” the Doctor stood up, holding out a hand, as if he were offering to dance with his daughter. “Show us you.”
Iris stared at him blankly. “What?”
“The stars. Show us.”
Iris grumbled. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” the Doctor ordered, gesturing out into the night.
“This is exactly what I didn’t want…”
Cioné decided she was going to have to stage an intervention to prevent this awkward confrontation from continuing, so she stood. “K9,” Cioné patted the metal dog on its head. “Look after Gerald, will you?”
“Yes Mistress!” K9 nodded with robotic obedience.
“Who’s Gerald?” the Doctor inquired.
“The Glowfly.”
It took a few seconds to register – that Cioné had named a Glowfly that shone a brand-new colour Gerald. “You called that beautiful creature Gerald?”
Cioné raised her arms in defence as she strode over to join her husband. “It’s a lovely name!”
“For my second-cousin twice removed, maybe…”
“Oh yes,” Cioné bickered back. “I forgot about The Gerald, ravisher of the universe and destroyer of worlds.”
It was not long before Iris reluctantly agreed, and followed her parents.
Lizzie hung back at first, until Iris turned. “Lizzie, please come, I think I’ll force a regeneration on otherwise.” She reached a hand down to her, and Lizzie grasped it, and together, they walked out far from beneath the cover of the trees.
As the four of them walked further and further out, they saw the sky unfurl around them. And because there was no cloud layer, and because there was no light pollution, the sky above them was a city of stars. It was bright and whizzing and a chromatic explosion all across the huge black screen of the night. The sky wasn’t just black, it was flickered with streaks of dark blue, and the little orange and gold remnants of the sunset lightly brushed over the top. The moon smiled over them – a full moon, not worried about hiding itself, and in its openness, it bathed the surface of the world in a silvery hue.
And the stars themselves – some of them remained static, while some of them burst across the horizon as if they were just happy to be alive, while those that remained unmoving watched contentedly on. Violet, magenta, azures, deep-sea green and bright neon lime. Dashing bolts of crimson dancing with passion and love, flashes of pink rushing, and white flames of gas raging in their purity, as if they were admitting to who they truly were.
And against it all, the four of them on the skin of this tiny planet, microscopic in comparison to the sprawling infinity of the universe above their heads. A universe that could be so cruel and bitter, but at the same time, was so beautiful and alive. As the four of them gazed above them in those moments, they forgot about that chilling aspect, because who knew when it would bite – instead, they treasured that moment of beauty and living, they celebrated it, and united in their love of the people and the skies above their heads, the four of them were themselves – the people they wanted be.
And at the same time, all of them were together.
***
Lizzie and Cioné had gone into the TARDIS, Lizzie because she decided the two of them probably needed some space, and Cioné because she suddenly remembered she’d left the bath running, parked not far from their willow tree, leaving just the Doctor and Iris outside under the stars. The Doctor shut the doors, and Iris leaned melancholily back against them.
“Where next?” the Doctor asked his daughter, as he looked out at the fields, at the stars ahead of them.
Iris was cycling through all the galaxies in her eyesight, identifying each of them in her head. It had become a comfort mechanism over the years, if ever she required one.
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
There was no other way to tell him, than to stay true to herself, and not mince her words.
“I’m not coming with you.”
She’d made Lizzie laugh through her bluntness once. Children always said exactly what they thought, and Iris had seemingly never changed. The Doctor felt like an idiot then, however, for being so expectant, and just thinking Iris would decide to fly away with them. Because of his idiocy he didn’t look at her, but he just stared, forwards. She could tell he was sad, though. Was it some kind of… familial telepathy? She’d heard stories of relatives who could just… know things, about their loved ones, no matter how far away they were.
“As I said earlier,” she explained. “I want to be me. I’m gonna go with Mum, go back to the Front, finish studying –”
“And you can be you. You don’t have to run away from me to be someone else, you know.”
“I know. And one day, I’ll travel with you. We’ll go see loads of cool places,” and Iris meant it. But for now, those first steps into the big wide universe had to be her own.
“So… what are you going to do?”
With a perfectly deadpan look upon her face, she said, “I’ve got to study.”
They stared forwards, in silence, just for a few seconds. Both of them were wondering what was going on inside the other’s head. Perhaps there was no such thing as familial telepathy.
However, Iris’ theories were reaffirmed when they both broke down into fits of laughter in unison.
“I’ll never forget you said that,” the Doctor’s daughter, wanting to study. Had he come back to the right dimension.
“Good,” Iris stated, a little bit awkwardly, because she didn’t really know how to say why she would only travel with him later on. All she knew was that the next few years of her life had to be hers, and she would have to brave them. Of course he could support her, of course her Mum and Lizzie could support her too.
But now it was time to grow up.
But… you get me, yeah?”
The Doctor turned to look at her, and with complete and utter understanding, he said, “Of course I do. Yes – no need to worry.”
And he did – because he had stood where she had stood. As he looked at her then in the starlight, a look of unbridled confidence as well as slight trepidation in her face, he realised that perhaps they were more similar than either of them had ever realised.
“Go and see some cool stuff. And look after my sis, hey?” Iris glanced around at the TARDIS. “She needs it, even if she doesn’t admit it.”
Lizzie had let her in – not for long, but she had. Iris had seen inside her mind, and she hoped more than anything else that Lizzie would take care of herself.
The Doctor nodded, not just determined to do right by his daughter, but also by his best friend. And then he realised.
“You’ve said exactly the same thing to her.”
Iris kicked her trainers at the ground sheepishly, because yes, she had. But two of her most precious people in her life – what should the Doctor have expected?
“You and Mum,” the Doctor still felt as if he couldn’t properly leave them and keep his mind at rest.
Iris sighed, and however mocking her answer, it managed to reassure him. “She’ll be glad that she doesn’t have to put up with you crying every time there’s a spider in the TARDIS.”
Iris turned to face her Dad, and although hugging was probably not her thing, they smiled at each other, and she walked into his arms. There was so much to say, but it was much more communicable through an action, and not through some boring sentimental words. Two of them not so different, but also their own selves – but also a family – together as one.
The two of them stepped into the TARDIS.
Here’s to more days like that.
***
It was the evening.
Or, however the evening could be described on the TARDIS. For their simulated sleep cycles, it was the evening.
Lizzie had always been one for bedtime reading. It usually felt appropriate to escape into some other world at the end of the day. She’d take herself off to the TARDIS library where she would usually end up spending the whole night slumped over a book or scribbling out some paragraphs of prose that just sprung to her. There was something amazing about libraries anyway – collections of lives, all in paper form, and all pressed together, between two other pieces of leather or paper or card or whatever. Books were memories. Except, they weren’t dead memories – they were living memories.
Her armchair was an old one, and battered, with a miscellany of cushions from all over the place. There was an antique bedside table next to the chair, where a lamp stood, illuminating her and the pages in a burned, orange glow. In a strange way, that glow brought the books to life. The only other light in the great library came from the glass ceiling – similarly to the console room, the TARDIS’ library had an observatory.
And there was nothing more comforting than reading by lamplight, and by starlight.
The library was so big, sprawling on and on and on. So many shelves, and so many books. If one lived a life as long as the Doctor’s, it would make sense that you would end up with such a library in your possession. There were times when she would just randomly walk through the maze of novels, her fingers trailing their dusty spines, just enjoying the touch of the books. And often, she would find herself stood on the balcony, looking down at the cathedral-sized space, with the blanket of stars covering the night sky, visible through the glass.
That was when she wanted to feel the life in the universe – because one could see everything then. Everything that had ever happened, through the books, and everything that could be discovered, through the stars.
Her armchair, though, was quietly tucked away in one corner, by an arched window in the wall, so she could see the night from there, as well. Lizzie sat there now, curled up in the old armchair, with the orange lamp switched on, bringing light and life to her and the pages. The starlight shone as well, and the two came together to bring some… truly beautiful illumination.
She looked up, to see the Doctor stood by one of the bookshelves, watching her.
“We never found out why,” she said. She sounded a bit awkward, but to be fair, he was just randomly watching her. “Sorry – I mean, why the Memory Graveyard was linked to my den.”
“No,” the Doctor stepped away from the shadows, and walked over towards her. The starlight shone on him, bringing him closer to her. “I don’t know why. Maybe we’ll never find out.”
Lizzie looked at him, and then out the huge arched window. Unless we do, she thought. Perhaps it wasn’t all over yet. Perhaps there was more to be discovered.
Bad memories were never lost, really. Only kept quiet.
She didn’t say that to him, though, because she suspected that he already knew it.
There was something amazing, as the two of them were there, in the library, in that bigger-on-the-inside box, amongst the huge, great, church-esque beams, with the mass of scuffed old wooden bookshelves, with battered old tomes and crumbled pieces of paper, all containing impossible and improbable stories and lives and fairytales, with the only other company being that of the stars through the window.
“I can see why you like it down here so much,” the Doctor placed a hand on the glass.
“Yeah. It’s… yeah, it’s beautiful.”
Lizzie didn’t mention Iris – the Doctor had only just dropped her off back home, and he seemed pretty sad.
“All of these books, Lizzie,” the Doctor gestured around him. “We could see any of the stories, we could walk in those pages. We could see those that were never written, and we could write new ones. All them,” he walked over to her, and she couldn’t help but smile up at him, as he smiled down at her. “This library, Lizzie, is like the universe. With so many lives and so many people, and with every single one being so different but so beautiful. And just like you get to walk through this library, we get to walk through the universe,” he turned to look out of the window again. “That won’t ever stop being amazing, Elizabeth Darwin.”
“No,” Lizzie said. “No, it won’t.”
He said they could write new stories. She couldn’t stop thinking about that.
Maybe they already were.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“What for?”
“For the library.”
Lizzie placed her bookmark in the book, and closed it, placing it on the bedside table. She walked past him, and smiled, and then vanished, into a galaxy of shelves.
The Doctor walked over to the table, to see what she was reading. The Good-Dream Girl. He’d seen her with it several times – it was the first thing she’d picked up from her flat when they’d gone back to get some things. On the inside cover, written in ink, were the words,
To Lizzie. Don’t stop dreaming.
He clasped it in his hands, feeling the weight of it, of the pages so frequently turned by Elizabeth Darwin.
Casually, he read the blurb, and looked around, and then he saw it.
And he couldn’t help but walk towards it.
For on the nearest shelf, there was a book, and he felt suddenly drawn to it. He wasn’t sure why, there was just something familiar about it.
That’s when he realised.
The Doctor looked down at the book he was holding in his hands, and then back at the book on the shelf, and saw that the two were identical.
He took the book off the shelf, and saw that not only were they the same book, they were exactly the same book. With exactly the same scuffmarks, and exactly the same tears and stains in the pages, and with exactly the same smell.
The Doctor had an exact copy of one of Lizzie’s books.
Exact, barring the enscription on the inside cover.
And he had no idea why.
There was something about her – something strange about the life of Lizzie Darwin. He’d thought it before, with the thriving of dimensional energy around a place she’d spent so much time in her childhood. He’d had his suspicions confirmed when somehow, the Memory Graveyard had been connected to the same place. Now he saw the twin books, he knew that there was something.
He wasn’t sure what. Lizzie wasn’t sure what.
But there was.
The Doctor walked over to orange lamp, and he turned it off. The flick of the switch was audible, as it echoed in the silence of the library.
The Doctor walked away from the armchair, and the only light was that of the stars.
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NEXT TIME -
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