Prologue
Meiko couldn’t bear much more snivelling.
Gently she pushed open the door to the strange room at the top of the house, and she crept in.
“Lizzie,” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”
Lizzie had been crying into her pillow all night, hours and hours of quiet, tortured sobs. Meiko had only been at the children’s home a couple of months, whilst Lizzie had been a resident for three years, but already she had found herself taking the girl in that funny little room at the top of the house under her wing. Three flights of stairs, hidden away. She had her own room, Lizzie. Nobody shared with her... the tears would wake them up.
“Nothing,” Lizzie said, her voice shaking through a blocked nose. “Sorry.”
Lizzie Darwin and Meiko Saito were about the same age. Nine, but Meiko was a few weeks older. People had a hard time believing they were so close, though; Meiko stood taller, her back straighter; she spoke more loudly and clearly, just as Mother had taught her. Lizzie was a much more anxious thing, looking for skirts to hide behind.
Meiko sighed. There it was again, the stab of pain whenever she thought about Mother and Father, the sob that bubbled up in her throat but never quite escaped her lips. Nearly four months since the car accident had taken their lives, and she still hadn’t cried, only bottled up the pain and guilt until it burned.
She was glad to have Lizzie. She was something to focus on.
Quickly, she clambered over and sat herself on the edge of Lizzie’s bed.
“You can talk to me, Lizzie,” Meiko said. “It’s really boring if we never talk to each other.”
Lizzie brought her face from out her pillow – she was red and puffy and stained with tears and snot. “Sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I’m just…sad.”
Meiko knew all about that. Everyone in this home was sad, one way or another. You could comfort someone if they had a specific problem, she found, but for just feeling sad…that was hard to make better. Often, the comfort would fly over their heads. When the mind was closed off to happy thoughts, happy thoughts were rarely successful.
“Let me show you something,” she reached into her dressing down.
Her hand touched plastic, and Meiko grinned – her Gameboy.
Back in Japan, he father’s brother, Uncle Nobusuke, worked as some sort of supply manager. Electronics, mostly. Including videogames. When Mother and Father died, Meiko assumed she would go to live with him…but the men in suits said there were immigration issues. And a fraud trial. To be honest, Meiko didn’t really understand.
But Uncle Nobusuke could still send her mail. And sometimes, he’d send her games.
The latest one had arrived only yesterday. ‘The Secret of the Dark Yurei’, it was called; a pretty simple, top-down exploration game, you’d enter buildings and find clues, try and piece together the identity of the vengeful spirit haunting the town. Meiko loved videogames, and this one especially grabbed her – in only two days, she was almost three quarters of the way through.
Gameboy in hand, she climbed back into Lizzie’s bed, crawling up to the pillow and lying next to her friend. “Here,” she said, showing her the game. “My uncle sent it to me. We can play for a while?”
Lizzie sniffed, and managed a smile. “Okay.”
Meiko grinned back, and hit the button: Start New Game.
They played for a few hours, the older girl translating the Japanese text for the younger. After a time, Lizzie drifted off to sleep, her sobbing replaced by soft snores. In the soft grey light of the Gameboy, her face looked serene.
Satisfied with her work, Meiko quietly made her way out of the room, slipping the game back into her dressing gown. Then, she crept down the stairs, and back into her own room. Within a few minutes of resting in her bed and closing her eyes, sleep came to her as well.
Meiko …
The word was quiet, like a whisper, barely enough to disturb her from her sleep. But it was there.
Meiko …
She sat up. “Who’s there?” she said, quietly.
Mei…ko…
From beneath her bed, the soft grey light spilled outwards, flowing like water across the room, casting long, imposing shadows, sucking the colour from the books and clothes and paintings on the walls until they looked faint, faraway and ghostly.
She kept her body on the bed, but Meiko lowered her head over the edge, to peek at whatever was creating the light, and whatever was speaking her name. Each falling lock of her hair made her flinch, tiny shadows flitting across her vision, playing with her imagination.
The source was the Gameboy, and Meiko breathed a tiny sigh of relief. You just forgot to turn it off, she told herself, and the voice, that was just your imagination.
Still upside down, she grabbed the device – it was on the menu screen, the selector arrow hovering over the new game option. She pushed the buttons, but the arrow didn’t move; she held down the power button, but the screen remained alight. Meiko bit her lip, and, unable to think of anything else to do, pushed Start New Game.
MEIKO!
The voice came like a rush of wind, so loud Meiko’s eyes watered. But the house remained silent. She pushed herself off her bed and stood upright, hugging the Gameboy close to her chest. The light from the Gameboy had died, but still the room seemed pale and ghostly, not truly dark at all, as if bathed in alien moonlight.
The door to the corridor had come slightly ajar. The voice must have come through there, Meiko reasoned, just one of the other children trying to frighten her. She was a brave girl, everybody said so, and she wasn’t about to let some mean boy get away with scaring her.
She took tentative, barefoot steps into the corridor, mindful of creaking wooden floorboards.
The corridor was painted in the same grey, alien colour as her bedroom, the pitch-black banished to the darkest corners by the ever-present eeriness. Meiko looked left, towards the stairwell, and saw nothing suspicious.
Then, she looked right, towards the bathroom. In the gap between the floor and the door, the strange grey light flickered, casting strange shadows, as if someone had plucked the light from her Gameboy screen and dropped it behind the door.
Meiko started her journey to the light feeling strong, ready to confront whatever idiot was playing stupid games. But with every step, a strange feeling built up inside her. The light beyond seemed to give off a warmth she hadn’t felt in months, and, at the same time, a coldness that had become all the familiar.
Tears welled in her eyes as she reached the bathroom door, slowly and deliberately placing her hand on the knob. She opened slowly, peering into the light. She didn’t know why she said it, but the question forced its way out her throat: “Mother?”
The light disappeared. The Gameboy clattered to the ground, and Meiko was gone.
Gently she pushed open the door to the strange room at the top of the house, and she crept in.
“Lizzie,” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”
Lizzie had been crying into her pillow all night, hours and hours of quiet, tortured sobs. Meiko had only been at the children’s home a couple of months, whilst Lizzie had been a resident for three years, but already she had found herself taking the girl in that funny little room at the top of the house under her wing. Three flights of stairs, hidden away. She had her own room, Lizzie. Nobody shared with her... the tears would wake them up.
“Nothing,” Lizzie said, her voice shaking through a blocked nose. “Sorry.”
Lizzie Darwin and Meiko Saito were about the same age. Nine, but Meiko was a few weeks older. People had a hard time believing they were so close, though; Meiko stood taller, her back straighter; she spoke more loudly and clearly, just as Mother had taught her. Lizzie was a much more anxious thing, looking for skirts to hide behind.
Meiko sighed. There it was again, the stab of pain whenever she thought about Mother and Father, the sob that bubbled up in her throat but never quite escaped her lips. Nearly four months since the car accident had taken their lives, and she still hadn’t cried, only bottled up the pain and guilt until it burned.
She was glad to have Lizzie. She was something to focus on.
Quickly, she clambered over and sat herself on the edge of Lizzie’s bed.
“You can talk to me, Lizzie,” Meiko said. “It’s really boring if we never talk to each other.”
Lizzie brought her face from out her pillow – she was red and puffy and stained with tears and snot. “Sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I’m just…sad.”
Meiko knew all about that. Everyone in this home was sad, one way or another. You could comfort someone if they had a specific problem, she found, but for just feeling sad…that was hard to make better. Often, the comfort would fly over their heads. When the mind was closed off to happy thoughts, happy thoughts were rarely successful.
“Let me show you something,” she reached into her dressing down.
Her hand touched plastic, and Meiko grinned – her Gameboy.
Back in Japan, he father’s brother, Uncle Nobusuke, worked as some sort of supply manager. Electronics, mostly. Including videogames. When Mother and Father died, Meiko assumed she would go to live with him…but the men in suits said there were immigration issues. And a fraud trial. To be honest, Meiko didn’t really understand.
But Uncle Nobusuke could still send her mail. And sometimes, he’d send her games.
The latest one had arrived only yesterday. ‘The Secret of the Dark Yurei’, it was called; a pretty simple, top-down exploration game, you’d enter buildings and find clues, try and piece together the identity of the vengeful spirit haunting the town. Meiko loved videogames, and this one especially grabbed her – in only two days, she was almost three quarters of the way through.
Gameboy in hand, she climbed back into Lizzie’s bed, crawling up to the pillow and lying next to her friend. “Here,” she said, showing her the game. “My uncle sent it to me. We can play for a while?”
Lizzie sniffed, and managed a smile. “Okay.”
Meiko grinned back, and hit the button: Start New Game.
They played for a few hours, the older girl translating the Japanese text for the younger. After a time, Lizzie drifted off to sleep, her sobbing replaced by soft snores. In the soft grey light of the Gameboy, her face looked serene.
Satisfied with her work, Meiko quietly made her way out of the room, slipping the game back into her dressing gown. Then, she crept down the stairs, and back into her own room. Within a few minutes of resting in her bed and closing her eyes, sleep came to her as well.
Meiko …
The word was quiet, like a whisper, barely enough to disturb her from her sleep. But it was there.
Meiko …
She sat up. “Who’s there?” she said, quietly.
Mei…ko…
From beneath her bed, the soft grey light spilled outwards, flowing like water across the room, casting long, imposing shadows, sucking the colour from the books and clothes and paintings on the walls until they looked faint, faraway and ghostly.
She kept her body on the bed, but Meiko lowered her head over the edge, to peek at whatever was creating the light, and whatever was speaking her name. Each falling lock of her hair made her flinch, tiny shadows flitting across her vision, playing with her imagination.
The source was the Gameboy, and Meiko breathed a tiny sigh of relief. You just forgot to turn it off, she told herself, and the voice, that was just your imagination.
Still upside down, she grabbed the device – it was on the menu screen, the selector arrow hovering over the new game option. She pushed the buttons, but the arrow didn’t move; she held down the power button, but the screen remained alight. Meiko bit her lip, and, unable to think of anything else to do, pushed Start New Game.
MEIKO!
The voice came like a rush of wind, so loud Meiko’s eyes watered. But the house remained silent. She pushed herself off her bed and stood upright, hugging the Gameboy close to her chest. The light from the Gameboy had died, but still the room seemed pale and ghostly, not truly dark at all, as if bathed in alien moonlight.
The door to the corridor had come slightly ajar. The voice must have come through there, Meiko reasoned, just one of the other children trying to frighten her. She was a brave girl, everybody said so, and she wasn’t about to let some mean boy get away with scaring her.
She took tentative, barefoot steps into the corridor, mindful of creaking wooden floorboards.
The corridor was painted in the same grey, alien colour as her bedroom, the pitch-black banished to the darkest corners by the ever-present eeriness. Meiko looked left, towards the stairwell, and saw nothing suspicious.
Then, she looked right, towards the bathroom. In the gap between the floor and the door, the strange grey light flickered, casting strange shadows, as if someone had plucked the light from her Gameboy screen and dropped it behind the door.
Meiko started her journey to the light feeling strong, ready to confront whatever idiot was playing stupid games. But with every step, a strange feeling built up inside her. The light beyond seemed to give off a warmth she hadn’t felt in months, and, at the same time, a coldness that had become all the familiar.
Tears welled in her eyes as she reached the bathroom door, slowly and deliberately placing her hand on the knob. She opened slowly, peering into the light. She didn’t know why she said it, but the question forced its way out her throat: “Mother?”
The light disappeared. The Gameboy clattered to the ground, and Meiko was gone.
the eighth doctor adventures
series 5 - episode 9
start new game
written by james blanchard
The TARDIS was strangely quiet as Lizzie told her story, the usual hum of her engines and whir of her console muted as she spoke. Maybe she’s listening to me, Lizzie thought.
“They found her Gameboy outside the bathroom,” she said to the Doctor. He had his bum parked on the edge of the TARDIS console, his arms crossed, and his eyebrows knit together in a tight frown, presumably to try and communicate to her that he was, in fact, listening.
“The police searched for three months, but they didn’t find her. No sightings, no body, no anything. There were no signs of forced entry, so it didn’t look like a kidnapping. I always thought she ran away, that having to be mother to everyone was getting her down, ended up lost in some dark field. Broke her leg, something like that.”
Lizzie looked down to her shoes, rubbing her nose and sniffing. It was an anxious habit. She straightened out the newspaper on her lap. “I didn’t always think like that, obviously. I was only a kid. I don’t think I accepted she wasn’t coming back til I was sixteen.”
“But now you think differently?” the Doctor asked.
She held up the front page for the Doctor to see. It was a Japanese newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, but the TARDIS translated the headline: Eight Children Missing, Video Game Detectives’ Only Lead.
She’d found it in the deeper bowels of the TARDIS library, an archive of historical newspapers and journals, both human and alien. She’d been down there hours, reading until her eyes could barely stay open, when she happened upon this one particular newspaper, from 1999.
The Doctor always said the TARDIS was psychic, and Lizzie believed him; it was as if the ship has purposely shuffled the shelves so she would find it. She’d cried for twenty minutes as the memories of her friend came flooding back…but the Doctor didn’t need to know that.
“It’s the same game,” she told him. “’The Secret of the Dark Yurei’. It wasn’t released it Britain, but she had a copy from Japan. If there is a link…if we could find those children…”
“Then we can find Meiko too?” The Doctor asked. “It makes sense. But it was a long time ago, Lizzie.”
“I know,” She did the thing again, examination her shoes and brushing her nose. “But Meiko was sweet. She was a good friend, and only a kid. She deserved better.”
“Have you considered…?”
“Time travel?” Lizzie gave him a knowing smile. “I have. I haven’t read ahead, I have no idea whether those kids are found or not. And if we do find Meiko, I know we have to keep her away from my past self. No possibility of paradoxes here. So, if we can save her, it’s worth a shot, right?”
The Doctor smiled at his companion. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Hey, we’ve been together a while now. Are you really so surprised I’ve started to learn?”
“Not in the slightest, Lizzie Darwin. Not in the slightest,” the Time Lord pushed himself away from the console, spinning to face the controls. He pulled a lever, and the time rotor began to pick up speed, the familiar wheezing of the TARDIS in flight beginning to echo around the room.
“I can’t make any promises,” the Doctor said, stepping towards Lizzie and grabbing the newspaper. He inspected the print closely. “But,” he said, after a couple of seconds, “I’ll do my best to find her, Lizzie.”
“Thank you,” Lizzie replied, and suddenly the tears she shed in the library seemed a tiny bit more worthwhile.
***
The bustle of human traffic was like a humid, heavy blanket, rolling like hot waves over Akio Kido as he made his way to work. Every breath seemed to be shared with someone else – their perfume, their sweat, what they had for lunch.
Lost in thought as he was, the rest of the world was inescapable. Judgemental eyes around every corner, nervous brushing of the brow.
Itsumi?
No. No, just another tall girl with bright eyes, laughing lightly with her friends.
The stress is getting to me, that is all, Kido thought to himself. The world and memory is blending together.
He stopped at the newspaper stand to collect his copy of the Yomiuri Shimbun, as he did every morning. The old man behind the counter, toothless and smoking, said nothing as he took Kido’s money.
He glanced at the headline before moving on: Eight Children Missing, Video Game Detectives’ Only Lead.
Twenty minutes later, and he finally arrived at his work – Tokyo Police Headquarters. He took his normal, sombre walk through the lobby, head down and pointed straightforward to the elevator. Avoid all stares, all eye contact. A man in green leaned against the reception desk, waiting to be met by someone more important than Kido, no doubt – Keimuati, military police, for sure. The man gave him a steely look as he passed.
In the elevator, and Kido pushed the button to his floor – eight. The ascent felt like it took forever but, after an age, he finally arrived in his office.
“Good morning, Inspector Kido,” his assistant greeted him as he stepped through the doors, bowing – somewhat too deeply – as he always did. Kido’s assistant was a tall man, hair cropped short, wrapped in a tight dark suit that made him look like a walking pencil, which was appropriate, given his main function mostly consisted of writing things down.
“Good morning,” the Inspector answered, strolling toward his office. “Any news?”
Inside, ironically, he finally noticed the outside; walking to work, he had been too taken in avoiding the masses, keeping his head down. But now, looking through the window of the eighth floor, he finally saw the melancholy tone of grey that had taken to the sky. It was a grey that told a story, that promised something beyond, like a dirty window into another world. Would that world hold answers? Or only more questions to stump Kido’s work?
“None, I am afraid,” his assistant told him, with that perfectly practiced, perfectly reticent tone of his. “I have put the most recently updated case files on your desk.”
As promised, he found the case files neatly stacked between Kido’s notes and the pictures of his family. Updated, however, was something of a stretch – they reported nothing new at all, detailing only the same stagnant lack of progress that had marred the investigation for the last month.
Eight children. All missing within the last six weeks. No bodies, no signs of forced entry. No connection but that god-damn video game.
Kido collapsed into his chair.
He thought of Itsumi again, his own lost child, and empathised with the families. She was only twenty-three when the car crash took her, nearly five years ago; in fact, her twenty-eighth birthday was only around the corner. Almost thirty. Almost as old Kido himself, when she was born.
It seemed unfair. It was unfair.
Hands over his eyes, and his mind cast back to the moment. He was sat in the back, Itsumi in the passenger seat as her boyfriend drove. She was laughing, looking over her shoulder, teasing him about being relegated to the back seat. Everything moved slowly. Light streamed in through the windscreen. Then the truck came.
Rap-rap-rap
Kido’s assistant knocking on the door dragged him back to the present reality. “Enter,” he said, shortly.
The assistant entered and bowed. “Inspector, there are two people outside. They wish to speak with you.”
The man from downstairs, Kido thought. “Keimuati?” He asked. Things were getting serious.
But the assistant shook his head. “No, sir. They aren’t Japanese. From Britain, they say.” He cleared his throat, and tugged at his tie. “The man’s credentials appear in order. They say they are with the London police, with information concerning the missing children.”
Kido’s brow furrowed. Nonetheless, he said: “Send them in.”
His assistant left, and two white people entered: a man and a woman. The man was tall, and handsome, with light stubble covering his jaw, the woman shorter, shyer. The man bowed, and, after a second, the girl followed suit.
Kido stood, and returned the gesture. The man wasted no time, reaching into his pocket and handing the detective his credentials. “Thank you for seeing us, Detective,” he said. “My name is the Doctor, and this is my assistant, Elizabeth Darwin. We’ve come from Scotland Yard to talk with you.”
“As I can see,” Kido replied. The man’s Japanese was remarkably perfect. The inspector raised an eyebrow. “Special branch.”
“Er, yeah. That used to be funny.”
Bewildered still, Kido invited them to sit. “My assistant tells me you have information, concerning the recent disappearance of eight children.”
This time, Miss Darwin answered, her Japanese equally fluent as her partner’s. “We think it might be nine children, Inspector. Two weeks ago, a girl disappeared in Britain, in much the same circumstances as what has been happening here.”
Kido’s heart skipped a beat. “How is that possible?” If there were some kind of conspiracy, some kind of international operation…how many children were gone?
“Her name was Meiko Saito. Nine years old, at the time of her disappearance. No sign of kidnapping of forced entry.”
The Doctor took over. “Her parents were Japanese, living in Britain to manage a branch of their family’s small business, but she was born and raised in the UK.” The Doctor produced a file from his bag, and slid it across the desk. “Her parents died in a car crash.”
More skipped heart beats. Perhaps I should call for an ambulance, the Inspector thought.
“It seems she had a copy of the same videogame connected to the disappearances in Tokyo.”
“‘The Secret of the Dark Yurei’?” Kido asked. “The game was never circulated outside of Japan.”
“You’re right, but Meiko had family still in Japan.” Miss Darwin sniffed, and looked to her shoes before carrying on; a nervous habit, unbecoming of a high-ranking police officer. “An uncle, in distribution, who sent her a copy. One Nobusuke Saito, I believe you have him under charge for fraud.”
“Yes. Yes that’s true,” lightbulbs ticked inside Kido’s head. “His company was one of the main distributors of the game. We think there are a large number of copies in one of their warehouses, in downtown Tokyo, but we haven’t a warrant to search the premises. Not yet, at any rate.”
The Doctor stood and smoothed down his jacket. “Get one, Inspector. We have to move quickly.”
Kido stood to meet him, not sure why he was deferring to the Doctor’s authority, yet doing so all the same. “I believe I can get one, yes. Will you join us on the raid? How can we contact you?”
The Doctor handed him a piece of paper with a phone number – a strange string of numbers with an odd extension Kido didn’t recognise, but nonetheless he accepted it. “Thank you,” he said, and bowed.
The Doctor and Miss Darwin returned the courtesy, and went to leave. Miss Darwin lingered at the door, however, and said: “Thank you for hearing me-…us…Inspector.”
One last time she looked to the floor, and left.
***
Two days passed, as Kido waited for his warrant. He was confident it would come through, but everything in this world took time…time the eight – now nine – missing children surely did not have.
Meiko Saito. The name echoed inside his brain, bouncing around the walls of his skull. Now his failure seemed to reach halfway around the world. What was going on? Conspiracy? People trafficking? What terrible fate awaited these small lives.
He tried not to dwell, but as the hours dragged on it was impossible. Soon the name of Meiko began to turn back to Itsumi.
On the second day, the warrant arrived. Kido wasted no time in calling the Doctor. “That was quick,” he had said, bizarrely, as if only a few minutes had passed since their last meeting. “Where shall we meet?”
He gave the Doctor the address, and a time in the evening.
Darkness fell on downtown Tokyo, and Kido arrived at the warehouse, ten armed officers at his back. He had wanted to play it safe – the belligerence of the distribution company in denying the police access had led the inspector to believe th3at there might be a troublesome amount of security. Yet when they arrived the warehouse seemed practically abandoned; all lights were out, the gates chained and barred, and days-old rain sliding from slimy plastic gutter, grim tears on the cladded windows.
The Doctor and Miss Darwin arrived a few minutes after the officers, on foot, and unarmed. Neither of them even wore a coat.
“We’re not trained,” Miss Darwin explained, with a sheepish smile, drawing a raised eyebrow from her companion. Kido remained incredulous, but nonetheless, continued with the operation.
One of the officers took a heavy bolt cutter to the chain holding the fenced gate together. With a heave, he snapped the steel, and thirteen of them filed through, towards the door of the building itself.
The Doctor and a few other officers went ahead, the Briton chatting absent-mindedly to the officer next to him. Kido deliberately fell in behind, flashlight pointed ahead of him, putting himself next to Miss Darwin.
“If you don’t mind my saying, Miss Darwin,” he said to her. “You seem rather anxious about this operation.”
She sighed. “Please don’t call me Miss Darwin. It makes me nervous. I’m not that important, honestly. Just call me Lizzie.”
“Fair enough. Lizzie. So what is making you anxious, Lizzie?”
“I just want to get those children back, Inspector.”
“So do we all. But you seem…a little invested, if I may say so. Is this personal for you, in some way?”
Lizzie sighed, indulging in her nervous tick once more. “You worked it out, Inspector. I knew Meiko. I’d like to find out what happened to her.”
“I see. Were you a family friend?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“Understandable. And it explains how you are so proficient at Japanese.”
Lizzie blinked at him, confused. “Oh, yeah!” she said suddenly, as if surprised by the language she was speaking. “Yeah… that’s why I can speak Japanese.” She laughed it off, unconvincingly.
They reached the door of the warehouse, again held in place by a thick chain, quickly dispatched by the bolt cutters, and all filed through into the dark, damp, dank building.
The warehouse was two stories, ostensibly at least – the floor above was a thin membrane of rusted iron, filled with holes and gapes, picked out one by one by the flashlights from below. The sound of creaking metal and stagnant drops water bounded around the reverberant space.
“Fan out,” Kido instructed. “Slowly. Don’t go upstairs until you’ve checked down here, please.”
The officers did as they were told, points of light seeking into every corner. Kido went on his own searches, as did the Doctor and Lizzie, though Miss Darwin seemed to make a special effort to stay close to him.
Surely nothing hid the dark, Kido thought. No, it was not that kind of world. Yet all the same a strange presence hung over the warehouse, a strange…electricity in the air.
Itsumi?
A stupid thought. He banished it.
Though, he did wonder what she might say about all this. What advice would she give him? Would she have some special insight? She was young, perhaps she’d know something more about the missing children. Some intuition into their world.
No. Not that young, he had to remember. Kido looked over to Lizzie, her face a pale mask in the ghostly light of her torch. She and Itsumi, they were of an age. Perhaps.
The Inspector’s foot brushed against something. Something heavy, that seemed to roll and loll against the impact, before snapping back into position, almost like…
“…A head,” Kido said to himself, aloud. Slowly, he turned his flashlight downwards, praying to be wrong.
He was not.
By his foot was a huge, bald head. Thankfully, still attached to a huge body, dressed in a security outfit. The man was flat on his back, eyes clothes, mouth agape. In the light on the torch, he looked dangerously pale.
Lizzie was by him, apparently hearing his utterance. “Doctor!” she whispered over to him, and within a moment he was there, kneeling by the man on the floor, more officers following in a haze of light.
The Doctor inspected the body, living up to his moniker. “He’s alive,” the Doctor announced. “Just out cold. See those marks on his temples? The blue ones?” Kido couldn’t see anything, but was given no time to say so. “An electrical pulse, right into his brain. He could’ve been out for hours, maybe even a day.”
Kido turned. “Two of you, get this man to a hospital!” True to their training, two men came forward and – with trouble – grabbed the huge man and dragged him outside.
“What could have caused this?” Kido asked the Doctor. “A taser, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” the Doctor answered. “But who is a better question.” He seemed to laugh to himself.
“An intruder, perhaps?”
“But the place was completely sealed up, has been for days. Which means…”
“Which means what?” Kido was becoming impatient.
“Well, it suggests that the chaining up of the building was done by whoever decided to leave. Which further suggests that whatever knocked out this poor fellow…is still in here.”
Slowly, the Doctor looked upwards, eyeing the rusting metal grille above him. “Are you feeling brave, kids?”
He dashed off, towards the red iron staircase. Even in dark, Kido picked him out, leaping upstairs two steps at a time.
Lizzie turned to him. “Yeah, he does that.” And with that she went to follow him.
Kido huffed, and turned to the remaining eight men. “You men, upstairs, with me!”
Somehow, now standing on top of the iron grating, Kido felt the electrical presence even greater. There was no extra light up here, but, inexplicably, he saw better.
The Doctor was thirty feet ahead, kneeling before a large pile of what seemed to be boxes. Small, plastic boxes, coloured an off-grey – Kido’s flashlight managed to pick out labels, coloured a deep black and blood red.
Game cartridges, he realised. The Secret of the Dark Yurei. He heard more footsteps behind him, officers clattering up the stairs to meet him, but he didn’t turn, his mind focussed on the games before him.
“There’s several hundreds of them,” the Doctor was saying, examining a cartridge in his left hand. In his right, something whirred, a strange cylindrical instrument that he seemed to pass over the game. His flashlight stayed on the floor, gently rocking from one side to the other.
“They each seem to be holding a charge,” he carried on to the dark. “Not electrical, it seems to act more like Artron energy. But I can’t get a proper reading on it. If I didn’t know better I’d say it’s not from this universe…”
“What?” It was taking every ounce of politeness his mother had taught him to suppress the urge to kick the stupid white idiot up the backside. “What do you mean a charge? Like the kind that knocked out the man downstairs?”
The Doctor gave no answer, instead simply tossing the game cartridge in his hand aside, and grabbing new one to examine.
“That’s it!” Kido cried, throwing his flashlight to the ground with an incredible clatter. Everyone fell unambiguously silent, and turned to face the Inspector – even the Doctor. “I have suffered enough indignities today. A man is injured and I have no answers. You and your friend hijack my investigation, drag me down here to stare at plastic, start babbling on about charges and things in the dark! I’ve had enough. Why are you wasting my time like this? What are—”
“Inspector,” the Doctor interrupted. There was a sudden stillness in his voice, and his eyes hovered beyond his shoulder.
“No! No, you’re going to listen to me!”
“Honestly, inspector, I would love to, but…”
“But what?!” Kido noticed then: the warehouse was, gradually, becoming lighter. “What’s going on? Is the power back on?”
No one answered, and when Kido looked them, all eyes were looking over his shoulder. So, he turned.
Light was building in a space above the grille. A strange, flickering light, not natural and flowing as the water-like light of the sun, but artificial, square, each new section building upon last like the bricks of a house.
The light was clawing upwards, five feet, maybe more, a shoulder’s width apart, flickering all the time. Kido watched, amazed; the colours were muted whites and greys and pinks, strange and two-dimensional, but expanding, taking up three dimensions with every flicker. At a shoulder’s width, the blocks of light began to shrink, becoming more defined.
Robes. White robes, tied at the waist. “Impossible…” Kido said, breathlessly, to himself more than anyone else. “It’s a person…”
“A ghost,” one of the officers said behind him, though he barely heard him. “A demon!”
The colours were boldening further; Kido could see a blurred face of brown skin, long black hair tumbling down the creature’s back, a v-shape around its neck. A female form, Kido realised.
Only seconds passed, but it felt like an age before the demon woman became recognisable. Light danced around it, branching out then convulsing inwards like the pixels of an old TV. Though it flickered from state to state, Kido could see the hard, cruel line of her lips, and the dark, malevolent eyes peering through the jittering veil.
Itsumi? It was an involuntary thought.
Then, the Yurei screamed.
The creature thrust its arm in a wide, violent arc, and lightning sprung bright blue spheres.
All the slowed time of watching the monster form itself returned to Kido, and sudden flurry of events, compressed into such a short space he could not comprehend what was happening. There was light, and the sound of shockwaves, and the Inspector was flying through the air, floating without form, then bouncing across the grille, one, two, three, like a ragdoll, like a child’s toy.
No pain. Not yet. Pain would come later.
Shouting now. Gunshots, too. The voices of officers, Lizzie screaming, the Doctor shouting orders. The Inspector’s vision was darkened, spotty, but he could see lightning streaming above his head. People were running. Bodies lying on the floor, men being dragged down the stairs. All happening so quickly.
Kido looked to the creature. To the Yurei, the monstrous video game villain come to life. And he saw.
He saw his daughter. She was stood there, surrounded in flickering anger. Back from the dead, or beyond the dead, at least.
Itsumi was haunting him. Haunting the whole world. It was an irrational fear he never realised he had, but there it was, a terror sprung from far inside his mind, right in front of him.
This is my fault, he realised. I let her down. Now she needs me to pay.
Something grabbed from behind, a hand locking his collar, shouting in his ear, though he could barely hear the words. He fought back. No! he screamed, but words never seemed to escape his throat. No! Leave me with my daughter!
Darkness again. Vision fading. The yurei screamed and twisted and spat lightning, but never left the side of the plastic mountain. Guarding them, perhaps.
Oh, poor Itsumi…
Only spots of vision now, circles beginning to close. All sounds were gone. Itsumi’s face swam before him, once so beautiful, now full of rage, snarling, flickering from one state to the next like a broken monitor. Cracking every-which-way, like the Inspector’s heart.
He let the blackness take him.
***
It was Meiko. Lizzie knew it. She saw it, looked into that thing’s face and saw her friend from long ago. The yurei, a smart and sad little girl transformed into a monster. She didn’t know how; perhaps the game had sucked her in, transformed her, took her essence and projected the game’s villain onto her. The Doctor would know. But it was Meiko. Lizzie was in no doubt.
Her head was between her knees, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself. When she looked up, she could see the sun begin to rise, the first tendrils of sunlight touching the sky.
They were outside the warehouse, now. It has all happened so fast. A few men were injured, knocked out, Inspector Kido included, though none killed. Lizzie thanked god for that. Blue ambulance lights waxed and waned across the concrete and barbed wire. Doctors and medics rushed from person to person, bandages in hand, and the Doctor did the same, trying to help.
Lizzie sat away, and alone. She’d only get in the way. A few more deep breaths, and her head went back between her knees.
Five minutes past before the Doctor made his way to her. “Lizzie,” he said, standing above her. She raised her head to look at him. “Are you okay?”
She was about to say, “Yeah, of course,” but the words caught in her throat. This wasn’t something she could lie about.
“No,” she said, and then: “It was Meiko.”
“Lizzie, I don’t think it was—”
“No, listen to me. It was. I saw her myself.”
“That thing, whatever it was, was just an apparition,” the Doctor crouched down beside her, talking at her level. Talking down to me, Lizzie realised. “It looks like a yurei, for whatever reason, drawing on the ideas projected onto the game. I haven’t worked it out yet. But it wasn’t a person, not Meiko or anyone else. It’s just an anomaly of energy.”
Anger bubbled up in her, spread through her chest and limbs like a strong drink. “No,” she said, slowly, choosing each syllable carefully. “She was not an ‘anomaly of energy’. I looked at her face and saw my friend. I. Saw. Her.”
Lizzie stood before the Doctor could respond, putting her back to him. “Lizzie, I get you’re upset,” he was saying, still kneeling. “But you need to think rationally. That thing wasn’t Meiko.”
“How can you say that?” she span around to face him. “How can you say that when I know what I saw?”
“You think you saw her. That’s what it is, it latches onto what you think you know, and makes you believe in it.”
“You just made that up, I can tell.”
The Doctor hopped to his feet. “Lizzie, it looked like a fully-grown woman. Meiko was what, eight?”
“Nine.”
“Nine, then. And not a yurei.”
“But it transformed her, changed her into the game. That’s what happened, she became part of the game!”
“Now who’s just making things up?”
Lizzie pushed him. The Doctor barely moved, so she pushed him again, letting out a sob this time, forcing him to take a step back. “If you aren’t going to listen to me, you aren’t going to help me, are you?”
“I’m just trying to get through to you!”
It was enough, Lizzie realised. It was confirmation; if she wanted to save Meiko, she’d have to do it alone. She turned from the Doctor, and started to walk away from him.
It took him a few seconds to realise what she was doing. “Lizzie?” He started to come after her, though not quite running. He went to place a hand on her shoulder. “Lizzie…”
She swatted it away. “If you aren’t going to help, then leave me alone.”
“I can’t just leave you here!”
“Then you best think of a way to save Meiko, Doctor.” With that, she left him there, walking towards the bulk of Tokyo. She had no idea where she was going, or what she was going to do. Her heart felt heavy.
And so did her pocket. She felt the lump of plastic in there, the game cartridge she swiped from the pile in the warehouse, and, just maybe, felt her friend, too.
***
The gentle, ambient hum inside the TARDIS shattered like glass as the Doctor entered, slamming the wooden doors behind.
“Nonsense!” he cried to himself, marching towards the console. The ship seemed to whirr and warp in response to him. “They never listen. They never think! For such a rational species, they aren’t exactly reasonable.”
He flipped a lever, and the time rotor jumped to life, groaning upwards and downwards. Over the years, the Doctor had become so used to the sound that most of the time, he barely even heard it. Yet, sometimes, he could still detect a tone in the voice of his oldest companion.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” he said to the machine, folding his arms. The TARDIS was in flight now (though, ‘flight’ wasn’t a technically correct term), hurling through the time vortex. “I can find her again, easily. I wouldn’t just leave her there. But it wasn’t Meiko – I saw that thing too, it was a grown woman, not a little girl. Or at least, it took the image of a woman.”
He pushed away from the console, hand on his chin, contemplating his own logic. “Of course, there is a flaw in my argument, though he pains me to admit it,” he spun dramatically. “I said Lizzie couldn’t have seen what she said, yet…I reject it based on evidence of my eyes alone.”
He hit his own head. “But it couldn’t have been Meiko! No one else saw a girl. Everyone, everyone there, saw the yurei.”
It didn’t make sense. He thought as much as he could, thinking of his own testimony, of Lizzie’s, of everything said by all the officers. He thought of the charge held by the cartridges, the strange temporal energy that gave no sensible reading. The thoughts went round and round his head like a carousel, but no conclusion came to him.
“I told Lizzie to think rationally,” he said aloud. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this isn’t rational. I said, if I didn’t know better, the energy didn’t come from this universe. Maybe I’m a bloody idiot!”
He ran back to the console, pressing buttons, pulling levers, playing with the scanner. “Not from this universe. Not something that adheres to reason, not as we understand it. A whole different set of physical rules! Something brand new; I love this job!”
The scanners whizzed and spat numbers, but nothing made sense of the readings. “No, no, I need something I can read! If I can work out where this other reality is, how the yurei is manifesting itself here, then maybe I can find the children.”
But it was useless; only gibberish played upon the screen.
He slapped the stupid thing away, close to defeat. The Doctor sat – practically fell – on the floor, knees curled up to his chest. This trial was hardly the greatest he’d faced; he’d survived a Dalek prison camp, defeated the Master and her army of shades, even taken the fight to God himself. Yet this simple task avoided him. He kept thinking of all the lost children, all the families who’d never see their babies again. I let them down, said the voice in his skull.
No. No he couldn’t give up. Not for those children, or those families, and most of all not for Lizzie. He made a promise, and who was the Doctor if not a promise to help?
Thinking rationally would not lead him to answer. Perhaps he had to feel the solution, intuit where the yurei came from and what it wanted, rather than deduce from evidence.
There was only one thing nearby that would give the Doctor the depth of feeling he needed.
Within a second he was up on his feet, running towards the blue wooden doors of the TARDIS, and opening them, so he could out in the swirling, endless, majestic view of the Time Vortex.
Even after centuries of adventuring, the wonder and the terror the Vortex engendered in the Time Lord was intoxicating. The whole thing shifted, second to second, entire light years swirling overhead like a passing wave. On moment, the tunnel of time was blue, the next red, then green; sometimes it seemed to look like angry clouds, others huge and beautiful splashes of watercolour paint.
The Doctor sat in the TARDIS doorway, legs dangling over the edge of the floor, into the expanse before him. The ship’s shield encased him within a bubble, so he’d never truly touch the Vortex; to do that would mean being vaporised, and stretched across every point in space and time.
He thought about his whole life flowing above him. As long and wild as his time had been – longer than almost anyone else’s – no doubt it was but one of the glittering clouds that wheeled about him, lost already in the mosaic of light, diffused into the rest of the universes. Everything was there; the Doctor’s birth, his first day at the academy, the day he fled Gallifrey. The day I married Cioné, the day Iris was born. Their life together. He really felt something then.
But even the Time Vortex wasn’t the extent of all creation. No, parallel and pocket and bubble universes all existed beyond this place, some similar to the Doctor’s home, others wildly different. It was there the Doctor needed to focus, to stoke epiphany, to find knowledge beyond what was normally known.
He wondered what would become of other realities, after the war. The Time Lords maintained access to them, but if Gallifrey were to fall…
He shunned the thoughts as a distraction. But maybe a distraction was good? I don’t know, he thought. I never had to patience to meditate before.
Meditating, that was it! No distractions, clear the mind, let the universe flow right over you.
He closed his eyes. Then opened his eyes. Then closed them again. It wasn’t going well.
A little stillness crept over him, though. A tiny piece of tranquillity formed in the corner of his mind. Maybe it was enough, however small.
Something shimmered, far off in the Vortex. Was it just another glittering cloud of time, a distraction in the Doctor’s mind? No, it was something else, and maybe…
The pieces fell together, forming the finished puzzle. “Yes!” the Doctor cried, punching the air. “Just what I was looking for!”
The Doctor leapt up and ran to the console, the wooden doors of the TARDIS closing behind him. He was pulling levers every-which-way, not totally sure what he was doing, but the answer was in his head now, and that meant his trusted old ship could help him find it.
“I just need to find Lizzie,” he was saying. “Explain to her what’s going on. Tell her she was right, in a way.” He flipped on the tracking screen; she couldn’t have gone too far before the TARDIS could re-intercept with her timeline.
“That doesn’t make sense,” the Doctor hit the scanner, jolting the readings, but nothing changed. “She can’t be nowhere! She has to be somewhere. But where?”
Then, it occurred to the Doctor – he knew exactly where she was.
***
Lizzie had walked for hours – three, four, she couldn’t say – before she hit the busier side of Tokyo. Not quite the centre, she could see the towering skyscrapers in the distance, but these outskirts were busy enough with people and commuters and traffic.
Lizzie always wanted to visit Japan. The second year module on Japanese history was the best twelve weeks of her university life, and she could recite the entire History of Japan YouTube video from scratch. Perhaps, in some subconscious way, she’d always been looking for Meiko.
She touched the plastic inside her pocket. Cheap, tasteless, imported stuff. ‘Knock knock, it’s the United States,’ she almost said aloud, and grinned.
The grin faded as fatigue took hold of her, though. She was tired, she hadn’t slept, she had walked too far…just two minutes rest, that’s what she needed.
She wondered if the Doctor would find her. She felt like a little kid, storming off like that, virtually screaming ‘I hate you!’ like some angry teenager, all the while hoping he would follow her.
After a few minutes of aimless wandering, a bench appeared in front of her, and she eagerly parked herself on it. People walked past her with their children and their dogs and their briefcases, seldom giving her so much a sideways glance. Lizzie wondered if they thought she was a tramp.
She fished the game cartridge out of her pocket again, becoming more used to the strange electrical tingle passing through her digits as she fingered it. The plastic was grey, the label hard to make out, a crudely painted woman in a white gown screeching out the title, ‘Secret of the Dark Yurei’. The title was in Japanese, Lizzie knew, but the TARDIS reformed the words in her mind so that she could understand. Perhaps that meant the Doctor was coming back after all, she thought.
Meiko was in her thoughts, too. Was she trapped in here? Was she spread across all the different cartridges all over world? That was a horrible thought, her childhood friend being spread so thin and far. No wonder she was angry.
But the Doctor’s words echoed about her, too. Meiko was only a little girl, and the thing actualised by the game was clearly a woman. Or, at least, a monster in a woman’s form.
But it was Meiko. Lizzie felt it. How could it not be?
She groaned aloud; all the thinking was making her head swim. Isn’t the Doctor the one who’s supposed to figure this out? She thought. I’m just supposed to ask questions and get rescued.
Her eyes closed. She didn’t intend to sleep, just to shut out the rest of the world for a moment, find a little island of stillness so that, perhaps, things would become that tiny bit clearer.
A few seconds passed. Or, maybe a minute. Perhaps even several minutes. Lizzie opened her eyes, and the world had changed.
It was brighter. I must have slept, she thought. It must be midday by now. Yet the colours weren’t more vibrant, instead seeming fuzzier, bleeding together in a dream-like haze. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, but it didn’t clear.
“I’m going mad,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded the same, at least. But everything else, that was different. The bench was no longer a bench, but a seat, an entirely ordinary plastic chair sprung from nowhere, plucked from a void, and before her was no longer the leafy Tokyo outskirts, but a table, plastic legs holding a frosted glass top.
There was a street beside her now. It was busy and bustling, smaller than a grand metropolis like Tokyo, but all the same people filed past at a considerable pace. All the scenes on the streets were written in English – not the translated English of the TARDIS, Lizzie knew, but genuinely English, her mother language. She was, somehow, back home.
Durham, she realised. Not home, back in Durham. Though maybe they were the same. The town was where she went to university, studying history, and she was sat outside a café she used to visit regularly.
This must be some could kind of memory, or flashback, she thought. But all she could manage to say out loud was, “Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ, what?” a voice said from behind her. A woman’s voice, young, around the same age as Lizzie. She passed from behind her and took a seat opposite Lizzie, setting down two coffees, one for herself and for her friend. “Are you okay?” asked Meiko.
She was no longer a little girl, but grown up, with bright eyes that seemed to smile all by themselves. Her actual smile was wide too, almost a grin; she seemed to have the kind of face that smiled all the time.
“Lizzie?” the grown-up Meiko asked. “What’s up?”
“Oh, erm,” she wanted to bolt, to run away and throw up. But she also wanted to stay, and hug Meiko so tight she might never let go. The more she looked at her, the more real she became, the more sense it made that she was sitting there. “Nothing, honestly. Just…you know.”
Meiko nodded, knowingly, reassuringly. “Drink your coffee, it’ll liven you up a bit,” she said with a mischievous grin. She grabbed her own drink enthusiastically, drinking it without paying any mind to how hot it was, not like Lizzie, who sipped slowly so not to burn her tongue. She was always the bravest of us, Lizzie remembered from her days at the Children’s Home.
Meiko had grown tall, and, if Lizzie were honest with herself…pretty beautiful. Her face was a pleasing oval shape, with a nose at its centre that scrunched when she smiled, all framed by a head of dark hair, almost black.
Her wrists grabbed Lizzie’s attention the most, though. On her left was a tattoo, three pixelated hearts alongside each other. One was empty, showing only Meiko’s skin instead the black outline. The other two were filled with red. Lizzie didn’t know much about videogames, but still, she recognised the lives system from Legend of Zelda. Not that much has changed then, she thought.
Her other wrist, though, was wrapped in a clean white bandage.
Meiko spied her looking. “Yeah, I guess I need a new tattoo, huh?” Lizzie tried to formulate a response, but managed only to trip over a string of syllables, before defaulting to her nervous habit of sniffing and looking at her shoes. “Don’t worry!” Meiko said, reassuring smile still on her face, putting her coffee back on the table. Even in adulthood she seemed the same, forever trying to take care of everyone around her, and neglecting herself in the process it seemed. “Tell you what,” she carried on. “Let’s finish these and go for a wander, just to inject a little excitement into the morning. What do you say?”
“O-okay,” Lizzie replied. “That sounds great.” It might give me time to work what on earth has happened, too, she thought.
But the time never came. Suddenly, they were away from the café, and the sun had moved further in the sky, but the strange, unreal haze settled over the world remained. Now Lizzie and Meiko stood in a park, some kind of elevated arboretum, leaning against a stone railing, looking out to the rest of Durham.
“How did we…?” Lizzie looked around her. It was like she’d teleported, flashed forward in time. This isn’t my world, she realised then. This is somewhere else. The game has transported me.
Meiko looked at her. “We walked here, Lizzie. You really must be knackered.”
“Yeah…yeah I guess so…”
“You didn’t have to stay up in the hospital all night, you know,” Meiko said. Her smiled had faded now, and she was staring out over the city blankly. “I would’ve been okay.”
Lizzie had no memories of staying in any hospital, but that would’ve been impossible to explain. Instead, she only said: “I wasn’t just going to leave you, was I?”
Meiko’s smile returned after that. “There you go!” Lizzie said, easing herself into the banter. “I much prefer to look at that smile.”
“Yeah, me too,” Meiko turned to look at her. “You’re lucky though. You’re pretty even when you’re not smiling.”
“I don’t know if that’s lucky,” Meiko was to Lizzie’s left, with her right, bandaged wrist resting next to her. Gently, Lizzie touched it, running her thumb across the linen, and Meiko turned it over, taking Lizzie’s hand in her own.
“Thank you. Honestly, Lizzie, thank you for staying with me. It means the world.”
“You really don’t have to thank me. It’s just the right thing.”
“Still,” Meiko sighed. “It can be hard, when you feel so lost.”
“Yeah, I know,” Things were starting to make sense in Lizzie’s head. The game, it had taken her to some kind of…unreal reality. A projected world, showing her what Meiko was going through. Or, at least, what Lizzie thought she was going through. “But I’ll help you find your way back.”
“Yeah.” Meiko’s face really was beautiful, a thousand tiny expressions playing across her eyes and eyebrows and lips. She still looked like her friend from all those years ago, transformed into everything Lizzie had wished she’d seen her become. It was overwhelming.
She went to do the thing, sniffing anxiously and looking down. But as she lowered her chin, Meiko’s finger caught it, gently lifting her face back up. She wasn’t leaning on the railing anymore, but standing straight and level with Lizzie.
Then they kissed. It wasn’t anything special, only a light meeting of lips, but enough. It felt like someone running a battery across Lizzie’s mouth.
Maybe I can just stay here, Lizzie thought. Real or not, I could get used to it.
They pulled away, Meiko running her thumb across Lizzie’s jawline. It only lasted a second, but felt like hours.
Then the noise came, and deep wheezing, groaning and thrumming and stirring the air all around them. Meiko didn’t even seem to notice it, but Lizzie recognised the sound immediately: the TARDIS. She looked over her shoulder to see the blue wooden box materialise in the park, perhaps fifty meters behind her.
He did find me. Maybe she should’ve been surprised that the Doctor managed to blunder his way here, but somehow, she wasn’t.
“I’m going to go get a drink or something, real quick,” Lizzie said airily. “Do you want something?”
Meiko shrugged. “I dunno, maybe a coke or something? Just anything with caffeine, really.”
“Alright then. Back in a sec.” She turned away, turning to walk towards the TARDIS, without too much urgency. Behind her Meiko had turned back to gazing over Durham.
The TARDIS doors creeped open, and the Doctor stepped out into the park. The unreal haze of this world didn’t seem to touch him; he was much more defined against the background, bolder in colour. Harsher, in some ways.
“I’ve worked it out,” he said to her, as she arrived at the TARDIS. “You weren’t wrong. Not in a way. I wanted to say sorry.” He looked over her shoulder, spying Meiko. “Is that…?”
Lizzie didn’t need him to finish. “Yeah, I think so,” she looked over too. “But this world…it’s not real, is it? I’d worked that much out, at least. That’s not my Meiko, the one we’ve been looking for.”
The Doctor shook his head. “That’s a reflection of the real Meiko, I think. She’s trapped in the world the game links to. Part of it, like we’re part of ours. But I think she’s drawn from you, mostly. This whole world is.” He looked around him, at the park, and looked impressed that his friend had managed to create all this.
“So, explain. Where are we? If this isn’t our world, the one the game connects to?”
“It’s like…we’re standing on an ember. When the two worlds touched, ours and the games, it created sparks, a little offshoot of heat and light and dimensional energy. A whole new ember world. But they can’t last. Have you noticed time moving faster here? The space between events being shorter?”
Lizzie nodded.
“Embers cool and darken,” the Doctor explained. “This whole world is fading. Soon it’ll be gone, not even a ripple of dimensional energy left.”
“That’s sad.”
“I suppose. But what created this place still exists. And is still worth fighting for, Lizzie.”
Meiko was still looking out, oblivious to what was being said behind her. No, not Meiko, Lizzie had to remind herself. Just an ember. Still, it was hard to watch such a pretty ember die.
“She’ll fade too,” she found herself saying. “Like she was never here. She was never real.”
“She’ll stay in your mind. And the real Meiko can still be found.”
“Will she remember me? The, the ember Meiko, I mean. Will I have just, disappeared from her life? Will she spend her time looking for me?”
“No. No, everything about your universe came here with you. Once you leave, it will to. If she even remains, she won’t remember.”
That was a tiny mercy, at least. The haze was getting stronger now, and she could barely see the city beyond the blur. The world was fading. “She was never real,” she repeated. It was all she could think to say.
“It’s real enough for her. And even if it’s only in your head… that doesn’t make it unreal to you,” the Doctor said, tenderly. “Come on. Your friend is waiting for you.”
Lizzie nodded. I found Meiko once, she thought, and I can do it again.
The Doctor opened the TARDIS doors wide, and she stepped inside.
***
The door clicked behind her, and Lizzie was back in reality. A strange kind of reality, she had to admit; one where a centuries old alien danced about the inside of his blue-box time machine, which happened to be bigger on the inside. Still, if her time with the Doctor had taught her anything, just because something was strange, didn’t mean it was any less true.
I’ve just learned the opposite, too, she thought, sadness at leaving the ember world behind welling up inside her. But she didn’t dwell on it. No, her friend Meiko was still alive, and to let her down just wouldn’t do.
She turned to the Doctor. “So, Meiko’s trapped in this other world. So, we can just go and get her, right?”
The Doctor twirled a knob on the console, and laughed cynically. “If only things were so easy,” he turned to Lizzie. “You took a copy of the game from the warehouse, right? Pass it here.”
Lizzie reached into her pocket, touching the plastic and feeling the charge tingle against her fingers. She threw it underarm to the Time Lord, who caught it perfectly.
“I was able to reach the ember world because you were already there. I was tracking you, so the TARDIS could follow your trace.” He tapped the time rotor; praising it, perhaps. “But I don’t have that for the main world. We need a link to follow, and inroad to the other universe. And then…I can use this!”
Out of nowhere, the Doctor pulled out some strange contraction; it was long and flared like a trumpet, made of green plastic, with blinking lights and copper wires spiralling all along it. “That looks suspiciously like a vuvuzela,” Lizzie said, once it her.
“Yeah, something else I accidentally invented early. I think I was drinking tequila out of this one in 1966.” He shook his head, clearing the memory. “Anyway, this is a proper home-made quantum eraser! Point it at the yurei’s universe and it’ll collapse the wavefunction holding our two realities together. Once that happens, everything there from our universe will be spat back home. We’ll get the children back.”
“Back and alive?”
The Doctor shrugged, not in a dismissive way, but as a suggestion that he genuinely didn’t know. “I hope so,” he said, and that was enough.
“Okay,” Lizzie nodded, new determination welling inside her. “Where do we need to go?”
“Back to the warehouse!” the Doctor shouted, and with his free hand set the time rotor working. The room filled with that familiar old wheezing sound, spiriting them to exactly where they needed to be.
***
Night had come again, and Kido barely paid attention to the road he was driving on. Reckless, he knew, but soon enough it wouldn’t matter. Light streamed past his windows in bands of white and blue and red, not moving themselves, simply holding the impression of the movement of something else. The whole universe was like that, Kido reasoned; the moments of our lives are only ghosts, tiny glimpses of the fading light, stretching from time’s start to time’s end.
The Inspector had awoken in the hospital. Mild concussion, the doctors had claimed, but Kido had discharged himself immediately, heading home to his flat to sleep instead. It wouldn’t do to spend his last night in a hospital ward, garish and unfriendly. No, it had to be his flat; simple and small as it was, it was his, and all his precious memories of Itsumi surrounded him there.
The warehouse was waiting for him. That’s where he would find his daughter, beautiful, laughing Itsumi, transformed into the vengeful spirit, trapped inside that demon game. When he slept, he dreamed of her; sweet dreams, in truth, of her happy childhood days, but they all ended the same way.
He’d left his apartment quickly – on waking, he’d found lingering too painful. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, threw on the same close, and loaded his gun. He locked the door behind him with barely a look back, lest the doubt in his heart grew too great to bear. That couldn’t happen; nine children were relying on him, as well as his daughter.
He threw the gun on the passenger seat, and started driving.
It was a strange feeling, to be endowed with purpose for the first time in years. Being a father without a child was a terrible thing, endless days filled with grief that refused to go away. But now, Kido felt closer to his daughter than in years, even if that feeling was to come with a terrible price.
It will be worth it, he thought. For myself, for Itsumi, for all those lost children.
The warehouse loomed ahead of him, looking more tall and twisted and terrible than before. He’d arrived quicker than he thought he would – how long had he been dreaming on the road?
The place was cordoned off with a yellow police line, so Kido slowed as he approached. A uniformed officer came up to his car window, rapping on the glass roughly. The Inspector lowered it in response, and handed over his ID.
The officer ran his flashlight across the identity papers, scanning left and right. Seconds passed that felt like hours, and Kido feared they wouldn’t let him pass. Then the officer handed him the badge back.
“Apologies, Inspector Kido,” he said, the very picture of contrition. “We weren’t expecting anyone. Are you sure you’re okay to work?”
“I’m fine,” he replied, probably too quickly. “Just something I need to check out. Won’t take long.”
“Of course, Inspector,” the officer lifted the police cordon above the roof of Kido’s car, and he drove on, the two cops sharing a nod as he passed.
The first part was done. The hard part, at least physically. Only my strength stands in the way now, Kido thought.
He pulled up his car not far from the door of the warehouse. No one had gone in since the incident with the yurei, but the building remained open, easily accessible to anyone important enough to cross the police line.
Engine off, seatbelt undone, gun in his coat pocket. Kido closed the door behind him quietly and, checking over his shoulder to make sure no-one was looking, stole away inside the building.
It was pitch black inside, just as before, and Kido had to put his hand on the wall and follow it round, else risk being lost in the inner darkness. Above him he could hear the drip drip drip of the broken gutter, stagnant water plopping from the rusted iron grate above him. That was his goal, his destiny. It took nearly ten minutes, but soon enough the Inspector brushed against the stairwell. The metal scraped his skin, but it didn’t matter; he made his way up.
As before, upstairs was lighter – darkness still reigned, wheeled into every corner so Kido felt trapped in a strange, lightless dimension, but all the same there was an eerie luminosity emanating from the pile of game cartridges. He could seem them clearly.
“Itsumi,” he called out. He was confident no one outside could hear him. No one needed to get hurt. Except for me, he thought. “Sweetheart, I’m here. Where are you?”
He approached the pile of games. ‘The Secret of the Dark Yurei’, it had been called. Kido never knew what people saw in games like those, but then, they weren’t made for him. It wasn’t his world; the place he was made to occupy was shrinking with every moment.
Closer, and closer, and the warehouse was becoming brighter. Just as before, the light began to manifest, a shifting curtain of light, transforming into bricks of colour, building upwards, one on top of the other on top of the other on top of the other, until, at last, the form of the yurei was complete.
Though still, it blurred with every second, white and pink and grey and blue playing up and down it’s body. It looked like the yurei of folklore, for certain: a pale young woman in a white robe, hands limp by her side. The face didn’t stay still long enough for features or expression to be clear, but she was angry, of that much Kido was certain.
“Itsumi,” he said again, as close as her dare come without provoking an attack. Guilt still weighed on his mind for the men injured the last time he taken liberties here. “I’m sorry. I let you down. I should have protected you. I was your father, and I let my little girl down. You have every right to be angry with me. I don’t know how it is you’ve returned, or how you’ve come to connect yourself to that game. Even if you could explain yourself to me, I won’t ask you to. But the children…the children you’ve taken. They must be returned. They’ve done nothing wrong, they have families who miss them. That’s why I’m here. You can have me, and have your peace, but you must let the children go. Is that fair?”
Itsumi didn’t answer. The only response was a continuous flickering of light, like pixels bursting and branching out all around her.
“I hope you can hear me, Itsumi,” he continued, taking one more step towards her. She flickered with anger. “But I can feel you, in there.”
He sat now, crossed legged before the yurei his daughter had become. Her blurring face watched his every move, unseen eyes studying him. And out from his pocket, slowly, so slowly, he drew his gun.
She gave no reaction; a gun couldn’t hurt a spirit, they both new that. It wasn’t intended to harm her, though.
“I’ll do it. I’m not afraid to die. And I’m not afraid of you. You’re my daughter, how could I be? I failed to protect you. I won’t hide from that shame. But I have to know the children will be returned. Please, in whatever way you can, tell me that the children will go home.”
Nothing. Only the angry flickering answered, persisting through the darkness.
Kido nodded. Perhaps she simply couldn’t answer; only rage was left of his sweet daughter, swallowing her voice and laugh and thoughts. That was painful enough, but he couldn’t let it stop him.
He flicked the safety off his gun, and slid his finger onto the trigger. No dwelling, no hesitation, he decided. That would only make things worse.
Inspector Kido breathed deep, and the barrel of the pistol met with the flesh under his chin.
Then came the noise. Ghastly, at first, something that filled his ears and scraped at the inside of his skull. It was a groaning, a wheezing, the laboured breathing of a huge, mechanical lung. But after one or two rasps, the noise softened, the pain and awe replaced with an odd familiarity.
There was light, as well, rising and fading from behind the Inspector. He turned to look, and saw a strange box take shape, simply materialising out from thin air – blue, it was, and strangely luminous, emitting its own soft light to cancel out the harshness of the yurei.
Wood, Kido realised. It’s made of wood. A big blue box, taller than a man, and wide enough to hold three, was appearing from thin air right in front of him. On its roof, a lamp flashed on and off, as if signalling its comings, and beneath that was written in bold, golden characters, ‘Police Public Call Box’.
The police have arrived, Kido thought, and almost laughed.
The yurei that was Itsumi hissed in response to the box, light crackling from its face, but it made no move to attack the foreign object.
The doors opened, spilling yet more white light into the room, and a man stepped out from the box.
“Inspector Kido!” the Doctor said. He was holding some strange, trumpet-like device in his hand. Lizzie stepped out behind him. “What are you doing here?”
“I…That box? What is it?”
He looked over his shoulder. “It’s a police box. Do you not have them over there?”
“Not…really…”
The Doctor shrugged. “I’ll get one sent over to you. They’re pretty handy.”
Lizzie was more serious. “Doctor, he’s got a gun.”
“So he has,” he replied, the humour dying in his voice. “What are you planning on doing, Inspector?”
Kido’s throat was dry. He ran his thumb up and down the cold metal of the gun, grease rubbing off on his skin. “This is something I must do, Doctor,” he turned to look. “That thing is my daughter. I feel it. She died, you see, in a car accident some years ago. I let her down, and now she’s wroth. I must pay my debt to Itsumi, and then she will let go of her anger, and, I hope, the children.”
The Doctor was quiet for a moment. “You see, Lizzie,” he said after a moment. “When you look into the ember, you see things you recognise. Shapes of faces, shadows of people you lost. Just like you thought you saw Meiko, he sees his daughter.”
“What are you talking about? That is my daughter, I can see her right in front of me.”
“How do you know? She’s blurring with every second.”
“She’s the right age. Twenty-three when she died. Her twenty-eighth will be here, soon.”
“A grown woman. She had her own life, Inspector. She wasn’t a child anymore.” As the Doctor said it, the words struck a chord within him. Parenthood was hard - giving a child their freedom was harder.
“She was still my child!” Kido roared. “Why else would she take the children?!”
“Kido, I need you to listen,” the Doctor approached, crouching towards him, and again the yurei hissed. “I know how you feel, truly, I do - but listen to me. Nothing has been taking the children. The games are somehow to linked to another reality. I don’t know how, maybe some kind of cosmic entanglement, or they hold the charge from a bolt of alien lightning. It doesn’t matter, in the end.
“The children who touched the game fell from our dimension into the one the games share in. That yurei, it isn’t anyone’s daughter. It’s just an ember of dimensional energy, the children trying to reach back to our world. All their fear and anxiety, lashing out.”
Kido barely understood. “If it is all that you say, nothing but a freak of science…why take the form of a spirit?”
The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t think I’ll ever work out. Maybe it comes from a universe where emotion and spirituality govern the laws, over maths and physics. Or maybe not. But…I’m sorry, Inspector. I truly am. But that thing is not your daughter. It’s not a ghost, or a spectre, or a vengeful spirit. And whether you believe me or not, I have to stop you from doing this.”
“No, Doctor,” Kido was tired of all this. He wanted to bring an end. “I will not have anyone else shoulder my burden. Step away now, and let me do this.”
Dismay played on the other man’s face. Suddenly weary of the gun, he retreated back to his box, taking up next to a concerned-looking Lizzie.
I didn’t expect an audience for this, he thought. It would take him more to time to prepare, to be ready to leave the world and join Itsumi with the Doctor and Lizzie watching. But, still, he had a duty.
“Inspector?” This time, it was Lizzie speaking up, and making her way over.
He sighed. “I appreciate you trying, Miss Darwin. Truly I do. But you will not dissuade me.”
She didn’t seem to hear that, as she crouched by him. The yurei made no hostile noises this time, Kido noticed. “How old did you say your daughter would be, again?”
“Twenty-three when she died. Twenty-eight next month.”
“A similar age to me, then?”
“I suppose so.”
Lizzie nodded, and looked over to Itsumi. “When I first saw that, I thought it was the person I was looking for, too,” she said. “Meiko, her name is. She’s only nine, though.”
“A little young to be the spirit, then.”
“I suppose,” she turned back to him. “Meiko and I, we were in the same children’s home. I grew up there, but she never got the chance.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay, not your fault. It’s no one’s fault, that’s what the Doctor showed me. If you let him, he can show you too.”
“I wish he could, Lizzie. But it’s too late. I look at her and I know what I see.”
“I felt that too. I was I so sure of what I was seeing. But remember… thoughts can manifest themselves in dark ways. And just because they’re thoughts, doesn’t make them any less worthwhile. I can’t imagine how much you miss your daughter. But like the Doctor said, she was a grown woman. And if she was anything like you, I doubt she’d become a vengeful spirit that steals children.”
Lizzie held out her palm, hand-up. “I’m not asking you to believe me, not right now. Just trust us for two minutes. That’s all. Two minutes.”
Two minutes. Kido looked up to the yurei, to the thing that was his daughter, but, perhaps wasn’t. I was so sure, he thought. But there was a tiny glimmer of doubt in his mind. Two minutes. Surely, he owed this pair two minutes?
His thumb clicked the safety on, and he rested the gun in Lizzie’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, before turning to her companion. “Doctor?”
“Okay,” the man said. He stepped forward, holding out the strange trumpet device in front of him like a gun. The yurei was becoming more agitated, thrashing, spitting sparks. Kido wanted to bolt and run, but Lizzie’s hand on his arm kept him in place. “Let’s defeat the boss.”
The trumpet device thrummed, and a ripple went through the air. The yurei didn’t even seem to register it, only continuing to thrash angrily at the Doctor, and for a moment Kido feared nothing would happen.
But then, the yurei began to glow, brighter and brighter, lighting up like a candle. Kido had to shield his eyes to stop them burning. The light persisted for felt like hours, only ever getting brighter. It’s never going to die, is it? The Inspector thought.
But, eventually, it did, the whiteness shrinking away from the darkness. First, it retreated back into the shape of the spirit, but then turned smaller still, the size and shape of a child. It split like some microscopic organism, the original spitting out two new lights, and then each of those creating more, until…
Nine, Kido realised. Nine shapes.
At last, the light died, leaving the only illumination that which spilled from the Doctor’s box. The yurei was gone, it’s anger disappeared with the light, and in its place stood nine dazed and confused looking children.
One looked at him, a young boy, no more than eleven. “Sir?” he asked, as polite as a Japanese child could possibly be. “What happened? Where are we?”
“Meiko!” Lizzie shouted before he could answer. She was on her feet, running towards a girl at the back, embracing her in the tightest hug Kido had even seen. The girl tried to respond, but her head was buried in Lizzie’s shoulder.
Unbidden, tears crept down the Inspector’s face. After all these months of stress and guilt, it was, finally, over.
I hope I made you proud, Itsumi, he thought.
***
The awe on Meiko’s face was infectious, and through her Lizzie felt as though she too were experiencing the TARDIS for the first time. The little girl wandered around and around the console, analysing each button and leave, her eyes scanning up and down along with the time rotor.
“It’s incredible,” she said. “I believe you, it’s a spaceship. Can it really travel in time?”
“You bet!” the Doctor answered, always pleased to find a new admirer. “Anywhere and everywhere. The Paris Commune, Ancient Greece, or so far into the future that humankind has touched every star in the sky. Absolutely anything is possible.”
Meiko turned her eyes to Lizzie. “So…you really are her? The Lizzie I lived with? All grown up?”
“Yep, I’m me. Really me.”
“Wow, you went and found a time-traveller to help me,” Meiko was smiling now, bright and grateful. “I never thought I’d have a friend like that.”
“You would’ve done the same, I’m sure.”
“So…” Meiko asked. “Does that mean I can go home? Back to the UK?”
The Doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry Meiko, but as far as the universe knows you disappeared from Britain all that time ago. To take you back would be a paradox.” She seemed to understand. “But don’t worry, I’ve contacted UNIT’s Tokyo branch and they’re going to look after you. They have experience with kids who’ve had…weird things happen to them.”
“Raised by government alien fighters? Not many girls could claim that.”
Lizzie had to laugh. Even after all of this – years and years of hurt, from Lizzie’s point of view – her friend from the children’s home hadn’t lost her spirit. “Or…” she’d never have forgiven herself if she didn’t ask. “You could always come with us? Like the Doctor says, it’s the most amazing thing.”
Meiko contemplated for a moment, but then shook her head. “Maybe another time. But you’ve lived your life to this point already, Lizzie. You’ve earned it. I’ve still got all that to come.” She straightened her back. “Come back for me, one day, and I’ll be ready.”
The Doctor grinned. “You’re a smart girl, Meiko, I like you,” he hopped up to the console, flicked some switches, and the ship landed with a soft thud. “Right, just outside the door is UNIT Tokyo. Tell them I sent you, and they should give you anything you want.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
Meiko laughed. “Ice cream for dinner, then,” and with that, she turned for the door. She gave Lizzie one last smile as she left, and a little wave, then she was gone, the TARDIS doors closing softly behind her.
“So, all sorted, then,” the Doctor said, after a beat. “You saved her life, Lizzie.”
“Did I? Seems you did all the hard work.” Her mind went back to her storming off, to her adventure in the other world, to the other Meiko, replaced by the child who had just left, and how her world had died like a cooling cinder.
“I’d never have worked it out without your connection to Meiko. Besides!” he cried, and reached under the console. He grabbed something round and rolled up, and threw it to his companion: a newspaper. “Take a look.”
It was the Yomiuri Shimbun, dated the day after they’d left Tokyo. ‘Children Found in Miracle Incident! Mystery Remains; Police Praised’.
She read the headline twice more. It made her feel weird. “So this was all…pre-destined? We were always going to find those children? This headline…it was already written?”
The Doctor shook his head. “No. No, your actions wrote that headline. By making the choice, you forged the future. There are other possible futures, sure. Places where you were never brave enough to do the right thing. But those places are just sparks and embers, brought into being by you. By the work you do.”
Lizzie ran her fingers across the words of the headline. The ink felt dry, and yet, if the Doctor were to be believed, it had only been freshly printed. By me, of all people, she thought. A future made, and chosen.
She wondered if she should say something profound. But somehow, she knew it wouldn’t quite be appreciated. Instead, she simply rolled the paper back up. Onto the next future, she meant to say, but it seemed the Doctor had already picked that up, and was busy working on the TARDIS, making ready to fly as far away as possible.
“They found her Gameboy outside the bathroom,” she said to the Doctor. He had his bum parked on the edge of the TARDIS console, his arms crossed, and his eyebrows knit together in a tight frown, presumably to try and communicate to her that he was, in fact, listening.
“The police searched for three months, but they didn’t find her. No sightings, no body, no anything. There were no signs of forced entry, so it didn’t look like a kidnapping. I always thought she ran away, that having to be mother to everyone was getting her down, ended up lost in some dark field. Broke her leg, something like that.”
Lizzie looked down to her shoes, rubbing her nose and sniffing. It was an anxious habit. She straightened out the newspaper on her lap. “I didn’t always think like that, obviously. I was only a kid. I don’t think I accepted she wasn’t coming back til I was sixteen.”
“But now you think differently?” the Doctor asked.
She held up the front page for the Doctor to see. It was a Japanese newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, but the TARDIS translated the headline: Eight Children Missing, Video Game Detectives’ Only Lead.
She’d found it in the deeper bowels of the TARDIS library, an archive of historical newspapers and journals, both human and alien. She’d been down there hours, reading until her eyes could barely stay open, when she happened upon this one particular newspaper, from 1999.
The Doctor always said the TARDIS was psychic, and Lizzie believed him; it was as if the ship has purposely shuffled the shelves so she would find it. She’d cried for twenty minutes as the memories of her friend came flooding back…but the Doctor didn’t need to know that.
“It’s the same game,” she told him. “’The Secret of the Dark Yurei’. It wasn’t released it Britain, but she had a copy from Japan. If there is a link…if we could find those children…”
“Then we can find Meiko too?” The Doctor asked. “It makes sense. But it was a long time ago, Lizzie.”
“I know,” She did the thing again, examination her shoes and brushing her nose. “But Meiko was sweet. She was a good friend, and only a kid. She deserved better.”
“Have you considered…?”
“Time travel?” Lizzie gave him a knowing smile. “I have. I haven’t read ahead, I have no idea whether those kids are found or not. And if we do find Meiko, I know we have to keep her away from my past self. No possibility of paradoxes here. So, if we can save her, it’s worth a shot, right?”
The Doctor smiled at his companion. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Hey, we’ve been together a while now. Are you really so surprised I’ve started to learn?”
“Not in the slightest, Lizzie Darwin. Not in the slightest,” the Time Lord pushed himself away from the console, spinning to face the controls. He pulled a lever, and the time rotor began to pick up speed, the familiar wheezing of the TARDIS in flight beginning to echo around the room.
“I can’t make any promises,” the Doctor said, stepping towards Lizzie and grabbing the newspaper. He inspected the print closely. “But,” he said, after a couple of seconds, “I’ll do my best to find her, Lizzie.”
“Thank you,” Lizzie replied, and suddenly the tears she shed in the library seemed a tiny bit more worthwhile.
***
The bustle of human traffic was like a humid, heavy blanket, rolling like hot waves over Akio Kido as he made his way to work. Every breath seemed to be shared with someone else – their perfume, their sweat, what they had for lunch.
Lost in thought as he was, the rest of the world was inescapable. Judgemental eyes around every corner, nervous brushing of the brow.
Itsumi?
No. No, just another tall girl with bright eyes, laughing lightly with her friends.
The stress is getting to me, that is all, Kido thought to himself. The world and memory is blending together.
He stopped at the newspaper stand to collect his copy of the Yomiuri Shimbun, as he did every morning. The old man behind the counter, toothless and smoking, said nothing as he took Kido’s money.
He glanced at the headline before moving on: Eight Children Missing, Video Game Detectives’ Only Lead.
Twenty minutes later, and he finally arrived at his work – Tokyo Police Headquarters. He took his normal, sombre walk through the lobby, head down and pointed straightforward to the elevator. Avoid all stares, all eye contact. A man in green leaned against the reception desk, waiting to be met by someone more important than Kido, no doubt – Keimuati, military police, for sure. The man gave him a steely look as he passed.
In the elevator, and Kido pushed the button to his floor – eight. The ascent felt like it took forever but, after an age, he finally arrived in his office.
“Good morning, Inspector Kido,” his assistant greeted him as he stepped through the doors, bowing – somewhat too deeply – as he always did. Kido’s assistant was a tall man, hair cropped short, wrapped in a tight dark suit that made him look like a walking pencil, which was appropriate, given his main function mostly consisted of writing things down.
“Good morning,” the Inspector answered, strolling toward his office. “Any news?”
Inside, ironically, he finally noticed the outside; walking to work, he had been too taken in avoiding the masses, keeping his head down. But now, looking through the window of the eighth floor, he finally saw the melancholy tone of grey that had taken to the sky. It was a grey that told a story, that promised something beyond, like a dirty window into another world. Would that world hold answers? Or only more questions to stump Kido’s work?
“None, I am afraid,” his assistant told him, with that perfectly practiced, perfectly reticent tone of his. “I have put the most recently updated case files on your desk.”
As promised, he found the case files neatly stacked between Kido’s notes and the pictures of his family. Updated, however, was something of a stretch – they reported nothing new at all, detailing only the same stagnant lack of progress that had marred the investigation for the last month.
Eight children. All missing within the last six weeks. No bodies, no signs of forced entry. No connection but that god-damn video game.
Kido collapsed into his chair.
He thought of Itsumi again, his own lost child, and empathised with the families. She was only twenty-three when the car crash took her, nearly five years ago; in fact, her twenty-eighth birthday was only around the corner. Almost thirty. Almost as old Kido himself, when she was born.
It seemed unfair. It was unfair.
Hands over his eyes, and his mind cast back to the moment. He was sat in the back, Itsumi in the passenger seat as her boyfriend drove. She was laughing, looking over her shoulder, teasing him about being relegated to the back seat. Everything moved slowly. Light streamed in through the windscreen. Then the truck came.
Rap-rap-rap
Kido’s assistant knocking on the door dragged him back to the present reality. “Enter,” he said, shortly.
The assistant entered and bowed. “Inspector, there are two people outside. They wish to speak with you.”
The man from downstairs, Kido thought. “Keimuati?” He asked. Things were getting serious.
But the assistant shook his head. “No, sir. They aren’t Japanese. From Britain, they say.” He cleared his throat, and tugged at his tie. “The man’s credentials appear in order. They say they are with the London police, with information concerning the missing children.”
Kido’s brow furrowed. Nonetheless, he said: “Send them in.”
His assistant left, and two white people entered: a man and a woman. The man was tall, and handsome, with light stubble covering his jaw, the woman shorter, shyer. The man bowed, and, after a second, the girl followed suit.
Kido stood, and returned the gesture. The man wasted no time, reaching into his pocket and handing the detective his credentials. “Thank you for seeing us, Detective,” he said. “My name is the Doctor, and this is my assistant, Elizabeth Darwin. We’ve come from Scotland Yard to talk with you.”
“As I can see,” Kido replied. The man’s Japanese was remarkably perfect. The inspector raised an eyebrow. “Special branch.”
“Er, yeah. That used to be funny.”
Bewildered still, Kido invited them to sit. “My assistant tells me you have information, concerning the recent disappearance of eight children.”
This time, Miss Darwin answered, her Japanese equally fluent as her partner’s. “We think it might be nine children, Inspector. Two weeks ago, a girl disappeared in Britain, in much the same circumstances as what has been happening here.”
Kido’s heart skipped a beat. “How is that possible?” If there were some kind of conspiracy, some kind of international operation…how many children were gone?
“Her name was Meiko Saito. Nine years old, at the time of her disappearance. No sign of kidnapping of forced entry.”
The Doctor took over. “Her parents were Japanese, living in Britain to manage a branch of their family’s small business, but she was born and raised in the UK.” The Doctor produced a file from his bag, and slid it across the desk. “Her parents died in a car crash.”
More skipped heart beats. Perhaps I should call for an ambulance, the Inspector thought.
“It seems she had a copy of the same videogame connected to the disappearances in Tokyo.”
“‘The Secret of the Dark Yurei’?” Kido asked. “The game was never circulated outside of Japan.”
“You’re right, but Meiko had family still in Japan.” Miss Darwin sniffed, and looked to her shoes before carrying on; a nervous habit, unbecoming of a high-ranking police officer. “An uncle, in distribution, who sent her a copy. One Nobusuke Saito, I believe you have him under charge for fraud.”
“Yes. Yes that’s true,” lightbulbs ticked inside Kido’s head. “His company was one of the main distributors of the game. We think there are a large number of copies in one of their warehouses, in downtown Tokyo, but we haven’t a warrant to search the premises. Not yet, at any rate.”
The Doctor stood and smoothed down his jacket. “Get one, Inspector. We have to move quickly.”
Kido stood to meet him, not sure why he was deferring to the Doctor’s authority, yet doing so all the same. “I believe I can get one, yes. Will you join us on the raid? How can we contact you?”
The Doctor handed him a piece of paper with a phone number – a strange string of numbers with an odd extension Kido didn’t recognise, but nonetheless he accepted it. “Thank you,” he said, and bowed.
The Doctor and Miss Darwin returned the courtesy, and went to leave. Miss Darwin lingered at the door, however, and said: “Thank you for hearing me-…us…Inspector.”
One last time she looked to the floor, and left.
***
Two days passed, as Kido waited for his warrant. He was confident it would come through, but everything in this world took time…time the eight – now nine – missing children surely did not have.
Meiko Saito. The name echoed inside his brain, bouncing around the walls of his skull. Now his failure seemed to reach halfway around the world. What was going on? Conspiracy? People trafficking? What terrible fate awaited these small lives.
He tried not to dwell, but as the hours dragged on it was impossible. Soon the name of Meiko began to turn back to Itsumi.
On the second day, the warrant arrived. Kido wasted no time in calling the Doctor. “That was quick,” he had said, bizarrely, as if only a few minutes had passed since their last meeting. “Where shall we meet?”
He gave the Doctor the address, and a time in the evening.
Darkness fell on downtown Tokyo, and Kido arrived at the warehouse, ten armed officers at his back. He had wanted to play it safe – the belligerence of the distribution company in denying the police access had led the inspector to believe th3at there might be a troublesome amount of security. Yet when they arrived the warehouse seemed practically abandoned; all lights were out, the gates chained and barred, and days-old rain sliding from slimy plastic gutter, grim tears on the cladded windows.
The Doctor and Miss Darwin arrived a few minutes after the officers, on foot, and unarmed. Neither of them even wore a coat.
“We’re not trained,” Miss Darwin explained, with a sheepish smile, drawing a raised eyebrow from her companion. Kido remained incredulous, but nonetheless, continued with the operation.
One of the officers took a heavy bolt cutter to the chain holding the fenced gate together. With a heave, he snapped the steel, and thirteen of them filed through, towards the door of the building itself.
The Doctor and a few other officers went ahead, the Briton chatting absent-mindedly to the officer next to him. Kido deliberately fell in behind, flashlight pointed ahead of him, putting himself next to Miss Darwin.
“If you don’t mind my saying, Miss Darwin,” he said to her. “You seem rather anxious about this operation.”
She sighed. “Please don’t call me Miss Darwin. It makes me nervous. I’m not that important, honestly. Just call me Lizzie.”
“Fair enough. Lizzie. So what is making you anxious, Lizzie?”
“I just want to get those children back, Inspector.”
“So do we all. But you seem…a little invested, if I may say so. Is this personal for you, in some way?”
Lizzie sighed, indulging in her nervous tick once more. “You worked it out, Inspector. I knew Meiko. I’d like to find out what happened to her.”
“I see. Were you a family friend?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“Understandable. And it explains how you are so proficient at Japanese.”
Lizzie blinked at him, confused. “Oh, yeah!” she said suddenly, as if surprised by the language she was speaking. “Yeah… that’s why I can speak Japanese.” She laughed it off, unconvincingly.
They reached the door of the warehouse, again held in place by a thick chain, quickly dispatched by the bolt cutters, and all filed through into the dark, damp, dank building.
The warehouse was two stories, ostensibly at least – the floor above was a thin membrane of rusted iron, filled with holes and gapes, picked out one by one by the flashlights from below. The sound of creaking metal and stagnant drops water bounded around the reverberant space.
“Fan out,” Kido instructed. “Slowly. Don’t go upstairs until you’ve checked down here, please.”
The officers did as they were told, points of light seeking into every corner. Kido went on his own searches, as did the Doctor and Lizzie, though Miss Darwin seemed to make a special effort to stay close to him.
Surely nothing hid the dark, Kido thought. No, it was not that kind of world. Yet all the same a strange presence hung over the warehouse, a strange…electricity in the air.
Itsumi?
A stupid thought. He banished it.
Though, he did wonder what she might say about all this. What advice would she give him? Would she have some special insight? She was young, perhaps she’d know something more about the missing children. Some intuition into their world.
No. Not that young, he had to remember. Kido looked over to Lizzie, her face a pale mask in the ghostly light of her torch. She and Itsumi, they were of an age. Perhaps.
The Inspector’s foot brushed against something. Something heavy, that seemed to roll and loll against the impact, before snapping back into position, almost like…
“…A head,” Kido said to himself, aloud. Slowly, he turned his flashlight downwards, praying to be wrong.
He was not.
By his foot was a huge, bald head. Thankfully, still attached to a huge body, dressed in a security outfit. The man was flat on his back, eyes clothes, mouth agape. In the light on the torch, he looked dangerously pale.
Lizzie was by him, apparently hearing his utterance. “Doctor!” she whispered over to him, and within a moment he was there, kneeling by the man on the floor, more officers following in a haze of light.
The Doctor inspected the body, living up to his moniker. “He’s alive,” the Doctor announced. “Just out cold. See those marks on his temples? The blue ones?” Kido couldn’t see anything, but was given no time to say so. “An electrical pulse, right into his brain. He could’ve been out for hours, maybe even a day.”
Kido turned. “Two of you, get this man to a hospital!” True to their training, two men came forward and – with trouble – grabbed the huge man and dragged him outside.
“What could have caused this?” Kido asked the Doctor. “A taser, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” the Doctor answered. “But who is a better question.” He seemed to laugh to himself.
“An intruder, perhaps?”
“But the place was completely sealed up, has been for days. Which means…”
“Which means what?” Kido was becoming impatient.
“Well, it suggests that the chaining up of the building was done by whoever decided to leave. Which further suggests that whatever knocked out this poor fellow…is still in here.”
Slowly, the Doctor looked upwards, eyeing the rusting metal grille above him. “Are you feeling brave, kids?”
He dashed off, towards the red iron staircase. Even in dark, Kido picked him out, leaping upstairs two steps at a time.
Lizzie turned to him. “Yeah, he does that.” And with that she went to follow him.
Kido huffed, and turned to the remaining eight men. “You men, upstairs, with me!”
Somehow, now standing on top of the iron grating, Kido felt the electrical presence even greater. There was no extra light up here, but, inexplicably, he saw better.
The Doctor was thirty feet ahead, kneeling before a large pile of what seemed to be boxes. Small, plastic boxes, coloured an off-grey – Kido’s flashlight managed to pick out labels, coloured a deep black and blood red.
Game cartridges, he realised. The Secret of the Dark Yurei. He heard more footsteps behind him, officers clattering up the stairs to meet him, but he didn’t turn, his mind focussed on the games before him.
“There’s several hundreds of them,” the Doctor was saying, examining a cartridge in his left hand. In his right, something whirred, a strange cylindrical instrument that he seemed to pass over the game. His flashlight stayed on the floor, gently rocking from one side to the other.
“They each seem to be holding a charge,” he carried on to the dark. “Not electrical, it seems to act more like Artron energy. But I can’t get a proper reading on it. If I didn’t know better I’d say it’s not from this universe…”
“What?” It was taking every ounce of politeness his mother had taught him to suppress the urge to kick the stupid white idiot up the backside. “What do you mean a charge? Like the kind that knocked out the man downstairs?”
The Doctor gave no answer, instead simply tossing the game cartridge in his hand aside, and grabbing new one to examine.
“That’s it!” Kido cried, throwing his flashlight to the ground with an incredible clatter. Everyone fell unambiguously silent, and turned to face the Inspector – even the Doctor. “I have suffered enough indignities today. A man is injured and I have no answers. You and your friend hijack my investigation, drag me down here to stare at plastic, start babbling on about charges and things in the dark! I’ve had enough. Why are you wasting my time like this? What are—”
“Inspector,” the Doctor interrupted. There was a sudden stillness in his voice, and his eyes hovered beyond his shoulder.
“No! No, you’re going to listen to me!”
“Honestly, inspector, I would love to, but…”
“But what?!” Kido noticed then: the warehouse was, gradually, becoming lighter. “What’s going on? Is the power back on?”
No one answered, and when Kido looked them, all eyes were looking over his shoulder. So, he turned.
Light was building in a space above the grille. A strange, flickering light, not natural and flowing as the water-like light of the sun, but artificial, square, each new section building upon last like the bricks of a house.
The light was clawing upwards, five feet, maybe more, a shoulder’s width apart, flickering all the time. Kido watched, amazed; the colours were muted whites and greys and pinks, strange and two-dimensional, but expanding, taking up three dimensions with every flicker. At a shoulder’s width, the blocks of light began to shrink, becoming more defined.
Robes. White robes, tied at the waist. “Impossible…” Kido said, breathlessly, to himself more than anyone else. “It’s a person…”
“A ghost,” one of the officers said behind him, though he barely heard him. “A demon!”
The colours were boldening further; Kido could see a blurred face of brown skin, long black hair tumbling down the creature’s back, a v-shape around its neck. A female form, Kido realised.
Only seconds passed, but it felt like an age before the demon woman became recognisable. Light danced around it, branching out then convulsing inwards like the pixels of an old TV. Though it flickered from state to state, Kido could see the hard, cruel line of her lips, and the dark, malevolent eyes peering through the jittering veil.
Itsumi? It was an involuntary thought.
Then, the Yurei screamed.
The creature thrust its arm in a wide, violent arc, and lightning sprung bright blue spheres.
All the slowed time of watching the monster form itself returned to Kido, and sudden flurry of events, compressed into such a short space he could not comprehend what was happening. There was light, and the sound of shockwaves, and the Inspector was flying through the air, floating without form, then bouncing across the grille, one, two, three, like a ragdoll, like a child’s toy.
No pain. Not yet. Pain would come later.
Shouting now. Gunshots, too. The voices of officers, Lizzie screaming, the Doctor shouting orders. The Inspector’s vision was darkened, spotty, but he could see lightning streaming above his head. People were running. Bodies lying on the floor, men being dragged down the stairs. All happening so quickly.
Kido looked to the creature. To the Yurei, the monstrous video game villain come to life. And he saw.
He saw his daughter. She was stood there, surrounded in flickering anger. Back from the dead, or beyond the dead, at least.
Itsumi was haunting him. Haunting the whole world. It was an irrational fear he never realised he had, but there it was, a terror sprung from far inside his mind, right in front of him.
This is my fault, he realised. I let her down. Now she needs me to pay.
Something grabbed from behind, a hand locking his collar, shouting in his ear, though he could barely hear the words. He fought back. No! he screamed, but words never seemed to escape his throat. No! Leave me with my daughter!
Darkness again. Vision fading. The yurei screamed and twisted and spat lightning, but never left the side of the plastic mountain. Guarding them, perhaps.
Oh, poor Itsumi…
Only spots of vision now, circles beginning to close. All sounds were gone. Itsumi’s face swam before him, once so beautiful, now full of rage, snarling, flickering from one state to the next like a broken monitor. Cracking every-which-way, like the Inspector’s heart.
He let the blackness take him.
***
It was Meiko. Lizzie knew it. She saw it, looked into that thing’s face and saw her friend from long ago. The yurei, a smart and sad little girl transformed into a monster. She didn’t know how; perhaps the game had sucked her in, transformed her, took her essence and projected the game’s villain onto her. The Doctor would know. But it was Meiko. Lizzie was in no doubt.
Her head was between her knees, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself. When she looked up, she could see the sun begin to rise, the first tendrils of sunlight touching the sky.
They were outside the warehouse, now. It has all happened so fast. A few men were injured, knocked out, Inspector Kido included, though none killed. Lizzie thanked god for that. Blue ambulance lights waxed and waned across the concrete and barbed wire. Doctors and medics rushed from person to person, bandages in hand, and the Doctor did the same, trying to help.
Lizzie sat away, and alone. She’d only get in the way. A few more deep breaths, and her head went back between her knees.
Five minutes past before the Doctor made his way to her. “Lizzie,” he said, standing above her. She raised her head to look at him. “Are you okay?”
She was about to say, “Yeah, of course,” but the words caught in her throat. This wasn’t something she could lie about.
“No,” she said, and then: “It was Meiko.”
“Lizzie, I don’t think it was—”
“No, listen to me. It was. I saw her myself.”
“That thing, whatever it was, was just an apparition,” the Doctor crouched down beside her, talking at her level. Talking down to me, Lizzie realised. “It looks like a yurei, for whatever reason, drawing on the ideas projected onto the game. I haven’t worked it out yet. But it wasn’t a person, not Meiko or anyone else. It’s just an anomaly of energy.”
Anger bubbled up in her, spread through her chest and limbs like a strong drink. “No,” she said, slowly, choosing each syllable carefully. “She was not an ‘anomaly of energy’. I looked at her face and saw my friend. I. Saw. Her.”
Lizzie stood before the Doctor could respond, putting her back to him. “Lizzie, I get you’re upset,” he was saying, still kneeling. “But you need to think rationally. That thing wasn’t Meiko.”
“How can you say that?” she span around to face him. “How can you say that when I know what I saw?”
“You think you saw her. That’s what it is, it latches onto what you think you know, and makes you believe in it.”
“You just made that up, I can tell.”
The Doctor hopped to his feet. “Lizzie, it looked like a fully-grown woman. Meiko was what, eight?”
“Nine.”
“Nine, then. And not a yurei.”
“But it transformed her, changed her into the game. That’s what happened, she became part of the game!”
“Now who’s just making things up?”
Lizzie pushed him. The Doctor barely moved, so she pushed him again, letting out a sob this time, forcing him to take a step back. “If you aren’t going to listen to me, you aren’t going to help me, are you?”
“I’m just trying to get through to you!”
It was enough, Lizzie realised. It was confirmation; if she wanted to save Meiko, she’d have to do it alone. She turned from the Doctor, and started to walk away from him.
It took him a few seconds to realise what she was doing. “Lizzie?” He started to come after her, though not quite running. He went to place a hand on her shoulder. “Lizzie…”
She swatted it away. “If you aren’t going to help, then leave me alone.”
“I can’t just leave you here!”
“Then you best think of a way to save Meiko, Doctor.” With that, she left him there, walking towards the bulk of Tokyo. She had no idea where she was going, or what she was going to do. Her heart felt heavy.
And so did her pocket. She felt the lump of plastic in there, the game cartridge she swiped from the pile in the warehouse, and, just maybe, felt her friend, too.
***
The gentle, ambient hum inside the TARDIS shattered like glass as the Doctor entered, slamming the wooden doors behind.
“Nonsense!” he cried to himself, marching towards the console. The ship seemed to whirr and warp in response to him. “They never listen. They never think! For such a rational species, they aren’t exactly reasonable.”
He flipped a lever, and the time rotor jumped to life, groaning upwards and downwards. Over the years, the Doctor had become so used to the sound that most of the time, he barely even heard it. Yet, sometimes, he could still detect a tone in the voice of his oldest companion.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” he said to the machine, folding his arms. The TARDIS was in flight now (though, ‘flight’ wasn’t a technically correct term), hurling through the time vortex. “I can find her again, easily. I wouldn’t just leave her there. But it wasn’t Meiko – I saw that thing too, it was a grown woman, not a little girl. Or at least, it took the image of a woman.”
He pushed away from the console, hand on his chin, contemplating his own logic. “Of course, there is a flaw in my argument, though he pains me to admit it,” he spun dramatically. “I said Lizzie couldn’t have seen what she said, yet…I reject it based on evidence of my eyes alone.”
He hit his own head. “But it couldn’t have been Meiko! No one else saw a girl. Everyone, everyone there, saw the yurei.”
It didn’t make sense. He thought as much as he could, thinking of his own testimony, of Lizzie’s, of everything said by all the officers. He thought of the charge held by the cartridges, the strange temporal energy that gave no sensible reading. The thoughts went round and round his head like a carousel, but no conclusion came to him.
“I told Lizzie to think rationally,” he said aloud. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this isn’t rational. I said, if I didn’t know better, the energy didn’t come from this universe. Maybe I’m a bloody idiot!”
He ran back to the console, pressing buttons, pulling levers, playing with the scanner. “Not from this universe. Not something that adheres to reason, not as we understand it. A whole different set of physical rules! Something brand new; I love this job!”
The scanners whizzed and spat numbers, but nothing made sense of the readings. “No, no, I need something I can read! If I can work out where this other reality is, how the yurei is manifesting itself here, then maybe I can find the children.”
But it was useless; only gibberish played upon the screen.
He slapped the stupid thing away, close to defeat. The Doctor sat – practically fell – on the floor, knees curled up to his chest. This trial was hardly the greatest he’d faced; he’d survived a Dalek prison camp, defeated the Master and her army of shades, even taken the fight to God himself. Yet this simple task avoided him. He kept thinking of all the lost children, all the families who’d never see their babies again. I let them down, said the voice in his skull.
No. No he couldn’t give up. Not for those children, or those families, and most of all not for Lizzie. He made a promise, and who was the Doctor if not a promise to help?
Thinking rationally would not lead him to answer. Perhaps he had to feel the solution, intuit where the yurei came from and what it wanted, rather than deduce from evidence.
There was only one thing nearby that would give the Doctor the depth of feeling he needed.
Within a second he was up on his feet, running towards the blue wooden doors of the TARDIS, and opening them, so he could out in the swirling, endless, majestic view of the Time Vortex.
Even after centuries of adventuring, the wonder and the terror the Vortex engendered in the Time Lord was intoxicating. The whole thing shifted, second to second, entire light years swirling overhead like a passing wave. On moment, the tunnel of time was blue, the next red, then green; sometimes it seemed to look like angry clouds, others huge and beautiful splashes of watercolour paint.
The Doctor sat in the TARDIS doorway, legs dangling over the edge of the floor, into the expanse before him. The ship’s shield encased him within a bubble, so he’d never truly touch the Vortex; to do that would mean being vaporised, and stretched across every point in space and time.
He thought about his whole life flowing above him. As long and wild as his time had been – longer than almost anyone else’s – no doubt it was but one of the glittering clouds that wheeled about him, lost already in the mosaic of light, diffused into the rest of the universes. Everything was there; the Doctor’s birth, his first day at the academy, the day he fled Gallifrey. The day I married Cioné, the day Iris was born. Their life together. He really felt something then.
But even the Time Vortex wasn’t the extent of all creation. No, parallel and pocket and bubble universes all existed beyond this place, some similar to the Doctor’s home, others wildly different. It was there the Doctor needed to focus, to stoke epiphany, to find knowledge beyond what was normally known.
He wondered what would become of other realities, after the war. The Time Lords maintained access to them, but if Gallifrey were to fall…
He shunned the thoughts as a distraction. But maybe a distraction was good? I don’t know, he thought. I never had to patience to meditate before.
Meditating, that was it! No distractions, clear the mind, let the universe flow right over you.
He closed his eyes. Then opened his eyes. Then closed them again. It wasn’t going well.
A little stillness crept over him, though. A tiny piece of tranquillity formed in the corner of his mind. Maybe it was enough, however small.
Something shimmered, far off in the Vortex. Was it just another glittering cloud of time, a distraction in the Doctor’s mind? No, it was something else, and maybe…
The pieces fell together, forming the finished puzzle. “Yes!” the Doctor cried, punching the air. “Just what I was looking for!”
The Doctor leapt up and ran to the console, the wooden doors of the TARDIS closing behind him. He was pulling levers every-which-way, not totally sure what he was doing, but the answer was in his head now, and that meant his trusted old ship could help him find it.
“I just need to find Lizzie,” he was saying. “Explain to her what’s going on. Tell her she was right, in a way.” He flipped on the tracking screen; she couldn’t have gone too far before the TARDIS could re-intercept with her timeline.
“That doesn’t make sense,” the Doctor hit the scanner, jolting the readings, but nothing changed. “She can’t be nowhere! She has to be somewhere. But where?”
Then, it occurred to the Doctor – he knew exactly where she was.
***
Lizzie had walked for hours – three, four, she couldn’t say – before she hit the busier side of Tokyo. Not quite the centre, she could see the towering skyscrapers in the distance, but these outskirts were busy enough with people and commuters and traffic.
Lizzie always wanted to visit Japan. The second year module on Japanese history was the best twelve weeks of her university life, and she could recite the entire History of Japan YouTube video from scratch. Perhaps, in some subconscious way, she’d always been looking for Meiko.
She touched the plastic inside her pocket. Cheap, tasteless, imported stuff. ‘Knock knock, it’s the United States,’ she almost said aloud, and grinned.
The grin faded as fatigue took hold of her, though. She was tired, she hadn’t slept, she had walked too far…just two minutes rest, that’s what she needed.
She wondered if the Doctor would find her. She felt like a little kid, storming off like that, virtually screaming ‘I hate you!’ like some angry teenager, all the while hoping he would follow her.
After a few minutes of aimless wandering, a bench appeared in front of her, and she eagerly parked herself on it. People walked past her with their children and their dogs and their briefcases, seldom giving her so much a sideways glance. Lizzie wondered if they thought she was a tramp.
She fished the game cartridge out of her pocket again, becoming more used to the strange electrical tingle passing through her digits as she fingered it. The plastic was grey, the label hard to make out, a crudely painted woman in a white gown screeching out the title, ‘Secret of the Dark Yurei’. The title was in Japanese, Lizzie knew, but the TARDIS reformed the words in her mind so that she could understand. Perhaps that meant the Doctor was coming back after all, she thought.
Meiko was in her thoughts, too. Was she trapped in here? Was she spread across all the different cartridges all over world? That was a horrible thought, her childhood friend being spread so thin and far. No wonder she was angry.
But the Doctor’s words echoed about her, too. Meiko was only a little girl, and the thing actualised by the game was clearly a woman. Or, at least, a monster in a woman’s form.
But it was Meiko. Lizzie felt it. How could it not be?
She groaned aloud; all the thinking was making her head swim. Isn’t the Doctor the one who’s supposed to figure this out? She thought. I’m just supposed to ask questions and get rescued.
Her eyes closed. She didn’t intend to sleep, just to shut out the rest of the world for a moment, find a little island of stillness so that, perhaps, things would become that tiny bit clearer.
A few seconds passed. Or, maybe a minute. Perhaps even several minutes. Lizzie opened her eyes, and the world had changed.
It was brighter. I must have slept, she thought. It must be midday by now. Yet the colours weren’t more vibrant, instead seeming fuzzier, bleeding together in a dream-like haze. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, but it didn’t clear.
“I’m going mad,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded the same, at least. But everything else, that was different. The bench was no longer a bench, but a seat, an entirely ordinary plastic chair sprung from nowhere, plucked from a void, and before her was no longer the leafy Tokyo outskirts, but a table, plastic legs holding a frosted glass top.
There was a street beside her now. It was busy and bustling, smaller than a grand metropolis like Tokyo, but all the same people filed past at a considerable pace. All the scenes on the streets were written in English – not the translated English of the TARDIS, Lizzie knew, but genuinely English, her mother language. She was, somehow, back home.
Durham, she realised. Not home, back in Durham. Though maybe they were the same. The town was where she went to university, studying history, and she was sat outside a café she used to visit regularly.
This must be some could kind of memory, or flashback, she thought. But all she could manage to say out loud was, “Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ, what?” a voice said from behind her. A woman’s voice, young, around the same age as Lizzie. She passed from behind her and took a seat opposite Lizzie, setting down two coffees, one for herself and for her friend. “Are you okay?” asked Meiko.
She was no longer a little girl, but grown up, with bright eyes that seemed to smile all by themselves. Her actual smile was wide too, almost a grin; she seemed to have the kind of face that smiled all the time.
“Lizzie?” the grown-up Meiko asked. “What’s up?”
“Oh, erm,” she wanted to bolt, to run away and throw up. But she also wanted to stay, and hug Meiko so tight she might never let go. The more she looked at her, the more real she became, the more sense it made that she was sitting there. “Nothing, honestly. Just…you know.”
Meiko nodded, knowingly, reassuringly. “Drink your coffee, it’ll liven you up a bit,” she said with a mischievous grin. She grabbed her own drink enthusiastically, drinking it without paying any mind to how hot it was, not like Lizzie, who sipped slowly so not to burn her tongue. She was always the bravest of us, Lizzie remembered from her days at the Children’s Home.
Meiko had grown tall, and, if Lizzie were honest with herself…pretty beautiful. Her face was a pleasing oval shape, with a nose at its centre that scrunched when she smiled, all framed by a head of dark hair, almost black.
Her wrists grabbed Lizzie’s attention the most, though. On her left was a tattoo, three pixelated hearts alongside each other. One was empty, showing only Meiko’s skin instead the black outline. The other two were filled with red. Lizzie didn’t know much about videogames, but still, she recognised the lives system from Legend of Zelda. Not that much has changed then, she thought.
Her other wrist, though, was wrapped in a clean white bandage.
Meiko spied her looking. “Yeah, I guess I need a new tattoo, huh?” Lizzie tried to formulate a response, but managed only to trip over a string of syllables, before defaulting to her nervous habit of sniffing and looking at her shoes. “Don’t worry!” Meiko said, reassuring smile still on her face, putting her coffee back on the table. Even in adulthood she seemed the same, forever trying to take care of everyone around her, and neglecting herself in the process it seemed. “Tell you what,” she carried on. “Let’s finish these and go for a wander, just to inject a little excitement into the morning. What do you say?”
“O-okay,” Lizzie replied. “That sounds great.” It might give me time to work what on earth has happened, too, she thought.
But the time never came. Suddenly, they were away from the café, and the sun had moved further in the sky, but the strange, unreal haze settled over the world remained. Now Lizzie and Meiko stood in a park, some kind of elevated arboretum, leaning against a stone railing, looking out to the rest of Durham.
“How did we…?” Lizzie looked around her. It was like she’d teleported, flashed forward in time. This isn’t my world, she realised then. This is somewhere else. The game has transported me.
Meiko looked at her. “We walked here, Lizzie. You really must be knackered.”
“Yeah…yeah I guess so…”
“You didn’t have to stay up in the hospital all night, you know,” Meiko said. Her smiled had faded now, and she was staring out over the city blankly. “I would’ve been okay.”
Lizzie had no memories of staying in any hospital, but that would’ve been impossible to explain. Instead, she only said: “I wasn’t just going to leave you, was I?”
Meiko’s smile returned after that. “There you go!” Lizzie said, easing herself into the banter. “I much prefer to look at that smile.”
“Yeah, me too,” Meiko turned to look at her. “You’re lucky though. You’re pretty even when you’re not smiling.”
“I don’t know if that’s lucky,” Meiko was to Lizzie’s left, with her right, bandaged wrist resting next to her. Gently, Lizzie touched it, running her thumb across the linen, and Meiko turned it over, taking Lizzie’s hand in her own.
“Thank you. Honestly, Lizzie, thank you for staying with me. It means the world.”
“You really don’t have to thank me. It’s just the right thing.”
“Still,” Meiko sighed. “It can be hard, when you feel so lost.”
“Yeah, I know,” Things were starting to make sense in Lizzie’s head. The game, it had taken her to some kind of…unreal reality. A projected world, showing her what Meiko was going through. Or, at least, what Lizzie thought she was going through. “But I’ll help you find your way back.”
“Yeah.” Meiko’s face really was beautiful, a thousand tiny expressions playing across her eyes and eyebrows and lips. She still looked like her friend from all those years ago, transformed into everything Lizzie had wished she’d seen her become. It was overwhelming.
She went to do the thing, sniffing anxiously and looking down. But as she lowered her chin, Meiko’s finger caught it, gently lifting her face back up. She wasn’t leaning on the railing anymore, but standing straight and level with Lizzie.
Then they kissed. It wasn’t anything special, only a light meeting of lips, but enough. It felt like someone running a battery across Lizzie’s mouth.
Maybe I can just stay here, Lizzie thought. Real or not, I could get used to it.
They pulled away, Meiko running her thumb across Lizzie’s jawline. It only lasted a second, but felt like hours.
Then the noise came, and deep wheezing, groaning and thrumming and stirring the air all around them. Meiko didn’t even seem to notice it, but Lizzie recognised the sound immediately: the TARDIS. She looked over her shoulder to see the blue wooden box materialise in the park, perhaps fifty meters behind her.
He did find me. Maybe she should’ve been surprised that the Doctor managed to blunder his way here, but somehow, she wasn’t.
“I’m going to go get a drink or something, real quick,” Lizzie said airily. “Do you want something?”
Meiko shrugged. “I dunno, maybe a coke or something? Just anything with caffeine, really.”
“Alright then. Back in a sec.” She turned away, turning to walk towards the TARDIS, without too much urgency. Behind her Meiko had turned back to gazing over Durham.
The TARDIS doors creeped open, and the Doctor stepped out into the park. The unreal haze of this world didn’t seem to touch him; he was much more defined against the background, bolder in colour. Harsher, in some ways.
“I’ve worked it out,” he said to her, as she arrived at the TARDIS. “You weren’t wrong. Not in a way. I wanted to say sorry.” He looked over her shoulder, spying Meiko. “Is that…?”
Lizzie didn’t need him to finish. “Yeah, I think so,” she looked over too. “But this world…it’s not real, is it? I’d worked that much out, at least. That’s not my Meiko, the one we’ve been looking for.”
The Doctor shook his head. “That’s a reflection of the real Meiko, I think. She’s trapped in the world the game links to. Part of it, like we’re part of ours. But I think she’s drawn from you, mostly. This whole world is.” He looked around him, at the park, and looked impressed that his friend had managed to create all this.
“So, explain. Where are we? If this isn’t our world, the one the game connects to?”
“It’s like…we’re standing on an ember. When the two worlds touched, ours and the games, it created sparks, a little offshoot of heat and light and dimensional energy. A whole new ember world. But they can’t last. Have you noticed time moving faster here? The space between events being shorter?”
Lizzie nodded.
“Embers cool and darken,” the Doctor explained. “This whole world is fading. Soon it’ll be gone, not even a ripple of dimensional energy left.”
“That’s sad.”
“I suppose. But what created this place still exists. And is still worth fighting for, Lizzie.”
Meiko was still looking out, oblivious to what was being said behind her. No, not Meiko, Lizzie had to remind herself. Just an ember. Still, it was hard to watch such a pretty ember die.
“She’ll fade too,” she found herself saying. “Like she was never here. She was never real.”
“She’ll stay in your mind. And the real Meiko can still be found.”
“Will she remember me? The, the ember Meiko, I mean. Will I have just, disappeared from her life? Will she spend her time looking for me?”
“No. No, everything about your universe came here with you. Once you leave, it will to. If she even remains, she won’t remember.”
That was a tiny mercy, at least. The haze was getting stronger now, and she could barely see the city beyond the blur. The world was fading. “She was never real,” she repeated. It was all she could think to say.
“It’s real enough for her. And even if it’s only in your head… that doesn’t make it unreal to you,” the Doctor said, tenderly. “Come on. Your friend is waiting for you.”
Lizzie nodded. I found Meiko once, she thought, and I can do it again.
The Doctor opened the TARDIS doors wide, and she stepped inside.
***
The door clicked behind her, and Lizzie was back in reality. A strange kind of reality, she had to admit; one where a centuries old alien danced about the inside of his blue-box time machine, which happened to be bigger on the inside. Still, if her time with the Doctor had taught her anything, just because something was strange, didn’t mean it was any less true.
I’ve just learned the opposite, too, she thought, sadness at leaving the ember world behind welling up inside her. But she didn’t dwell on it. No, her friend Meiko was still alive, and to let her down just wouldn’t do.
She turned to the Doctor. “So, Meiko’s trapped in this other world. So, we can just go and get her, right?”
The Doctor twirled a knob on the console, and laughed cynically. “If only things were so easy,” he turned to Lizzie. “You took a copy of the game from the warehouse, right? Pass it here.”
Lizzie reached into her pocket, touching the plastic and feeling the charge tingle against her fingers. She threw it underarm to the Time Lord, who caught it perfectly.
“I was able to reach the ember world because you were already there. I was tracking you, so the TARDIS could follow your trace.” He tapped the time rotor; praising it, perhaps. “But I don’t have that for the main world. We need a link to follow, and inroad to the other universe. And then…I can use this!”
Out of nowhere, the Doctor pulled out some strange contraction; it was long and flared like a trumpet, made of green plastic, with blinking lights and copper wires spiralling all along it. “That looks suspiciously like a vuvuzela,” Lizzie said, once it her.
“Yeah, something else I accidentally invented early. I think I was drinking tequila out of this one in 1966.” He shook his head, clearing the memory. “Anyway, this is a proper home-made quantum eraser! Point it at the yurei’s universe and it’ll collapse the wavefunction holding our two realities together. Once that happens, everything there from our universe will be spat back home. We’ll get the children back.”
“Back and alive?”
The Doctor shrugged, not in a dismissive way, but as a suggestion that he genuinely didn’t know. “I hope so,” he said, and that was enough.
“Okay,” Lizzie nodded, new determination welling inside her. “Where do we need to go?”
“Back to the warehouse!” the Doctor shouted, and with his free hand set the time rotor working. The room filled with that familiar old wheezing sound, spiriting them to exactly where they needed to be.
***
Night had come again, and Kido barely paid attention to the road he was driving on. Reckless, he knew, but soon enough it wouldn’t matter. Light streamed past his windows in bands of white and blue and red, not moving themselves, simply holding the impression of the movement of something else. The whole universe was like that, Kido reasoned; the moments of our lives are only ghosts, tiny glimpses of the fading light, stretching from time’s start to time’s end.
The Inspector had awoken in the hospital. Mild concussion, the doctors had claimed, but Kido had discharged himself immediately, heading home to his flat to sleep instead. It wouldn’t do to spend his last night in a hospital ward, garish and unfriendly. No, it had to be his flat; simple and small as it was, it was his, and all his precious memories of Itsumi surrounded him there.
The warehouse was waiting for him. That’s where he would find his daughter, beautiful, laughing Itsumi, transformed into the vengeful spirit, trapped inside that demon game. When he slept, he dreamed of her; sweet dreams, in truth, of her happy childhood days, but they all ended the same way.
He’d left his apartment quickly – on waking, he’d found lingering too painful. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, threw on the same close, and loaded his gun. He locked the door behind him with barely a look back, lest the doubt in his heart grew too great to bear. That couldn’t happen; nine children were relying on him, as well as his daughter.
He threw the gun on the passenger seat, and started driving.
It was a strange feeling, to be endowed with purpose for the first time in years. Being a father without a child was a terrible thing, endless days filled with grief that refused to go away. But now, Kido felt closer to his daughter than in years, even if that feeling was to come with a terrible price.
It will be worth it, he thought. For myself, for Itsumi, for all those lost children.
The warehouse loomed ahead of him, looking more tall and twisted and terrible than before. He’d arrived quicker than he thought he would – how long had he been dreaming on the road?
The place was cordoned off with a yellow police line, so Kido slowed as he approached. A uniformed officer came up to his car window, rapping on the glass roughly. The Inspector lowered it in response, and handed over his ID.
The officer ran his flashlight across the identity papers, scanning left and right. Seconds passed that felt like hours, and Kido feared they wouldn’t let him pass. Then the officer handed him the badge back.
“Apologies, Inspector Kido,” he said, the very picture of contrition. “We weren’t expecting anyone. Are you sure you’re okay to work?”
“I’m fine,” he replied, probably too quickly. “Just something I need to check out. Won’t take long.”
“Of course, Inspector,” the officer lifted the police cordon above the roof of Kido’s car, and he drove on, the two cops sharing a nod as he passed.
The first part was done. The hard part, at least physically. Only my strength stands in the way now, Kido thought.
He pulled up his car not far from the door of the warehouse. No one had gone in since the incident with the yurei, but the building remained open, easily accessible to anyone important enough to cross the police line.
Engine off, seatbelt undone, gun in his coat pocket. Kido closed the door behind him quietly and, checking over his shoulder to make sure no-one was looking, stole away inside the building.
It was pitch black inside, just as before, and Kido had to put his hand on the wall and follow it round, else risk being lost in the inner darkness. Above him he could hear the drip drip drip of the broken gutter, stagnant water plopping from the rusted iron grate above him. That was his goal, his destiny. It took nearly ten minutes, but soon enough the Inspector brushed against the stairwell. The metal scraped his skin, but it didn’t matter; he made his way up.
As before, upstairs was lighter – darkness still reigned, wheeled into every corner so Kido felt trapped in a strange, lightless dimension, but all the same there was an eerie luminosity emanating from the pile of game cartridges. He could seem them clearly.
“Itsumi,” he called out. He was confident no one outside could hear him. No one needed to get hurt. Except for me, he thought. “Sweetheart, I’m here. Where are you?”
He approached the pile of games. ‘The Secret of the Dark Yurei’, it had been called. Kido never knew what people saw in games like those, but then, they weren’t made for him. It wasn’t his world; the place he was made to occupy was shrinking with every moment.
Closer, and closer, and the warehouse was becoming brighter. Just as before, the light began to manifest, a shifting curtain of light, transforming into bricks of colour, building upwards, one on top of the other on top of the other on top of the other, until, at last, the form of the yurei was complete.
Though still, it blurred with every second, white and pink and grey and blue playing up and down it’s body. It looked like the yurei of folklore, for certain: a pale young woman in a white robe, hands limp by her side. The face didn’t stay still long enough for features or expression to be clear, but she was angry, of that much Kido was certain.
“Itsumi,” he said again, as close as her dare come without provoking an attack. Guilt still weighed on his mind for the men injured the last time he taken liberties here. “I’m sorry. I let you down. I should have protected you. I was your father, and I let my little girl down. You have every right to be angry with me. I don’t know how it is you’ve returned, or how you’ve come to connect yourself to that game. Even if you could explain yourself to me, I won’t ask you to. But the children…the children you’ve taken. They must be returned. They’ve done nothing wrong, they have families who miss them. That’s why I’m here. You can have me, and have your peace, but you must let the children go. Is that fair?”
Itsumi didn’t answer. The only response was a continuous flickering of light, like pixels bursting and branching out all around her.
“I hope you can hear me, Itsumi,” he continued, taking one more step towards her. She flickered with anger. “But I can feel you, in there.”
He sat now, crossed legged before the yurei his daughter had become. Her blurring face watched his every move, unseen eyes studying him. And out from his pocket, slowly, so slowly, he drew his gun.
She gave no reaction; a gun couldn’t hurt a spirit, they both new that. It wasn’t intended to harm her, though.
“I’ll do it. I’m not afraid to die. And I’m not afraid of you. You’re my daughter, how could I be? I failed to protect you. I won’t hide from that shame. But I have to know the children will be returned. Please, in whatever way you can, tell me that the children will go home.”
Nothing. Only the angry flickering answered, persisting through the darkness.
Kido nodded. Perhaps she simply couldn’t answer; only rage was left of his sweet daughter, swallowing her voice and laugh and thoughts. That was painful enough, but he couldn’t let it stop him.
He flicked the safety off his gun, and slid his finger onto the trigger. No dwelling, no hesitation, he decided. That would only make things worse.
Inspector Kido breathed deep, and the barrel of the pistol met with the flesh under his chin.
Then came the noise. Ghastly, at first, something that filled his ears and scraped at the inside of his skull. It was a groaning, a wheezing, the laboured breathing of a huge, mechanical lung. But after one or two rasps, the noise softened, the pain and awe replaced with an odd familiarity.
There was light, as well, rising and fading from behind the Inspector. He turned to look, and saw a strange box take shape, simply materialising out from thin air – blue, it was, and strangely luminous, emitting its own soft light to cancel out the harshness of the yurei.
Wood, Kido realised. It’s made of wood. A big blue box, taller than a man, and wide enough to hold three, was appearing from thin air right in front of him. On its roof, a lamp flashed on and off, as if signalling its comings, and beneath that was written in bold, golden characters, ‘Police Public Call Box’.
The police have arrived, Kido thought, and almost laughed.
The yurei that was Itsumi hissed in response to the box, light crackling from its face, but it made no move to attack the foreign object.
The doors opened, spilling yet more white light into the room, and a man stepped out from the box.
“Inspector Kido!” the Doctor said. He was holding some strange, trumpet-like device in his hand. Lizzie stepped out behind him. “What are you doing here?”
“I…That box? What is it?”
He looked over his shoulder. “It’s a police box. Do you not have them over there?”
“Not…really…”
The Doctor shrugged. “I’ll get one sent over to you. They’re pretty handy.”
Lizzie was more serious. “Doctor, he’s got a gun.”
“So he has,” he replied, the humour dying in his voice. “What are you planning on doing, Inspector?”
Kido’s throat was dry. He ran his thumb up and down the cold metal of the gun, grease rubbing off on his skin. “This is something I must do, Doctor,” he turned to look. “That thing is my daughter. I feel it. She died, you see, in a car accident some years ago. I let her down, and now she’s wroth. I must pay my debt to Itsumi, and then she will let go of her anger, and, I hope, the children.”
The Doctor was quiet for a moment. “You see, Lizzie,” he said after a moment. “When you look into the ember, you see things you recognise. Shapes of faces, shadows of people you lost. Just like you thought you saw Meiko, he sees his daughter.”
“What are you talking about? That is my daughter, I can see her right in front of me.”
“How do you know? She’s blurring with every second.”
“She’s the right age. Twenty-three when she died. Her twenty-eighth will be here, soon.”
“A grown woman. She had her own life, Inspector. She wasn’t a child anymore.” As the Doctor said it, the words struck a chord within him. Parenthood was hard - giving a child their freedom was harder.
“She was still my child!” Kido roared. “Why else would she take the children?!”
“Kido, I need you to listen,” the Doctor approached, crouching towards him, and again the yurei hissed. “I know how you feel, truly, I do - but listen to me. Nothing has been taking the children. The games are somehow to linked to another reality. I don’t know how, maybe some kind of cosmic entanglement, or they hold the charge from a bolt of alien lightning. It doesn’t matter, in the end.
“The children who touched the game fell from our dimension into the one the games share in. That yurei, it isn’t anyone’s daughter. It’s just an ember of dimensional energy, the children trying to reach back to our world. All their fear and anxiety, lashing out.”
Kido barely understood. “If it is all that you say, nothing but a freak of science…why take the form of a spirit?”
The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t think I’ll ever work out. Maybe it comes from a universe where emotion and spirituality govern the laws, over maths and physics. Or maybe not. But…I’m sorry, Inspector. I truly am. But that thing is not your daughter. It’s not a ghost, or a spectre, or a vengeful spirit. And whether you believe me or not, I have to stop you from doing this.”
“No, Doctor,” Kido was tired of all this. He wanted to bring an end. “I will not have anyone else shoulder my burden. Step away now, and let me do this.”
Dismay played on the other man’s face. Suddenly weary of the gun, he retreated back to his box, taking up next to a concerned-looking Lizzie.
I didn’t expect an audience for this, he thought. It would take him more to time to prepare, to be ready to leave the world and join Itsumi with the Doctor and Lizzie watching. But, still, he had a duty.
“Inspector?” This time, it was Lizzie speaking up, and making her way over.
He sighed. “I appreciate you trying, Miss Darwin. Truly I do. But you will not dissuade me.”
She didn’t seem to hear that, as she crouched by him. The yurei made no hostile noises this time, Kido noticed. “How old did you say your daughter would be, again?”
“Twenty-three when she died. Twenty-eight next month.”
“A similar age to me, then?”
“I suppose so.”
Lizzie nodded, and looked over to Itsumi. “When I first saw that, I thought it was the person I was looking for, too,” she said. “Meiko, her name is. She’s only nine, though.”
“A little young to be the spirit, then.”
“I suppose,” she turned back to him. “Meiko and I, we were in the same children’s home. I grew up there, but she never got the chance.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay, not your fault. It’s no one’s fault, that’s what the Doctor showed me. If you let him, he can show you too.”
“I wish he could, Lizzie. But it’s too late. I look at her and I know what I see.”
“I felt that too. I was I so sure of what I was seeing. But remember… thoughts can manifest themselves in dark ways. And just because they’re thoughts, doesn’t make them any less worthwhile. I can’t imagine how much you miss your daughter. But like the Doctor said, she was a grown woman. And if she was anything like you, I doubt she’d become a vengeful spirit that steals children.”
Lizzie held out her palm, hand-up. “I’m not asking you to believe me, not right now. Just trust us for two minutes. That’s all. Two minutes.”
Two minutes. Kido looked up to the yurei, to the thing that was his daughter, but, perhaps wasn’t. I was so sure, he thought. But there was a tiny glimmer of doubt in his mind. Two minutes. Surely, he owed this pair two minutes?
His thumb clicked the safety on, and he rested the gun in Lizzie’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, before turning to her companion. “Doctor?”
“Okay,” the man said. He stepped forward, holding out the strange trumpet device in front of him like a gun. The yurei was becoming more agitated, thrashing, spitting sparks. Kido wanted to bolt and run, but Lizzie’s hand on his arm kept him in place. “Let’s defeat the boss.”
The trumpet device thrummed, and a ripple went through the air. The yurei didn’t even seem to register it, only continuing to thrash angrily at the Doctor, and for a moment Kido feared nothing would happen.
But then, the yurei began to glow, brighter and brighter, lighting up like a candle. Kido had to shield his eyes to stop them burning. The light persisted for felt like hours, only ever getting brighter. It’s never going to die, is it? The Inspector thought.
But, eventually, it did, the whiteness shrinking away from the darkness. First, it retreated back into the shape of the spirit, but then turned smaller still, the size and shape of a child. It split like some microscopic organism, the original spitting out two new lights, and then each of those creating more, until…
Nine, Kido realised. Nine shapes.
At last, the light died, leaving the only illumination that which spilled from the Doctor’s box. The yurei was gone, it’s anger disappeared with the light, and in its place stood nine dazed and confused looking children.
One looked at him, a young boy, no more than eleven. “Sir?” he asked, as polite as a Japanese child could possibly be. “What happened? Where are we?”
“Meiko!” Lizzie shouted before he could answer. She was on her feet, running towards a girl at the back, embracing her in the tightest hug Kido had even seen. The girl tried to respond, but her head was buried in Lizzie’s shoulder.
Unbidden, tears crept down the Inspector’s face. After all these months of stress and guilt, it was, finally, over.
I hope I made you proud, Itsumi, he thought.
***
The awe on Meiko’s face was infectious, and through her Lizzie felt as though she too were experiencing the TARDIS for the first time. The little girl wandered around and around the console, analysing each button and leave, her eyes scanning up and down along with the time rotor.
“It’s incredible,” she said. “I believe you, it’s a spaceship. Can it really travel in time?”
“You bet!” the Doctor answered, always pleased to find a new admirer. “Anywhere and everywhere. The Paris Commune, Ancient Greece, or so far into the future that humankind has touched every star in the sky. Absolutely anything is possible.”
Meiko turned her eyes to Lizzie. “So…you really are her? The Lizzie I lived with? All grown up?”
“Yep, I’m me. Really me.”
“Wow, you went and found a time-traveller to help me,” Meiko was smiling now, bright and grateful. “I never thought I’d have a friend like that.”
“You would’ve done the same, I’m sure.”
“So…” Meiko asked. “Does that mean I can go home? Back to the UK?”
The Doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry Meiko, but as far as the universe knows you disappeared from Britain all that time ago. To take you back would be a paradox.” She seemed to understand. “But don’t worry, I’ve contacted UNIT’s Tokyo branch and they’re going to look after you. They have experience with kids who’ve had…weird things happen to them.”
“Raised by government alien fighters? Not many girls could claim that.”
Lizzie had to laugh. Even after all of this – years and years of hurt, from Lizzie’s point of view – her friend from the children’s home hadn’t lost her spirit. “Or…” she’d never have forgiven herself if she didn’t ask. “You could always come with us? Like the Doctor says, it’s the most amazing thing.”
Meiko contemplated for a moment, but then shook her head. “Maybe another time. But you’ve lived your life to this point already, Lizzie. You’ve earned it. I’ve still got all that to come.” She straightened her back. “Come back for me, one day, and I’ll be ready.”
The Doctor grinned. “You’re a smart girl, Meiko, I like you,” he hopped up to the console, flicked some switches, and the ship landed with a soft thud. “Right, just outside the door is UNIT Tokyo. Tell them I sent you, and they should give you anything you want.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
Meiko laughed. “Ice cream for dinner, then,” and with that, she turned for the door. She gave Lizzie one last smile as she left, and a little wave, then she was gone, the TARDIS doors closing softly behind her.
“So, all sorted, then,” the Doctor said, after a beat. “You saved her life, Lizzie.”
“Did I? Seems you did all the hard work.” Her mind went back to her storming off, to her adventure in the other world, to the other Meiko, replaced by the child who had just left, and how her world had died like a cooling cinder.
“I’d never have worked it out without your connection to Meiko. Besides!” he cried, and reached under the console. He grabbed something round and rolled up, and threw it to his companion: a newspaper. “Take a look.”
It was the Yomiuri Shimbun, dated the day after they’d left Tokyo. ‘Children Found in Miracle Incident! Mystery Remains; Police Praised’.
She read the headline twice more. It made her feel weird. “So this was all…pre-destined? We were always going to find those children? This headline…it was already written?”
The Doctor shook his head. “No. No, your actions wrote that headline. By making the choice, you forged the future. There are other possible futures, sure. Places where you were never brave enough to do the right thing. But those places are just sparks and embers, brought into being by you. By the work you do.”
Lizzie ran her fingers across the words of the headline. The ink felt dry, and yet, if the Doctor were to be believed, it had only been freshly printed. By me, of all people, she thought. A future made, and chosen.
She wondered if she should say something profound. But somehow, she knew it wouldn’t quite be appreciated. Instead, she simply rolled the paper back up. Onto the next future, she meant to say, but it seemed the Doctor had already picked that up, and was busy working on the TARDIS, making ready to fly as far away as possible.
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