Saturday, 30th September, 1837
It is, as I write this now, 30 minutes past 10 of the clock. The manor is silent. More silent than it has ever been before in my many days working here as the butler.
I always believed that one day, I would recount my many years of service to the Dun family in some form of published memoirs, hence the diary I have been recording for the entire 43 years I have worked for them, starting off as a footman, and climbing the ranks until I reached butler. It was, as butler, that I presided over the pinnacle of the Dun family and their popularity. It is also as butler, that I have presided over the fall of such a family.
It also seems, that as butler, I have presided over a great and old house that is at the centre of the end of all time.
It is quite a chilling statement, even more so to my own person, as I glance back over the words I have just written. But I tell no lies, nor do I exaggerate. For it was today, Saturday, 23rd of the month of September, year-o-lord 1837, that I discovered that this manor I have worked at for so many years is at the centre of the end of all things. I keep the faith as well as any other man, and yet, I did not believe I would be at the centre of the stories told during the book of Revelation. It appears that I was dreadfully wrong.
Therefore, I see this as a very important tale to recount – not just for my memoirs, but as a tale of the end of time. I shall begin – as I believe this story will be read independently to the rest of my diaries, I shall provide some context to the family, and to my life, as we proceed through the tale.
Lord Dun, ever since the death of his wife, Lady Dun, and the marriage of his daughters to other worthy houses, has taken quite a turn for the worst.
He is quite mad.
The Duns were once one of the most prestigious families in all of England. They were respected, and it was an honour to not just serve them, but to head the workers serving them, and to have a close, working relationship with Lord Dun. He was a powerful, kindly lord – far from the sort you find in the works of dramatists and playwrights.
Though, the premature death of Lady Dun, a fair and happy woman, broke the heart of her husband. Lord Dun was a changed man from that day on, and he retreated into a cruel and nasty fellow. The only reason I dare write such things about him now, is that he is not sane enough to find them, nor sane enough to understand them. Therefore, I believe I am quite safe to write about his Lordship in such a way.
His Lordship can see ghosts.
Fantasies, one may say. But he has seen them for a great many years. And word has got out – and the people do not find the same respect for him as they once used to. It is because of this, that our household has shrunk. Once, we were a large group of staff. Now, there is just myself, and the cook.
At night, Lord Dun would scream. He’d cry of the ghosts, how they were coming for him, and how they were coming for us all.
The other day, it all became too much.
I decided to enlist the help of some ghost hunters.
It is, as I write this now, 30 minutes past 10 of the clock. The manor is silent. More silent than it has ever been before in my many days working here as the butler.
I always believed that one day, I would recount my many years of service to the Dun family in some form of published memoirs, hence the diary I have been recording for the entire 43 years I have worked for them, starting off as a footman, and climbing the ranks until I reached butler. It was, as butler, that I presided over the pinnacle of the Dun family and their popularity. It is also as butler, that I have presided over the fall of such a family.
It also seems, that as butler, I have presided over a great and old house that is at the centre of the end of all time.
It is quite a chilling statement, even more so to my own person, as I glance back over the words I have just written. But I tell no lies, nor do I exaggerate. For it was today, Saturday, 23rd of the month of September, year-o-lord 1837, that I discovered that this manor I have worked at for so many years is at the centre of the end of all things. I keep the faith as well as any other man, and yet, I did not believe I would be at the centre of the stories told during the book of Revelation. It appears that I was dreadfully wrong.
Therefore, I see this as a very important tale to recount – not just for my memoirs, but as a tale of the end of time. I shall begin – as I believe this story will be read independently to the rest of my diaries, I shall provide some context to the family, and to my life, as we proceed through the tale.
Lord Dun, ever since the death of his wife, Lady Dun, and the marriage of his daughters to other worthy houses, has taken quite a turn for the worst.
He is quite mad.
The Duns were once one of the most prestigious families in all of England. They were respected, and it was an honour to not just serve them, but to head the workers serving them, and to have a close, working relationship with Lord Dun. He was a powerful, kindly lord – far from the sort you find in the works of dramatists and playwrights.
Though, the premature death of Lady Dun, a fair and happy woman, broke the heart of her husband. Lord Dun was a changed man from that day on, and he retreated into a cruel and nasty fellow. The only reason I dare write such things about him now, is that he is not sane enough to find them, nor sane enough to understand them. Therefore, I believe I am quite safe to write about his Lordship in such a way.
His Lordship can see ghosts.
Fantasies, one may say. But he has seen them for a great many years. And word has got out – and the people do not find the same respect for him as they once used to. It is because of this, that our household has shrunk. Once, we were a large group of staff. Now, there is just myself, and the cook.
At night, Lord Dun would scream. He’d cry of the ghosts, how they were coming for him, and how they were coming for us all.
The other day, it all became too much.
I decided to enlist the help of some ghost hunters.
The eighth doctor adventures
series 5 - episode 11
the tick of a grandfather clock
written by Peter Darwin
How was Lizzie to tell someone something, that she couldn’t even tell herself?
Surely that was harder than trying to tell someone the impossible? Because at least when you were telling someone the impossible, you had already accepted the impossible thing in your own head. But if there was something very real, that wouldn’t sink into your mind, then surely that was even harder to communicate?
There was a thing.
Something in her mind, and she knew exactly what it was. She was telling herself, over and over, and although she knew it, it just wouldn’t sink in. She couldn’t accept it, no matter how hard she tried. It was bothering her constantly, as if she had her mind clamped down by some heavy chain, and she couldn’t shake it off.
What was worse, was that she had been in this situation for many years. Lizzie had known the thing since she was a teenager, because that’s when it had started to strike. And ever since it had struck, it hadn’t let go – and ever since then she had been trying to make herself accept the truth. And although she was well aware of the truth, it just wasn’t… there. It wasn’t fitting into her brain, as if the puzzle were so nearly complete, and yet the one remaining piece was the wrong size and shape to fit in its spot.
Lizzie nodded in agreement, and slumped back in her chair. She was in the TARDIS library, in the spot she so loved by the window looking out into space. The lamp was not its usual warm self, however – Lizzie had upped the brightness so it seemed more like an interrogation. However, there were no clear answers coming. Instead, the thoughts that she mused over then, would make no sense to anyone, let alone herself. It was all just gibberish, spilling through her mind, and because of that constant spin-cycle of rubbish in her head, she couldn’t do anything – she could barely do anything for more than five minutes without being distracted by the loose ends, the nothing-words, and that incessant need to somehow string them together.
She knew now, however, that the time was now. The stringing together would happen soon, and she decided that she needed to tell the thing to someone, because perhaps that would help it to solidify in her head. Maggie, of course, was already certain of it, and had tried to get something done about it for the few years she could, and had tried to get Lizzie to do something about it in the years she couldn’t. However, provision for dealing with the thing had been dreadful, and when it came to Lizzie dealing with it herself, she had refused, her acceptance of it still not crystallised.
But she was sick of the thing, and the way it hurt her every day. She was sick of everything it had made her do, and of the guilt she’d felt because of those things. Lizzie Darwin had to deal with it, and she decided that to do that, she would need to tell her best friend.
It was time to tell the Doctor.
A few hours later, the sounds of Xanadu echoed around the TARDIS - not long ago the Doctor had had a new set of speakers installed, and ever since then he’d been subjected to Lizzie’s taste in music.
Lizzie was sat on the battered old leather seat, her legs balanced up on the console. She wore a slightly hideous floral shirt that she’d taken a fancy to in some backstreet-summer-shirt-shop on a distant world somewhere, and circular, Harry Potter-esque sunglasses were balanced on her nose, her eyes peering over the rims. Peering over the rims, of course, at him. As she was sat there, her heart was pounding in her chest, and her palms were sweaty, and she felt as if she needed to vomit.
She was petrified. It’s not as if Lizzie was scared of telling him, because she knew that the Doctor would understand. Or at least, she hoped he would (although she was quite hopeful that the small fragment of doubt was merely her being anxious). The sheer terror that bubbled within her was, she deduced, the fear that telling him would cause her to accept herself – and there was very little more terrifying than that.
The Doctor had promised her a beach. A beach at night! Beaches were too hot and too noisy and too crowded and Lizzie, for what it was worth, hated them. But beaches at night - that was a completely different story. Somehow, the time of day could make a great difference as to whether they were actually bearable or not. While a crowded tourist-y beach in the middle of a boiling hot summer’s day was the worst thing in the entire universe ever, beaches at night were beautiful. There was something so calming about them, and Lizzie always felt content – and at that moment, Lizzie needed somewhere to feel content. Although she wasn’t sure that even a beach at night, which could normally sooth her no matter what state she was in, would be able to do anything about her current condition.
Even so, the Doctor’s promise was appealing – a really, really good one! On the edge of a planet on the edge of a solar system on the edge of a universe - from the shore, one could look out over the edge of nothingness, and the stars shone even brighter, and occasionally, if everything in the universe was perfectly balanced, one could see another universe there, glimmering in the darkness, where billions of billions of billions and more billions of people were living their lives. But as she thought of the universe being perfectly balanced, all it brought her back to was the imbalance of her mind, and how that would poison all of those stars.
Until the Doctor had told them they’d found something more exciting to do.
Lizzie probably should’ve been disappointed, but she wasn’t. She’d rather save the beach for a day when she didn’t feel awful, and was sure that her mind wouldn’t be all over the place. “Okay.”
There was a brief silence and the Doctor looked at her, a guilty look on his face. “It’s not okay, is it?” he said, as he played about with some lever on the TARDIS console to take them to wherever they were going to go instead of the beach-at-the-edge-of-the-universe.
“Nope. It’s fine,” she smiled, taking her legs down from the console, and folding up her sunglasses. And the Doctor could see she was being honest.
“I promise that this is really important.”
“What’s happened?” she asked, walking over to the console and leaning over opposite him.
The Doctor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crisp, white envelope. There was a stamped, ink seal on it. She looked at it, waiting for him to continue.
“It’s a letter.”
“... I can see that.”
“Someone has managed to post something to the TARDIS!”
Lizzie hadn’t ever thought about whether there was a postal service in space, nor whether the TARDIS had a letterbox. She assumed that it didn’t, because how would one post the letters? Fly really close to the box and lean out the window and put them through? Probably not.
“Can I…?” she asked, reaching over for the letter. He gave it to her, and she unfolded it.
Dear Doctor,
Friday 29th September 1837
I am writing to you on behalf of Lord Dun, current holder of the title and of the Dun estate. It will be of no surprise to you, considering his Lordship’s mental state, that I have resorted to asking for such help, but it appears I have no choice.
I do not know who you are. In fact, it is the most ridiculous thing of me to do, to possibly ask for your assistance, for we know that the supernatural is not real, and there is nothing that you can be, but for a farce.
However, I assure you it is not.
We require a paranormal investigator, effective-immediately. You came recommended to me. They said you would not judge me for asking for such help, nor would you judge his Lordship. They said you were not a liar, nor will you deceive me.
They said you could help.
There are ghosts at the manor. They wake his Lordship in the night. They terrify him. They say he is quite mad, but these spirits just make his madness ever the more volatile.
You will, of course, be paid a great sum, for your services, and for your silence.
Yours sincerely
Robert Carson
Butler
Lizzie handed the letter back to the Doctor, who pocketed it again. It was, to be fair, quite a difficult prospect to resist. A butler from the 19th century who had somehow managed to post a letter to the TARDIS about ghosts haunting a mad old man? Sounded pretty cool. And hell, perhaps someone madder than her would make her feel about herself (she knew she was disgustingly selfish, and at that moment, she hated herself even more).
“What’s interesting,” Lizzie observed, deciding to play at detective instead of worrying. “Is that he himself doesn’t believe in ghosts.”
The Doctor grabbed his coat, and walked towards the doors.
“You’re too good at this.”
When the Doctor pushed open the doors, they were met with a great lashing storm. He grabbed his umbrella and opened it, and the two of them stepped out into the rain.
They had arrived at the bottom of a long, long, gravel driveway, stretching for what seemed like forever ahead of them. At the far end, was a great, big, ‘one day I’ll be owned by the National Trust’, stately home. When Lizzie turned around, she saw massive wrought-iron gates looming above her. On the other side, there was a cobbled road, winding down into what seemed like a quaint little village. The village was obscured in the mist and the rain, though.
Autumn was here, it seemed. They began their trek down the driveway towards the big house. Old oak trees lined the path, and they had started to shed their leaves for the winter. Many of them were a mixture of sunshine-oranges and yellows and burgundies and brand-new greens of nature and hope and freshness – greens that weren’t new anymore, because the summer was over. In fact, the newness had grown old now. Finally, it had settled down. Every time a gust of wind blew, as well as throwing rainwater in their faces, one or two of the leaves would fly from their branches, off into wherever the wind would take them. There was a melancholy to the world, and as the season of death crawled on Lizzie couldn’t help but feel especially dejected by it. Wherever she looked, she just saw the bleakness and the greyness, as if the life had somehow been… sucked out.
As they approached the house (though ‘approached’ makes it sound as if they were any closer – due to the sheer length of the driveway, they were not), they could hear the wind singing with the chimneys on top of the house. There were a great many chimneys, but it was a very big house – there were probably more fireplaces in there than Lizzie had seen in her entire life. As they got closer, the mist began to clear, just a little bit – there were windows as well. Lots and lots of windows. Except, white curtains were draped across the inside of all of them, and nobody could see in. Which also meant nobody could see out. It looked like an old-fashioned house from her time, one that nobody had touched or been in for so many years.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Lizzie asked the Doctor as they walked, watching the droplets fall sadly off the rim of the umbrella in front of them.
“Yes. Normally I don’t, but perhaps in this incarnation, I’ve finally seen the light.”
“Yeah…”
“Do you?” the Doctor asked her.
She didn’t respond, because that question was a whole different and complicated kettle of fish. Instead, she pretended to be looking at the old man who stood in one of the upstairs windows of the house, his head peering around the edge of the curtain with thin, wrinkly fingers curled around, grasping the fabric. An old man who was actually there, but Lizzie exploited his appearance to shunt attention off herself.
The Doctor clocked her investigation. “Ah. I should think that’s the mad lord…”
The lord shrunk back around the curtain, disappearing off into the darkness of the house. Lizzie felt sorry for him – the amount of people, in that grim, Victorian day and age, who would have ridiculed him for being able to see ghosts. Even his own butler didn’t seem to believe his boss.
They walked, arm in arm, down the drive, through the rain. Despite the weather, it was a beautiful day. Perhaps it was the weather that made it all the more beautiful. Puddles lapped up at their feet, splashing over the Doctor’s scruffy old brown boots and Lizzie’s converse. The drive was fast becoming a quagmire – by the end of the day, it would certainly be like a sea of mud.
Eventually, they came to the end of the drive. There was silence. Normally (or, at least, on period dramas), there was at least some noise from a huge house like this. It always felt as if the staff were constantly on the go, whenever Lizzie had watched Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs and stuff. Though, she knew whitewashed period dramas were not the best way to gauge historical fact. Regardless of this, however, the house seemed in tune with the autumnal atmosphere. Dead… or dying.
The Doctor pounded on the front door, and they could hear the sound echo in some hollow hall inside. Nothing happened, for a good few minutes, and the two of them were left out on the doorstep, watching leaves sullenly skulk down from the skies. Eventually, they heard shoes tapping against a floor inside – marble, perhaps – and then the almighty wooden door swung open.
The man who stood in the doorway was not a small man – though he seemed it, in comparison to the door, and to the whole house. Dressed to perfection in the garb for a butler of a great house, his posture and stance indicated that he took his position very seriously.
It was then that after several years of watching period dramas, Lizzie realised what was about to happen.
“You should have come in the back way,” the butler said, as if he were following a script.
The Doctor turned to Lizzie, and Lizzie turned to the Doctor, and after clocking each other’s glances they had to look away from each other, to avoid bursting into laughter. Thankfully Cioné wasn’t there to be a bad influence.
“I’m sorry?” the Doctor joked. “I didn’t mean to disappoint you, we’re the ghost hunters.”
“And besides,” Lizzie continued. “He’s married.”
They both sniggered – something that Lizzie found especially refreshing, as she expected the time for sniggers to perhaps be over sooner rather than later. Then, the man who Lizzie assumed was Robert Carson, butler of this fine manor, muttered a “come in” to the two of them. The Doctor swung past, and Lizzie smiled and followed. Chequered marble tiles covered the floor, and a chandelier hung from the ceiling, so precariously that it seemed as if even the smallest gust of wind could send the mass of crystals catapulting down to the floor. A stairway, almost wide enough to drive a carriage down, leapt up from the centre of the hall, and split into two, leading up to the higher wings of the house.
The Doctor was already admiring one of the great paintings hung up on the wall. It pictured a violent scene, of a man falling into a rush of waves and foam and seawater, and clawing his way to the surface, desperate for breath. He ran his finger across it, and a layer of dust came off, the width of an average-sized slice of cheese.
“Apologies,” said Carson, deciding not to bother about the two peculiar people who had just wondered into the house of a great lord via the front door. “There isn’t much time for me to dust nowadays. I try and get a maid in at least once a month, but even she’s… reluctant.”
“This is a big house, no?” the Doctor walked back over to the butler. “Don’t you have… staff?”
Carson gave him a bemused look – not his first bemused look of the last five minutes – and stammered a few words, that were meant to sound like ‘how do you not know?’.
“We’re not from around here,” the Doctor said. “We’re… out of the loop, shall I say…”
“We were once one of the finest houses in all of England,” Carson began, while Lizzie was internally screaming nobody cares. “Because of his lordship’s madness, the number of servants decreased dramatically. Now, there is only myself, and the cook.”
No staff, and he’d still wanted them in the back way. Mr Carson was clearly up on Victorian etiquette.
The hall of the house was not walked much, it seemed. The dust was visible in the light streaming in through the front door, and there was a musty smell – the sort that one would expect to find in old houses – except the sort that they would expect to find in an old house when it’s actually old, and not when it’s being lived in.
“Why did you stay?” the Doctor asked the butler. Carson looked around, as if he were looking for someone to answer for him.
“I – I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I felt loyal, I suppose. This family have given me employment for 40 years. It would not feel right to throw it back in their faces.”
The Doctor gave the butler a smile – perhaps it was a smile of understanding, or one of reassurance. Lizzie wasn’t sure.
“Firstly, the lord isn’t mad,” the Doctor said.
“I understand that this is your line of work, but, really –,” Carson began, in his deep, rumbling voice, before the Doctor interrupted again.
“Ghosts are real, Mr Carson.”
“That’s not possible –”
It definitely is, Lizzie thought to herself.
“I didn’t believe in them myself until I saw your letter,” the Doctor continued, pulling it out of his jacket pocket and scanning over it again, as if he were checking that everything was in order.
“But you’re a – a paranormal investigator! How can you not believe in ghosts?” Carson spluttered, leaning against the bannister. He was an old man, one who, with the sheer amount of work he was doing, would probably spend a large amount of time feeling extremely tired.
“Not really,” the Doctor admitted. “But look! I deal with aliens, I thought, why not ghosts? Because, when I saw this, it was just too difficult to resist. Also, there’s a gigantic gash in space and time in your drawing room.”
No surprise there, then, Lizzie thought. The Doctor could never resist a giant gash in space and time, and for once, she was thankful for it. She watched as he reached into his satchel, and pulled out the sonic screwdriver, holding it up in the dusty, stale air. Carson glanced at it, before shaking his head. He’d already had quite enough for one day, and had reached the stage of not even bothering to question it. Lizzie had been in his shoes frequently.
“Right. You seem to know what you’re both doing,” Carson murmured, turning away from them.
“Mr Carson,” the Doctor interrupted. “Why don’t you believe him?”
“Hmm?” Carson responded, in a way that suggested he didn’t have an answer, and was merely stalling for time. “Because ghosts are ridiculous. And not real.”
“Why are they ridiculous?” the Doctor strode up closer to the butler.
“Well… dead people walking! And let’s be proper here, who has ever seen a ghost!” Carson chuckled, expecting the Doctor to chuckle with him, before stopping awkwardly as he realised the Doctor was going to do no such thing.
“I can assure you, Mr Carson. Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not real. And I hope that when all this is over, you, and especially all of your staff, are very, very good to his lordship.”
Lizzie breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
“And why would that be?” Carson squared up to him.
“So you make amends for how ignorant you are. Now please – would you mind showing us to the drawing room? It would be greatly appreciated.”
***
It was not long before the Doctor and Lizzie were sat in matching deckchairs. As they had been prepared for their trip to the beach, it was not a hassle to retrieve them from the TARDIS. The Doctor had also donned a threadbare, beige fisherman’s hat, and a holey tan jacket with little embroidered fish – apparently, the set had been waiting in the TARDIS wardrobe for years, and hadn’t been used. It was fitting, supposedly, as the Doctor was also wielding a fishing rod, currently angling for something in the great Persian rug. Except, instead of a fly, or a maggot, or any other form of bait, a strange, glowing-green orb dangled above the carpet, its brightness constantly throbbing.
“And… you’re sure the glasses are necessary?” Lizzie pushed her pair higher up her nose.
They were also both wearing pairs of glasses with bright, neon blue lenses, like blue sunglasses.
“I told you,” the Doctor sighed. “To maximise our chances of seeing anything, we need to be able to see dimension shifts in the air.”
Lizzie shut up then, deciding not to say anything else in case he got grumpy.
They both looked quite a sight, with their glasses, the Doctor in his fisherman’s gear and fishing rod and Lizzie in her Hawaiian shirt and with her Walkman.
“And that… the rod,” she braved. “That should help attract them, yeah?”
“The ecto-rod 4000. Yes – the latest in paranormangling technology.”
“Is that a thing?”
“Yes,” the Doctor shrugged, not looking away from the lime-green ball of light in front of him. It swayed gently from side to side, and Lizzie found it quite therapeutic to watch. “Humans, you’re all horror movies and occasionally ghostbusters. But in reality, it’s nothing like that,” the Doctor swung the rod back, and recast the line. “This is where it’s really at. Oh, before I forget, check my satchel.”
Lizzie took his satchel and opened it. “What am I looking for?”
“A plastic tub. It should be there.”
Lizzie began the process of rifling through his bag, the sheer untidiness of it all irritating her. She picked her way through a battered wallet, some keys (one of which was very big, made out of wrought iron and painted a bright neon pink), a chewed pencil and a diary, and she grimaced as she saw a half-eaten apple. “I can’t see it.”
“It’s in the pocket.”
“Which pocket…,” she murmured as she unzipped one of the interior pockets.
“No, not that one,” the Doctor said, keeping one eye on the orb, and another on Lizzie. “The one on the right.”
“This one?” she said, starting to unzip another.
“No, no, the one below it.”
“This bag is big...” she murmured, as she finally found the right pocket.
“Bigger on the inside,” he explained. She didn’t say anything, as she reached inside the pocket and found the Tupperware box he’d asked her to look for. “Now, if you open it up…”
Lizzie did as she was told, removing the lid of the box, and then recoiling from the utterly disgusting smell emerging from the inside.
“I’ve brought some sandwiches,” the Doctor said, and Lizzie tried her best to look grateful. “There’s cheese, pickle, tuna and gooseberry, and ginger, bacon, prawn and powdered milk.”
Lizzie eyed up the sandwiches, wondering what had ever happened to the man with the supposed refined tastes. “Thanks… I think I’ll save mine for later.” She put the box back into the Doctor’s satchel.
“For future reference,” the Doctor started. “Favourite sandwich filling?”
“Hmm,” Lizzie thought to herself. A good question, for she loved a good sandwich, and she loved a variety of different fillings. “I love cheese and pickle –”
“You’ll love the cheese, pickle, tuna and gooseberry –”
“ – I’m sure I will,” she murmured under her breath. “But honestly, there’s this… chain of restaurants on Earth, called Pret a Manger. And they do the most amazing cheese and pickle baguettes. It’s like… really thick slabs of mature cheddar –”
“Ohh,” the Doctor sat back, dreaming of the cheese, his mouth watering.
“And the pickle is lovely, and there’s roasted tomatoes and red onions and mayo, and oh, it’s delicious.”
“You know – actually, pass me the box, would you, I’m starving.”
Lizzie reached into the satchel and took out the box again, opening the lid and offering them to the Doctor. The Doctor reached in to take one, before hesitating, his hands hovering in mid-air.
“Actually, can you just get the napkins from the…”
His voice trailed off as Lizzie reached back into the satchel.
“Yep…,” he saw her find them. “Yes, those are the ones. Just…”
Lizzie opened up the plastic packaging and passed them over to him.
“Brilliant… don’t want to get the ecto-rod too sticky, it’ll mess up the reeling system. Now for the sandwiches…,” he wrapped his hands in the napkin, and as Lizzie passed him the box, he took one of the not-particularly-desirable ginger, bacon, prawn and powered milk sandwiches. It was on a seeded loaf.
“Enjoy…”
“Mmm,” the Doctor wiped a sprinkling of ginger from his top lip, closing his eyes and lying backwards, letting the beautiful, fishy, meaty taste wash over him. Lizzie grimaced and looked back at the fishing rod. “Iris makes great sandwiches.”
“Oh yes?” Lizzie enquired, turning away from him as the smell of prawn got too much. “How is Iris?”
“She takes after me, in that she’s one of life’s free spirits.”
Lizzie nodded, aware of the fact that it didn’t take a genius to work it out, but that the Doctor was probably oblivious to it anyway.
“She’s doing this module as part of her course,” the Doctor continued. “And she hates it. The field work is more her thing.”
Lizzie smiled, and it was amazing how kids grew and found their place. She remembered Iris when she was so small, and was just doing what kids did, and now she was all grown-up and her own, brighter-than-bright individual. She dreamt longingly of her – they’d have to meet up again soon, as it had been way too long.
Whenever they caught up, it was that kind of relationship when they could just pick things up again instantly. She looked back on Iris’ childhood fondly, however – the days when she’d been able to enjoy the company of someone who was just so happy. Lizzie envied those days. She wanted some for herself, but with every passing day, anything like that seemed so far away.
Was now the moment to tell him? Tell him about the thing. After all, there was a brief spell of silence, perhaps now, while they were on their leisurely ecto-fishing trip, would be the perfect moment. But she knew that there would be no perfect moment, because every time she came to tell the Doctor, she backed out, telling herself it wasn’t the right moment. With that mindset, there wouldn’t ever be the right moment. She would have to tell him, but she just couldn’t do it.
Oh, what the hell.
“Doctor –”
“This is –,” he spoke at the same time, checking his watch. “Sorry,” he backtracked. “You go.”
“No, no, don’t worry.”
“No, I was just saying it was awfully boring. What were you going to say?”
Lizzie couldn’t do it now. It’d have to wait. She should’ve just done it, why couldn’t she have just done it. And now she was telling herself not to be so hard on herself, but her mind just found itself going around in circles, as it always did. Lizzie side-lined it, which in fact meant use part of the brain stressing about it until she could be bothered to confront it.
“Oh, haha, I was just going to say Iris takes after you.” And Lizzie wasn’t lying – she could see both Iris’ mum and dad in her. “I mean,” Lizzie continued. “I don’t know what the other ‘yous’ are like,” she was, of course, referring to his other regenerations. “But I think an inability to sit still is probably a common theme.”
“I disagree,” the Doctor said, looking thoughtful. “I can easily sit still, as long as I’m doing something. Like a good book, for example. Nothing better than a good book.”
“Yeah…,” Lizzie definitely agreed with that one, glancing down at her bag and spying the book she was flicking through at the moment. She was still near the beginning, and she’d been reading it for weeks. It was unlike her, though – especially since she started travelling with the Doctor. The sluggish progress was much more reminiscent of her days back in Dunsworth.
She looked over at him, and she realised she hadn’t dared to imagine what the other ‘hims’ were like. To her, there was just ‘him’. The Edwardian gentleman, a man of the arts, with a heart of gold, but with a sliver of ice somewhere inside him. A family man at heart, a charmer and an introvert, an emotional chap, all while having a shocking sandwich taste.
“What are the other Doctors like?” she asked, randomly, perhaps hoping for a story to take her mind off herself. Then she blushed, and started to wonder whether that was a question like asking a woman her age, or something.
“Mad.”
Nothing changes.
“Well,” the Doctor pulled out an old diary, with Something-year-old Diary emblazoned on the front. Lizzie didn’t actually know how old he was, and it seemed that he didn’t either.
He flicked through, and presented her with a picture of a man. He was older, a curmudgeonly grandfather, and he was stood beside an Aztec Queen. The photo had yellowed, and was starting to fade, and the edge was slightly creased, having been trapped inside this extensive record of the Doctor’s life for who-knows how long.
“This was the first me. The original, you might say.”
He looked almost-scary, but there was a golden twinkle in his eye as well.
“You’ve aged well,” she acknowledged, not sure what else to say, because there weren’t really words or any kind of social conduct to deal with a situation such as this. “But… you look lovely.”
“That’s me, and…,” he flicked through, looking for another photo. “That’s Susan, my granddaughter.”
Grandchildren? The time travelling had grown too complicated for her to even grasp.
“I know,” the Doctor acknowledged. “I applied for Jeremy Kyle, they told me it was too complicated.”
She laughed, and the Doctor looked at her, a serious look on his face.
“Wait, you actually did?” she shut up immediately.
“Jeremy’s an alien. Isn’t it obvious?”
“Oh…,” she thought back to the brief times she’d watched Jeremy Kyle on the TV and selfishly appreciated the fact that there was somebody out there who had a life more complicated than hers. “Anyone other TV presenters who are aliens?”
“Piers Morgan is a renegade Time Lord. He ran the journalism sector on Gallifrey, and was exiled following a series of inappropriate reports he published.”
Lizzie believed him – and she was not sure what was more terrifying – the fact that Piers Morgan had not changed ever, or the fact that one day, he’d regenerate.
The Doctor flicked through the diary again, stopping at a page with a small gentleman, sporting a bowtie and wearing a pair of tartan trousers. He was holding a device – and at second glance, it appeared to be a recorder. Lizzie observed that he looked like a Beatle.
“Aww. He looks sweet,” she smiled, looking at his impish smile.
“He was – I liked being him. I liked being everyone. But number 2 was definitely one of the most charming. Also I had the best bromance –”
The Doctor caught sight of Lizzie’s eternal, never-ending bout of cringing, and agreed that he would never say ‘bromance’ ever again.
“I was a bit boring though, either dealing with some alien siege or the Cybermen. But always charming. Always fun. Those days were good.”
The next page displayed a man with a frilly shirt and a glaring look. A dashing dandy, it seems.
“You wouldn’t have liked him,” the Doctor grimaced.
“Why not?” she couldn’t imagine ever disliking an incarnation of the Doctor.
“He voted for Maggie Thatcher.”
She hadn’t ever had any incarnation of the Doctor down as a Tory. Then again… the frills.
“Yes... I lost my way a bit. Always fancied himself a bit of a Bond,” the Doctor turned the page, and there was a picture of a bright yellow car, and of a girl sat in the back, dressed in a thick, fur coat.
“She looks lovely,” Lizzie smiled.
“That’s Jo. And she was. She lived such a happy life after me. And that, Lizzie, is Bessie.”
“Who? There’s only two of you in the photo…”
“The car was called Bessie.”
Lizzie tried very, very hard not to laugh, and failed miserably.
“What?”
“I just – I never had you down as a… a car enthusiast.”
The Doctor looked around sheepishly, as if it were a period in his life he would rather forget. She nearly asked him if he had a garage, but decided not to.
“I appeared on Top Gear with Bessie. I presented Top Gear for several years, until I got sacked following a fracas.”
She jokily wondered if he’d punched a producer.
“I punched a producer,” he said, and she sighed, because it was exactly what she should’ve been expecting. “He was an alien, and nobody believed me. So I punched him, and broke his shape-shifter technology. Turns out the reason there was no hot food was because the creature could only consume roasted steak.”
Okay…
The next incarnation, she thought, looked like her kind of guy – a great, flowing scarf, with a long, grey coat, and a wide-brimmed hat balanced on his head. Black curls billowed from underneath. Whacky and bohemian, and a twinkling smile that could charm anyone. This man seemed very Doctor-ish, but she didn’t know whether that was possible. People didn’t usually have different incarnations. Except weirdly, at the same time, they did.
She’d also taken quite a fancy to his scarf. And the hat. This version definitely had the best sense in clothing.
“I had great fun then,” the Doctor smiled. “Apart from the bit I let the Daleks live, that was awful. But still, it was a good time. I made a lot of enemies too…”
“Oh?”
“To be fair, I did have a tendency to be simultaneously popular whilst also pushing the boundaries, perhaps. That wound up a few.”
The Doctor seemed like the sort of guy who was very good at attracting controversy.
“And this,” the Doctor turned the page again. “Is my Sarah Jane. Oh, Lizzie, you’d love Sarah Jane.”
She looked like a kind woman, but one with fire and passion as well. The sort of woman who would not take no for an answer, but was also deeply lovely at the same time, and would inspire so many.
The next page displayed a man who was much younger, and wore cricket whites, with a stick of celery on his lapel. He looked like the kindest, and the most amicable incarnation yet. He was surrounded by three people as well – two women and a man, barely more than a boy.
“You look so happy there.”
“I suppose I had a family, in a way. Even so, I was terribly boring during that time. Insipid was my middle name.”
Lizzie nodded in understanding, again reminded that the two of them were similar.
“Probably the cricket,” the Doctor tried to lighten the not-so-awkward silence between the two of them. Such silences had dissipated since their earlier adventures, and Lizzie laughed.
“I never had you down as a sportsman.”
“I’m not.”
“Neither am I,” Lizzie admitted. She sighed – even the thought of the boredom of exercise made her want to sleep. “Even so. Dunsworth House, table tennis champion.”
“You didn’t?” the Doctor looked at her.
“Battled my way fiercely through every round,” she thought back to that day. It was boiling, deep within the heat of summer, and it was towards the end of her time at the home. Pat had organised the tournament, just to bring them all together, or something. And after complaining internally for half an hour, she eventually agreed, and fluked her way to the top.
The next page showed the Doctor’s best recreation of ‘Joseph and his Technicolour Dream Coat’.
“There’s no justification for this,” the Doctor turned the page straight away. “I wasn’t that much of a moron, really – people just don’t remember the good stuff. Same for me, to be honest – I look back on those days and remember monsters that looked like – anyway…”
“I’d quite like the coat,” Lizzie was also admiring the cat broaches. She also fancied the umbrella of the man on the next page – short, he was, with a question-mark pullover.
“A dark horse, was the most recent me,” the Doctor’s most recent incarnation grinned back at him with a clownish smile. “Looks like a prat, but was actually a master-manipulator. Good days, those. Underrated in my own memory.”
The different Doctors were very different, perhaps – Lizzie’s Doctor wouldn’t be good at manipulating people. She thought so, at least.
“And then there’s me,” the Doctor closed the diary, and slipped it back into his coat pocket. He sat there, and suddenly the two of them felt very alone. It seemed definitive – they were right up to date, the end of the story. Nothing more to recap – only more to create. There was probably something deep she could say to respond to it, but she just sat and imagined what it would be like to change your face so much, and she found the idea strangely familiar. People changed.
They had both changed.
“Oh my goodness,” the Doctor took one look at her Walkman, and opened it up, looking at the tape inside. “This song…”
“Hang on a sec,” Lizzie reached into her bag and pulled out another pair of headphones, plugging them into the second jack. She handed them to the Doctor, and he slipped them on. She put hers’ on well.
And suddenly, the voice of David Bowie was steadily rising in pitch.
In unison, the Doctor and Lizzie began to sing.
“Let’s dance.”
“Put on your red shoes and daaance the blues.”
The Doctor began to do a little sway from side-to-side, and Lizzie looked down at her red converse.
“Let’s dance.”
“To the song they’re playin’ on the radio.”
The Doctor found himself clicking his fingers along with the beat, and Lizzie swayed her head back and forth. They were somewhere else, a brand-new dimension – the music was like the TARDIS, transporting them to a brand new place, and a brand new time – and she felt herself leave her fears and anxieties behind. Now she was somewhere new and unfamiliar, but as they’d both heard the song before, so familiar at the same time. A better place, unfamiliar because of its happiness. As they danced together, it seemed even more alien – neither of them had done it before, and so the untrodden territory felt even more brilliant.
“Let’s sway.”
“While colour lights up your face.”
The Doctor was smiling, more so than Lizzie had ever seen him before. Euphoria had spread across his cheeks, and he was grinning the cheesiest grin. If Carson were to walk in now, he would ridicule them – after all, Lizzie was wearing a hideous Hawaiian shirt, and the Doctor was dressed like a fisherman, and they both wore blue sunglasses, and they were singing stupendously loudly. And yet they kept dancing, allowing the rhythm and the lyrics to bring them both closer.
“Let’s sway.”
“Sway through the crowd to an empty space.”
And the house was quiet, but for the sounds of their voices. The drawing room was almost like a bubble, and they were both trapped inside its great walls of song and dance.
They sang and danced (though it was kind of impossible because of the headphones, which they both kept stumbling over), for the rest of the song, and then they both collapsed in the deckchairs, laughing uncontrollably.
The Doctor cheered, and wiped the sweat from his brow. “That song is a classic.”
“One of my all-time favourites,” Lizzie knew all the lyrics, probably backwards as well. It was a song she had played during darker times, and it didn’t feel right, because of the great disharmony between the joy in the song and how she was feeling. But because of that, it was, perhaps, an escape. As she looked up, however, there was that crushing feeling of reality seeping back in again.
The Doctor’s mind had wandered, drifting back to the iCruiser. “I wonder how they’re doing on floor 80.”
Lizzie thought back to the evening when the Doctor had dared her to dance to Girls Just Want To Have Fun, and he’d ridiculed her because he said she wouldn’t do it, but she did it. And it was the best fun she’d had ever. It was the happiest she had been in a very long time.
Now the music had ended, the house seemed even quieter, apart from the constant tick of the grandfather clock. Both of them wanted the music back.
Time passed. Both of them talked, about whatever. Nothing clever or interesting or deep, just random stuff. The clock in the corner kept ticking. At times, Lizzie forgot what they were even doing there – but always in her mind was that she should tell him. With each random anecdote they each shared, she knew that the next thing she mentioned, should be the thing. But still she couldn’t pluck up the courage, and instead focused on the sheer absurdity of sitting in an antique drawing room with a fishing rod. At one point, she took the ecto-rod from him, and the Doctor showed her how to use it. And they would swap back and forth, taking it in turns. Then she’d said she was going to put on her headphones and try and get some sleep, even though she knew she wouldn’t get any sleep. She just wanted to listen to some music and forget about the world.
After a while, though, she slipped off her headphones.
“You mind if I go for a walk?”
The Doctor shook his head. “No – go for it.”
So, Lizzie stood up, and made her way out of the drawing room. The house was a maze, and she allowed herself to just trail meaninglessly down the corridors. After all, that was all life was. No directions, no meaning, no nothing. All that could be done, was to walk, and to grin and bear any misfortune that arose because of it. It was dark within the mansion, as none of the gas lamps were lit, barring those in the drawing room, and night had settled, meaning the only light came from that of the moon streaming through the windows.
If one were on a conventional ghost hunt, it would’ve been rather terrifying. Occasionally, a floorboard would give an eerie moan, or she’d glance and see a painting of a terrifying old man in mediaeval frills, whose beady acrylic eyes would follow her as she crept through the cramped, twisting building. Yes, a notable aspect of the architecture was how small and poky the upstairs was – like a rabbit warren, twisting and turning and worming, in stark contrast to the almighty halls of downstairs – and even in contrast to the drawing room. She did wonder whether it was, in fact, the darkness changing the way she saw things, as if it were manipulating the world around her and allowing things to hide in the shadows.
However, none of this scared Lizzie. The reason she had decided to retire for a walk through the house was to try and focus on telling him about the thing. Although she’d told herself now wasn’t the time, she knew it had to be now, for the reasons that she had been listing in her head.
1. They were such good friends, and they had come so far together. It had been a long time since she saw him out on the street corner, sat beneath the lamplight. The two of them had been alone, and now they had a family. And through this, they had grown closer. He was her best friend and she thought, perhaps, he deserved to know. At the same time, she thought it was none of his business at all, and she firmly maintained this – but her brain was silly and did what it wanted, and had settled on believing that she wasn’t comfortable keeping something like this from him 2.
2. Keeping things from people was her MO, and although she was okay with that, it had got to a point where, with certain things, it had begun toxifying her own thoughts and she felt the desperate need to get this one off her chest. She had declared that she was awfully stupid for not doing anything about it sooner. But eh – she’d been too scared. Understandable
3. And when she said it had begun toxifying her own thoughts, she meant that on multiple levels. The thing was ruining her. It had crept inside long ago and it had been making her happiness rot and wither ever since. All this time, she’d just lived with it, letting the rot ruin everything it touched – and that included the outside world. It had destroyed her life, and she was sick of it.
4. She checked the scars on her arm. Still very much there, from days she’d rather forget, but would never be able to forget.
5. Also, she’d googled it and WikiHow had suggested telling someone was a good place to start.
Her list stopped, partly because she was quite certain she’d exhausted her entire list of good reasons to tell the Doctor about the thing, but also because she’d just walked past a room, and from the inside, she was almost certain she could hear someone crying. Within an instant, she’d turned around, and knocked on the door. There was no response, but the sobbing persisted, and perhaps quicker than was appropriate, Lizzie shoved the door inwards, to see, curled up in the armchair in the corner of the room, was a little old man.
He looked up as she walked in.
“Erm… hi,” Lizzie murmured.
“Who – who are you?” the man spluttered, making a move from his chair – except, he quickly sat back, taking deep gulps of breath. Lizzie immediately realised that this had probably been a bad idea, but she decided she couldn’t just leave when someone was crying. With that in mind, Lizzie walked a bit further over towards the Lord.
“I’m… erm, I’m Lizzie. We’re here to… hunt the ghosts.”
At that moment, the man almost lurched forward, as if she’d said something that had riled him up. It was, obviously, concerning the ghosts.
“You – you see the ghosts as well?”
Lizzie thought for a few seconds, as she pulled a piano stool over from beside the grand in the corner of the room. “Yeah.” Though not, perhaps, in the way the Lord saw ghosts.
“I – I’m not mad, am I, they all say I’m mad – please, please tell me I’m not mad.”
Lizzie gently placed her hand over the Lords – it was skinny, and decrepit, and pale. As she glanced around the room, she realised what a state this part of the house was in. It reeked, and mucky sheets covered the windows. The dust in this part of the house was thicker than the already-thick layer covering everything else, and it was completely pitch black, barring a tiny, flickering candle. The shelves were bare of any personal mementos, and as Lizzie gazed around, she realised that what this room truly meant, was neglect.
“You’re not mad.”
“But they all left me, they ran from me –”
“And that’s a judgement on their hearts, not yours.”
The man took in another long, rasping breath, perhaps because it seemed as if there was no clean air in the room. “They say it’s not real.”
“Oh… they’re definitely real. Even if not everyone sees something, that doesn’t make it not real.”
And Lizzie really hoped she was right. She really hoped the Doctor was right.
As she watched the old man, she had no idea what she could possibly say to him, that would perhaps give him some assurance that there was goodness in the world. His eyes wandered, as if he were looking for something, but wasn’t sure where to find it. Maybe there was nothing that would make it easier. When she’d been in a state not far off him, she’d been almost impossible to get through to.
“You’re gonna get help. Trust me.”
Lizzie wanted to say more, she felt as if she had to, but then she had to look away from him, as tears were brimming in her eyes. She put a hand to her mouth, to try and stifle the audible sobs coming from it. It had touched something raw within her, and she shook her head, as she realised the weight of what was happening. As she realised that after this, she would have to tell the Doctor.
Lizzie turned back to the old man.
“It’s not gonna feel like… anything positive is gonna happen. In fact, you’re never going to be able to get these ghosts out of your memories,” Lizzie shrugged, as if it were the simplest thing in the world and she’d grown used to it. There are… horrendous days coming, and I… I don’t think I can say anything to you to make them more bearable.”
She glanced over her shoulder to see Mr Carson enter the room, then started to speak to the Lord of the Manor again. Some people need to change their attitudes, she thought. That’d help.
“Maybe things will be okay. One day. All I can say is stay strong and you’ll get there.”
It was a rubbish speech. Really, not very good at all – but it was all she could muster. After all, she was well versed in what she was talking about – but not how to deal with it. All she could say was it’s dreadful, and draw it out a bit to make a rather majestic sounding speech. But everything else was just conjecture and maybes. But one day, perhaps she would be able to return and be able to give him some better words of advice.
She needed to speak to the Doctor.
On her way out, she turned to Mr Carson. “You need to treat him so much better than you are. I’ve been stigmatised my whole life, because of people like you. Change things, do it now.”
Lizzie, for once, did not feel her usual need to apologise after her harsh words.
***
Surely that was harder than trying to tell someone the impossible? Because at least when you were telling someone the impossible, you had already accepted the impossible thing in your own head. But if there was something very real, that wouldn’t sink into your mind, then surely that was even harder to communicate?
There was a thing.
Something in her mind, and she knew exactly what it was. She was telling herself, over and over, and although she knew it, it just wouldn’t sink in. She couldn’t accept it, no matter how hard she tried. It was bothering her constantly, as if she had her mind clamped down by some heavy chain, and she couldn’t shake it off.
What was worse, was that she had been in this situation for many years. Lizzie had known the thing since she was a teenager, because that’s when it had started to strike. And ever since it had struck, it hadn’t let go – and ever since then she had been trying to make herself accept the truth. And although she was well aware of the truth, it just wasn’t… there. It wasn’t fitting into her brain, as if the puzzle were so nearly complete, and yet the one remaining piece was the wrong size and shape to fit in its spot.
Lizzie nodded in agreement, and slumped back in her chair. She was in the TARDIS library, in the spot she so loved by the window looking out into space. The lamp was not its usual warm self, however – Lizzie had upped the brightness so it seemed more like an interrogation. However, there were no clear answers coming. Instead, the thoughts that she mused over then, would make no sense to anyone, let alone herself. It was all just gibberish, spilling through her mind, and because of that constant spin-cycle of rubbish in her head, she couldn’t do anything – she could barely do anything for more than five minutes without being distracted by the loose ends, the nothing-words, and that incessant need to somehow string them together.
She knew now, however, that the time was now. The stringing together would happen soon, and she decided that she needed to tell the thing to someone, because perhaps that would help it to solidify in her head. Maggie, of course, was already certain of it, and had tried to get something done about it for the few years she could, and had tried to get Lizzie to do something about it in the years she couldn’t. However, provision for dealing with the thing had been dreadful, and when it came to Lizzie dealing with it herself, she had refused, her acceptance of it still not crystallised.
But she was sick of the thing, and the way it hurt her every day. She was sick of everything it had made her do, and of the guilt she’d felt because of those things. Lizzie Darwin had to deal with it, and she decided that to do that, she would need to tell her best friend.
It was time to tell the Doctor.
A few hours later, the sounds of Xanadu echoed around the TARDIS - not long ago the Doctor had had a new set of speakers installed, and ever since then he’d been subjected to Lizzie’s taste in music.
Lizzie was sat on the battered old leather seat, her legs balanced up on the console. She wore a slightly hideous floral shirt that she’d taken a fancy to in some backstreet-summer-shirt-shop on a distant world somewhere, and circular, Harry Potter-esque sunglasses were balanced on her nose, her eyes peering over the rims. Peering over the rims, of course, at him. As she was sat there, her heart was pounding in her chest, and her palms were sweaty, and she felt as if she needed to vomit.
She was petrified. It’s not as if Lizzie was scared of telling him, because she knew that the Doctor would understand. Or at least, she hoped he would (although she was quite hopeful that the small fragment of doubt was merely her being anxious). The sheer terror that bubbled within her was, she deduced, the fear that telling him would cause her to accept herself – and there was very little more terrifying than that.
The Doctor had promised her a beach. A beach at night! Beaches were too hot and too noisy and too crowded and Lizzie, for what it was worth, hated them. But beaches at night - that was a completely different story. Somehow, the time of day could make a great difference as to whether they were actually bearable or not. While a crowded tourist-y beach in the middle of a boiling hot summer’s day was the worst thing in the entire universe ever, beaches at night were beautiful. There was something so calming about them, and Lizzie always felt content – and at that moment, Lizzie needed somewhere to feel content. Although she wasn’t sure that even a beach at night, which could normally sooth her no matter what state she was in, would be able to do anything about her current condition.
Even so, the Doctor’s promise was appealing – a really, really good one! On the edge of a planet on the edge of a solar system on the edge of a universe - from the shore, one could look out over the edge of nothingness, and the stars shone even brighter, and occasionally, if everything in the universe was perfectly balanced, one could see another universe there, glimmering in the darkness, where billions of billions of billions and more billions of people were living their lives. But as she thought of the universe being perfectly balanced, all it brought her back to was the imbalance of her mind, and how that would poison all of those stars.
Until the Doctor had told them they’d found something more exciting to do.
Lizzie probably should’ve been disappointed, but she wasn’t. She’d rather save the beach for a day when she didn’t feel awful, and was sure that her mind wouldn’t be all over the place. “Okay.”
There was a brief silence and the Doctor looked at her, a guilty look on his face. “It’s not okay, is it?” he said, as he played about with some lever on the TARDIS console to take them to wherever they were going to go instead of the beach-at-the-edge-of-the-universe.
“Nope. It’s fine,” she smiled, taking her legs down from the console, and folding up her sunglasses. And the Doctor could see she was being honest.
“I promise that this is really important.”
“What’s happened?” she asked, walking over to the console and leaning over opposite him.
The Doctor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crisp, white envelope. There was a stamped, ink seal on it. She looked at it, waiting for him to continue.
“It’s a letter.”
“... I can see that.”
“Someone has managed to post something to the TARDIS!”
Lizzie hadn’t ever thought about whether there was a postal service in space, nor whether the TARDIS had a letterbox. She assumed that it didn’t, because how would one post the letters? Fly really close to the box and lean out the window and put them through? Probably not.
“Can I…?” she asked, reaching over for the letter. He gave it to her, and she unfolded it.
Dear Doctor,
Friday 29th September 1837
I am writing to you on behalf of Lord Dun, current holder of the title and of the Dun estate. It will be of no surprise to you, considering his Lordship’s mental state, that I have resorted to asking for such help, but it appears I have no choice.
I do not know who you are. In fact, it is the most ridiculous thing of me to do, to possibly ask for your assistance, for we know that the supernatural is not real, and there is nothing that you can be, but for a farce.
However, I assure you it is not.
We require a paranormal investigator, effective-immediately. You came recommended to me. They said you would not judge me for asking for such help, nor would you judge his Lordship. They said you were not a liar, nor will you deceive me.
They said you could help.
There are ghosts at the manor. They wake his Lordship in the night. They terrify him. They say he is quite mad, but these spirits just make his madness ever the more volatile.
You will, of course, be paid a great sum, for your services, and for your silence.
Yours sincerely
Robert Carson
Butler
Lizzie handed the letter back to the Doctor, who pocketed it again. It was, to be fair, quite a difficult prospect to resist. A butler from the 19th century who had somehow managed to post a letter to the TARDIS about ghosts haunting a mad old man? Sounded pretty cool. And hell, perhaps someone madder than her would make her feel about herself (she knew she was disgustingly selfish, and at that moment, she hated herself even more).
“What’s interesting,” Lizzie observed, deciding to play at detective instead of worrying. “Is that he himself doesn’t believe in ghosts.”
The Doctor grabbed his coat, and walked towards the doors.
“You’re too good at this.”
When the Doctor pushed open the doors, they were met with a great lashing storm. He grabbed his umbrella and opened it, and the two of them stepped out into the rain.
They had arrived at the bottom of a long, long, gravel driveway, stretching for what seemed like forever ahead of them. At the far end, was a great, big, ‘one day I’ll be owned by the National Trust’, stately home. When Lizzie turned around, she saw massive wrought-iron gates looming above her. On the other side, there was a cobbled road, winding down into what seemed like a quaint little village. The village was obscured in the mist and the rain, though.
Autumn was here, it seemed. They began their trek down the driveway towards the big house. Old oak trees lined the path, and they had started to shed their leaves for the winter. Many of them were a mixture of sunshine-oranges and yellows and burgundies and brand-new greens of nature and hope and freshness – greens that weren’t new anymore, because the summer was over. In fact, the newness had grown old now. Finally, it had settled down. Every time a gust of wind blew, as well as throwing rainwater in their faces, one or two of the leaves would fly from their branches, off into wherever the wind would take them. There was a melancholy to the world, and as the season of death crawled on Lizzie couldn’t help but feel especially dejected by it. Wherever she looked, she just saw the bleakness and the greyness, as if the life had somehow been… sucked out.
As they approached the house (though ‘approached’ makes it sound as if they were any closer – due to the sheer length of the driveway, they were not), they could hear the wind singing with the chimneys on top of the house. There were a great many chimneys, but it was a very big house – there were probably more fireplaces in there than Lizzie had seen in her entire life. As they got closer, the mist began to clear, just a little bit – there were windows as well. Lots and lots of windows. Except, white curtains were draped across the inside of all of them, and nobody could see in. Which also meant nobody could see out. It looked like an old-fashioned house from her time, one that nobody had touched or been in for so many years.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Lizzie asked the Doctor as they walked, watching the droplets fall sadly off the rim of the umbrella in front of them.
“Yes. Normally I don’t, but perhaps in this incarnation, I’ve finally seen the light.”
“Yeah…”
“Do you?” the Doctor asked her.
She didn’t respond, because that question was a whole different and complicated kettle of fish. Instead, she pretended to be looking at the old man who stood in one of the upstairs windows of the house, his head peering around the edge of the curtain with thin, wrinkly fingers curled around, grasping the fabric. An old man who was actually there, but Lizzie exploited his appearance to shunt attention off herself.
The Doctor clocked her investigation. “Ah. I should think that’s the mad lord…”
The lord shrunk back around the curtain, disappearing off into the darkness of the house. Lizzie felt sorry for him – the amount of people, in that grim, Victorian day and age, who would have ridiculed him for being able to see ghosts. Even his own butler didn’t seem to believe his boss.
They walked, arm in arm, down the drive, through the rain. Despite the weather, it was a beautiful day. Perhaps it was the weather that made it all the more beautiful. Puddles lapped up at their feet, splashing over the Doctor’s scruffy old brown boots and Lizzie’s converse. The drive was fast becoming a quagmire – by the end of the day, it would certainly be like a sea of mud.
Eventually, they came to the end of the drive. There was silence. Normally (or, at least, on period dramas), there was at least some noise from a huge house like this. It always felt as if the staff were constantly on the go, whenever Lizzie had watched Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs and stuff. Though, she knew whitewashed period dramas were not the best way to gauge historical fact. Regardless of this, however, the house seemed in tune with the autumnal atmosphere. Dead… or dying.
The Doctor pounded on the front door, and they could hear the sound echo in some hollow hall inside. Nothing happened, for a good few minutes, and the two of them were left out on the doorstep, watching leaves sullenly skulk down from the skies. Eventually, they heard shoes tapping against a floor inside – marble, perhaps – and then the almighty wooden door swung open.
The man who stood in the doorway was not a small man – though he seemed it, in comparison to the door, and to the whole house. Dressed to perfection in the garb for a butler of a great house, his posture and stance indicated that he took his position very seriously.
It was then that after several years of watching period dramas, Lizzie realised what was about to happen.
“You should have come in the back way,” the butler said, as if he were following a script.
The Doctor turned to Lizzie, and Lizzie turned to the Doctor, and after clocking each other’s glances they had to look away from each other, to avoid bursting into laughter. Thankfully Cioné wasn’t there to be a bad influence.
“I’m sorry?” the Doctor joked. “I didn’t mean to disappoint you, we’re the ghost hunters.”
“And besides,” Lizzie continued. “He’s married.”
They both sniggered – something that Lizzie found especially refreshing, as she expected the time for sniggers to perhaps be over sooner rather than later. Then, the man who Lizzie assumed was Robert Carson, butler of this fine manor, muttered a “come in” to the two of them. The Doctor swung past, and Lizzie smiled and followed. Chequered marble tiles covered the floor, and a chandelier hung from the ceiling, so precariously that it seemed as if even the smallest gust of wind could send the mass of crystals catapulting down to the floor. A stairway, almost wide enough to drive a carriage down, leapt up from the centre of the hall, and split into two, leading up to the higher wings of the house.
The Doctor was already admiring one of the great paintings hung up on the wall. It pictured a violent scene, of a man falling into a rush of waves and foam and seawater, and clawing his way to the surface, desperate for breath. He ran his finger across it, and a layer of dust came off, the width of an average-sized slice of cheese.
“Apologies,” said Carson, deciding not to bother about the two peculiar people who had just wondered into the house of a great lord via the front door. “There isn’t much time for me to dust nowadays. I try and get a maid in at least once a month, but even she’s… reluctant.”
“This is a big house, no?” the Doctor walked back over to the butler. “Don’t you have… staff?”
Carson gave him a bemused look – not his first bemused look of the last five minutes – and stammered a few words, that were meant to sound like ‘how do you not know?’.
“We’re not from around here,” the Doctor said. “We’re… out of the loop, shall I say…”
“We were once one of the finest houses in all of England,” Carson began, while Lizzie was internally screaming nobody cares. “Because of his lordship’s madness, the number of servants decreased dramatically. Now, there is only myself, and the cook.”
No staff, and he’d still wanted them in the back way. Mr Carson was clearly up on Victorian etiquette.
The hall of the house was not walked much, it seemed. The dust was visible in the light streaming in through the front door, and there was a musty smell – the sort that one would expect to find in old houses – except the sort that they would expect to find in an old house when it’s actually old, and not when it’s being lived in.
“Why did you stay?” the Doctor asked the butler. Carson looked around, as if he were looking for someone to answer for him.
“I – I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I felt loyal, I suppose. This family have given me employment for 40 years. It would not feel right to throw it back in their faces.”
The Doctor gave the butler a smile – perhaps it was a smile of understanding, or one of reassurance. Lizzie wasn’t sure.
“Firstly, the lord isn’t mad,” the Doctor said.
“I understand that this is your line of work, but, really –,” Carson began, in his deep, rumbling voice, before the Doctor interrupted again.
“Ghosts are real, Mr Carson.”
“That’s not possible –”
It definitely is, Lizzie thought to herself.
“I didn’t believe in them myself until I saw your letter,” the Doctor continued, pulling it out of his jacket pocket and scanning over it again, as if he were checking that everything was in order.
“But you’re a – a paranormal investigator! How can you not believe in ghosts?” Carson spluttered, leaning against the bannister. He was an old man, one who, with the sheer amount of work he was doing, would probably spend a large amount of time feeling extremely tired.
“Not really,” the Doctor admitted. “But look! I deal with aliens, I thought, why not ghosts? Because, when I saw this, it was just too difficult to resist. Also, there’s a gigantic gash in space and time in your drawing room.”
No surprise there, then, Lizzie thought. The Doctor could never resist a giant gash in space and time, and for once, she was thankful for it. She watched as he reached into his satchel, and pulled out the sonic screwdriver, holding it up in the dusty, stale air. Carson glanced at it, before shaking his head. He’d already had quite enough for one day, and had reached the stage of not even bothering to question it. Lizzie had been in his shoes frequently.
“Right. You seem to know what you’re both doing,” Carson murmured, turning away from them.
“Mr Carson,” the Doctor interrupted. “Why don’t you believe him?”
“Hmm?” Carson responded, in a way that suggested he didn’t have an answer, and was merely stalling for time. “Because ghosts are ridiculous. And not real.”
“Why are they ridiculous?” the Doctor strode up closer to the butler.
“Well… dead people walking! And let’s be proper here, who has ever seen a ghost!” Carson chuckled, expecting the Doctor to chuckle with him, before stopping awkwardly as he realised the Doctor was going to do no such thing.
“I can assure you, Mr Carson. Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not real. And I hope that when all this is over, you, and especially all of your staff, are very, very good to his lordship.”
Lizzie breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
“And why would that be?” Carson squared up to him.
“So you make amends for how ignorant you are. Now please – would you mind showing us to the drawing room? It would be greatly appreciated.”
***
It was not long before the Doctor and Lizzie were sat in matching deckchairs. As they had been prepared for their trip to the beach, it was not a hassle to retrieve them from the TARDIS. The Doctor had also donned a threadbare, beige fisherman’s hat, and a holey tan jacket with little embroidered fish – apparently, the set had been waiting in the TARDIS wardrobe for years, and hadn’t been used. It was fitting, supposedly, as the Doctor was also wielding a fishing rod, currently angling for something in the great Persian rug. Except, instead of a fly, or a maggot, or any other form of bait, a strange, glowing-green orb dangled above the carpet, its brightness constantly throbbing.
“And… you’re sure the glasses are necessary?” Lizzie pushed her pair higher up her nose.
They were also both wearing pairs of glasses with bright, neon blue lenses, like blue sunglasses.
“I told you,” the Doctor sighed. “To maximise our chances of seeing anything, we need to be able to see dimension shifts in the air.”
Lizzie shut up then, deciding not to say anything else in case he got grumpy.
They both looked quite a sight, with their glasses, the Doctor in his fisherman’s gear and fishing rod and Lizzie in her Hawaiian shirt and with her Walkman.
“And that… the rod,” she braved. “That should help attract them, yeah?”
“The ecto-rod 4000. Yes – the latest in paranormangling technology.”
“Is that a thing?”
“Yes,” the Doctor shrugged, not looking away from the lime-green ball of light in front of him. It swayed gently from side to side, and Lizzie found it quite therapeutic to watch. “Humans, you’re all horror movies and occasionally ghostbusters. But in reality, it’s nothing like that,” the Doctor swung the rod back, and recast the line. “This is where it’s really at. Oh, before I forget, check my satchel.”
Lizzie took his satchel and opened it. “What am I looking for?”
“A plastic tub. It should be there.”
Lizzie began the process of rifling through his bag, the sheer untidiness of it all irritating her. She picked her way through a battered wallet, some keys (one of which was very big, made out of wrought iron and painted a bright neon pink), a chewed pencil and a diary, and she grimaced as she saw a half-eaten apple. “I can’t see it.”
“It’s in the pocket.”
“Which pocket…,” she murmured as she unzipped one of the interior pockets.
“No, not that one,” the Doctor said, keeping one eye on the orb, and another on Lizzie. “The one on the right.”
“This one?” she said, starting to unzip another.
“No, no, the one below it.”
“This bag is big...” she murmured, as she finally found the right pocket.
“Bigger on the inside,” he explained. She didn’t say anything, as she reached inside the pocket and found the Tupperware box he’d asked her to look for. “Now, if you open it up…”
Lizzie did as she was told, removing the lid of the box, and then recoiling from the utterly disgusting smell emerging from the inside.
“I’ve brought some sandwiches,” the Doctor said, and Lizzie tried her best to look grateful. “There’s cheese, pickle, tuna and gooseberry, and ginger, bacon, prawn and powdered milk.”
Lizzie eyed up the sandwiches, wondering what had ever happened to the man with the supposed refined tastes. “Thanks… I think I’ll save mine for later.” She put the box back into the Doctor’s satchel.
“For future reference,” the Doctor started. “Favourite sandwich filling?”
“Hmm,” Lizzie thought to herself. A good question, for she loved a good sandwich, and she loved a variety of different fillings. “I love cheese and pickle –”
“You’ll love the cheese, pickle, tuna and gooseberry –”
“ – I’m sure I will,” she murmured under her breath. “But honestly, there’s this… chain of restaurants on Earth, called Pret a Manger. And they do the most amazing cheese and pickle baguettes. It’s like… really thick slabs of mature cheddar –”
“Ohh,” the Doctor sat back, dreaming of the cheese, his mouth watering.
“And the pickle is lovely, and there’s roasted tomatoes and red onions and mayo, and oh, it’s delicious.”
“You know – actually, pass me the box, would you, I’m starving.”
Lizzie reached into the satchel and took out the box again, opening the lid and offering them to the Doctor. The Doctor reached in to take one, before hesitating, his hands hovering in mid-air.
“Actually, can you just get the napkins from the…”
His voice trailed off as Lizzie reached back into the satchel.
“Yep…,” he saw her find them. “Yes, those are the ones. Just…”
Lizzie opened up the plastic packaging and passed them over to him.
“Brilliant… don’t want to get the ecto-rod too sticky, it’ll mess up the reeling system. Now for the sandwiches…,” he wrapped his hands in the napkin, and as Lizzie passed him the box, he took one of the not-particularly-desirable ginger, bacon, prawn and powered milk sandwiches. It was on a seeded loaf.
“Enjoy…”
“Mmm,” the Doctor wiped a sprinkling of ginger from his top lip, closing his eyes and lying backwards, letting the beautiful, fishy, meaty taste wash over him. Lizzie grimaced and looked back at the fishing rod. “Iris makes great sandwiches.”
“Oh yes?” Lizzie enquired, turning away from him as the smell of prawn got too much. “How is Iris?”
“She takes after me, in that she’s one of life’s free spirits.”
Lizzie nodded, aware of the fact that it didn’t take a genius to work it out, but that the Doctor was probably oblivious to it anyway.
“She’s doing this module as part of her course,” the Doctor continued. “And she hates it. The field work is more her thing.”
Lizzie smiled, and it was amazing how kids grew and found their place. She remembered Iris when she was so small, and was just doing what kids did, and now she was all grown-up and her own, brighter-than-bright individual. She dreamt longingly of her – they’d have to meet up again soon, as it had been way too long.
Whenever they caught up, it was that kind of relationship when they could just pick things up again instantly. She looked back on Iris’ childhood fondly, however – the days when she’d been able to enjoy the company of someone who was just so happy. Lizzie envied those days. She wanted some for herself, but with every passing day, anything like that seemed so far away.
Was now the moment to tell him? Tell him about the thing. After all, there was a brief spell of silence, perhaps now, while they were on their leisurely ecto-fishing trip, would be the perfect moment. But she knew that there would be no perfect moment, because every time she came to tell the Doctor, she backed out, telling herself it wasn’t the right moment. With that mindset, there wouldn’t ever be the right moment. She would have to tell him, but she just couldn’t do it.
Oh, what the hell.
“Doctor –”
“This is –,” he spoke at the same time, checking his watch. “Sorry,” he backtracked. “You go.”
“No, no, don’t worry.”
“No, I was just saying it was awfully boring. What were you going to say?”
Lizzie couldn’t do it now. It’d have to wait. She should’ve just done it, why couldn’t she have just done it. And now she was telling herself not to be so hard on herself, but her mind just found itself going around in circles, as it always did. Lizzie side-lined it, which in fact meant use part of the brain stressing about it until she could be bothered to confront it.
“Oh, haha, I was just going to say Iris takes after you.” And Lizzie wasn’t lying – she could see both Iris’ mum and dad in her. “I mean,” Lizzie continued. “I don’t know what the other ‘yous’ are like,” she was, of course, referring to his other regenerations. “But I think an inability to sit still is probably a common theme.”
“I disagree,” the Doctor said, looking thoughtful. “I can easily sit still, as long as I’m doing something. Like a good book, for example. Nothing better than a good book.”
“Yeah…,” Lizzie definitely agreed with that one, glancing down at her bag and spying the book she was flicking through at the moment. She was still near the beginning, and she’d been reading it for weeks. It was unlike her, though – especially since she started travelling with the Doctor. The sluggish progress was much more reminiscent of her days back in Dunsworth.
She looked over at him, and she realised she hadn’t dared to imagine what the other ‘hims’ were like. To her, there was just ‘him’. The Edwardian gentleman, a man of the arts, with a heart of gold, but with a sliver of ice somewhere inside him. A family man at heart, a charmer and an introvert, an emotional chap, all while having a shocking sandwich taste.
“What are the other Doctors like?” she asked, randomly, perhaps hoping for a story to take her mind off herself. Then she blushed, and started to wonder whether that was a question like asking a woman her age, or something.
“Mad.”
Nothing changes.
“Well,” the Doctor pulled out an old diary, with Something-year-old Diary emblazoned on the front. Lizzie didn’t actually know how old he was, and it seemed that he didn’t either.
He flicked through, and presented her with a picture of a man. He was older, a curmudgeonly grandfather, and he was stood beside an Aztec Queen. The photo had yellowed, and was starting to fade, and the edge was slightly creased, having been trapped inside this extensive record of the Doctor’s life for who-knows how long.
“This was the first me. The original, you might say.”
He looked almost-scary, but there was a golden twinkle in his eye as well.
“You’ve aged well,” she acknowledged, not sure what else to say, because there weren’t really words or any kind of social conduct to deal with a situation such as this. “But… you look lovely.”
“That’s me, and…,” he flicked through, looking for another photo. “That’s Susan, my granddaughter.”
Grandchildren? The time travelling had grown too complicated for her to even grasp.
“I know,” the Doctor acknowledged. “I applied for Jeremy Kyle, they told me it was too complicated.”
She laughed, and the Doctor looked at her, a serious look on his face.
“Wait, you actually did?” she shut up immediately.
“Jeremy’s an alien. Isn’t it obvious?”
“Oh…,” she thought back to the brief times she’d watched Jeremy Kyle on the TV and selfishly appreciated the fact that there was somebody out there who had a life more complicated than hers. “Anyone other TV presenters who are aliens?”
“Piers Morgan is a renegade Time Lord. He ran the journalism sector on Gallifrey, and was exiled following a series of inappropriate reports he published.”
Lizzie believed him – and she was not sure what was more terrifying – the fact that Piers Morgan had not changed ever, or the fact that one day, he’d regenerate.
The Doctor flicked through the diary again, stopping at a page with a small gentleman, sporting a bowtie and wearing a pair of tartan trousers. He was holding a device – and at second glance, it appeared to be a recorder. Lizzie observed that he looked like a Beatle.
“Aww. He looks sweet,” she smiled, looking at his impish smile.
“He was – I liked being him. I liked being everyone. But number 2 was definitely one of the most charming. Also I had the best bromance –”
The Doctor caught sight of Lizzie’s eternal, never-ending bout of cringing, and agreed that he would never say ‘bromance’ ever again.
“I was a bit boring though, either dealing with some alien siege or the Cybermen. But always charming. Always fun. Those days were good.”
The next page displayed a man with a frilly shirt and a glaring look. A dashing dandy, it seems.
“You wouldn’t have liked him,” the Doctor grimaced.
“Why not?” she couldn’t imagine ever disliking an incarnation of the Doctor.
“He voted for Maggie Thatcher.”
She hadn’t ever had any incarnation of the Doctor down as a Tory. Then again… the frills.
“Yes... I lost my way a bit. Always fancied himself a bit of a Bond,” the Doctor turned the page, and there was a picture of a bright yellow car, and of a girl sat in the back, dressed in a thick, fur coat.
“She looks lovely,” Lizzie smiled.
“That’s Jo. And she was. She lived such a happy life after me. And that, Lizzie, is Bessie.”
“Who? There’s only two of you in the photo…”
“The car was called Bessie.”
Lizzie tried very, very hard not to laugh, and failed miserably.
“What?”
“I just – I never had you down as a… a car enthusiast.”
The Doctor looked around sheepishly, as if it were a period in his life he would rather forget. She nearly asked him if he had a garage, but decided not to.
“I appeared on Top Gear with Bessie. I presented Top Gear for several years, until I got sacked following a fracas.”
She jokily wondered if he’d punched a producer.
“I punched a producer,” he said, and she sighed, because it was exactly what she should’ve been expecting. “He was an alien, and nobody believed me. So I punched him, and broke his shape-shifter technology. Turns out the reason there was no hot food was because the creature could only consume roasted steak.”
Okay…
The next incarnation, she thought, looked like her kind of guy – a great, flowing scarf, with a long, grey coat, and a wide-brimmed hat balanced on his head. Black curls billowed from underneath. Whacky and bohemian, and a twinkling smile that could charm anyone. This man seemed very Doctor-ish, but she didn’t know whether that was possible. People didn’t usually have different incarnations. Except weirdly, at the same time, they did.
She’d also taken quite a fancy to his scarf. And the hat. This version definitely had the best sense in clothing.
“I had great fun then,” the Doctor smiled. “Apart from the bit I let the Daleks live, that was awful. But still, it was a good time. I made a lot of enemies too…”
“Oh?”
“To be fair, I did have a tendency to be simultaneously popular whilst also pushing the boundaries, perhaps. That wound up a few.”
The Doctor seemed like the sort of guy who was very good at attracting controversy.
“And this,” the Doctor turned the page again. “Is my Sarah Jane. Oh, Lizzie, you’d love Sarah Jane.”
She looked like a kind woman, but one with fire and passion as well. The sort of woman who would not take no for an answer, but was also deeply lovely at the same time, and would inspire so many.
The next page displayed a man who was much younger, and wore cricket whites, with a stick of celery on his lapel. He looked like the kindest, and the most amicable incarnation yet. He was surrounded by three people as well – two women and a man, barely more than a boy.
“You look so happy there.”
“I suppose I had a family, in a way. Even so, I was terribly boring during that time. Insipid was my middle name.”
Lizzie nodded in understanding, again reminded that the two of them were similar.
“Probably the cricket,” the Doctor tried to lighten the not-so-awkward silence between the two of them. Such silences had dissipated since their earlier adventures, and Lizzie laughed.
“I never had you down as a sportsman.”
“I’m not.”
“Neither am I,” Lizzie admitted. She sighed – even the thought of the boredom of exercise made her want to sleep. “Even so. Dunsworth House, table tennis champion.”
“You didn’t?” the Doctor looked at her.
“Battled my way fiercely through every round,” she thought back to that day. It was boiling, deep within the heat of summer, and it was towards the end of her time at the home. Pat had organised the tournament, just to bring them all together, or something. And after complaining internally for half an hour, she eventually agreed, and fluked her way to the top.
The next page showed the Doctor’s best recreation of ‘Joseph and his Technicolour Dream Coat’.
“There’s no justification for this,” the Doctor turned the page straight away. “I wasn’t that much of a moron, really – people just don’t remember the good stuff. Same for me, to be honest – I look back on those days and remember monsters that looked like – anyway…”
“I’d quite like the coat,” Lizzie was also admiring the cat broaches. She also fancied the umbrella of the man on the next page – short, he was, with a question-mark pullover.
“A dark horse, was the most recent me,” the Doctor’s most recent incarnation grinned back at him with a clownish smile. “Looks like a prat, but was actually a master-manipulator. Good days, those. Underrated in my own memory.”
The different Doctors were very different, perhaps – Lizzie’s Doctor wouldn’t be good at manipulating people. She thought so, at least.
“And then there’s me,” the Doctor closed the diary, and slipped it back into his coat pocket. He sat there, and suddenly the two of them felt very alone. It seemed definitive – they were right up to date, the end of the story. Nothing more to recap – only more to create. There was probably something deep she could say to respond to it, but she just sat and imagined what it would be like to change your face so much, and she found the idea strangely familiar. People changed.
They had both changed.
“Oh my goodness,” the Doctor took one look at her Walkman, and opened it up, looking at the tape inside. “This song…”
“Hang on a sec,” Lizzie reached into her bag and pulled out another pair of headphones, plugging them into the second jack. She handed them to the Doctor, and he slipped them on. She put hers’ on well.
And suddenly, the voice of David Bowie was steadily rising in pitch.
In unison, the Doctor and Lizzie began to sing.
“Let’s dance.”
“Put on your red shoes and daaance the blues.”
The Doctor began to do a little sway from side-to-side, and Lizzie looked down at her red converse.
“Let’s dance.”
“To the song they’re playin’ on the radio.”
The Doctor found himself clicking his fingers along with the beat, and Lizzie swayed her head back and forth. They were somewhere else, a brand-new dimension – the music was like the TARDIS, transporting them to a brand new place, and a brand new time – and she felt herself leave her fears and anxieties behind. Now she was somewhere new and unfamiliar, but as they’d both heard the song before, so familiar at the same time. A better place, unfamiliar because of its happiness. As they danced together, it seemed even more alien – neither of them had done it before, and so the untrodden territory felt even more brilliant.
“Let’s sway.”
“While colour lights up your face.”
The Doctor was smiling, more so than Lizzie had ever seen him before. Euphoria had spread across his cheeks, and he was grinning the cheesiest grin. If Carson were to walk in now, he would ridicule them – after all, Lizzie was wearing a hideous Hawaiian shirt, and the Doctor was dressed like a fisherman, and they both wore blue sunglasses, and they were singing stupendously loudly. And yet they kept dancing, allowing the rhythm and the lyrics to bring them both closer.
“Let’s sway.”
“Sway through the crowd to an empty space.”
And the house was quiet, but for the sounds of their voices. The drawing room was almost like a bubble, and they were both trapped inside its great walls of song and dance.
They sang and danced (though it was kind of impossible because of the headphones, which they both kept stumbling over), for the rest of the song, and then they both collapsed in the deckchairs, laughing uncontrollably.
The Doctor cheered, and wiped the sweat from his brow. “That song is a classic.”
“One of my all-time favourites,” Lizzie knew all the lyrics, probably backwards as well. It was a song she had played during darker times, and it didn’t feel right, because of the great disharmony between the joy in the song and how she was feeling. But because of that, it was, perhaps, an escape. As she looked up, however, there was that crushing feeling of reality seeping back in again.
The Doctor’s mind had wandered, drifting back to the iCruiser. “I wonder how they’re doing on floor 80.”
Lizzie thought back to the evening when the Doctor had dared her to dance to Girls Just Want To Have Fun, and he’d ridiculed her because he said she wouldn’t do it, but she did it. And it was the best fun she’d had ever. It was the happiest she had been in a very long time.
Now the music had ended, the house seemed even quieter, apart from the constant tick of the grandfather clock. Both of them wanted the music back.
Time passed. Both of them talked, about whatever. Nothing clever or interesting or deep, just random stuff. The clock in the corner kept ticking. At times, Lizzie forgot what they were even doing there – but always in her mind was that she should tell him. With each random anecdote they each shared, she knew that the next thing she mentioned, should be the thing. But still she couldn’t pluck up the courage, and instead focused on the sheer absurdity of sitting in an antique drawing room with a fishing rod. At one point, she took the ecto-rod from him, and the Doctor showed her how to use it. And they would swap back and forth, taking it in turns. Then she’d said she was going to put on her headphones and try and get some sleep, even though she knew she wouldn’t get any sleep. She just wanted to listen to some music and forget about the world.
After a while, though, she slipped off her headphones.
“You mind if I go for a walk?”
The Doctor shook his head. “No – go for it.”
So, Lizzie stood up, and made her way out of the drawing room. The house was a maze, and she allowed herself to just trail meaninglessly down the corridors. After all, that was all life was. No directions, no meaning, no nothing. All that could be done, was to walk, and to grin and bear any misfortune that arose because of it. It was dark within the mansion, as none of the gas lamps were lit, barring those in the drawing room, and night had settled, meaning the only light came from that of the moon streaming through the windows.
If one were on a conventional ghost hunt, it would’ve been rather terrifying. Occasionally, a floorboard would give an eerie moan, or she’d glance and see a painting of a terrifying old man in mediaeval frills, whose beady acrylic eyes would follow her as she crept through the cramped, twisting building. Yes, a notable aspect of the architecture was how small and poky the upstairs was – like a rabbit warren, twisting and turning and worming, in stark contrast to the almighty halls of downstairs – and even in contrast to the drawing room. She did wonder whether it was, in fact, the darkness changing the way she saw things, as if it were manipulating the world around her and allowing things to hide in the shadows.
However, none of this scared Lizzie. The reason she had decided to retire for a walk through the house was to try and focus on telling him about the thing. Although she’d told herself now wasn’t the time, she knew it had to be now, for the reasons that she had been listing in her head.
1. They were such good friends, and they had come so far together. It had been a long time since she saw him out on the street corner, sat beneath the lamplight. The two of them had been alone, and now they had a family. And through this, they had grown closer. He was her best friend and she thought, perhaps, he deserved to know. At the same time, she thought it was none of his business at all, and she firmly maintained this – but her brain was silly and did what it wanted, and had settled on believing that she wasn’t comfortable keeping something like this from him 2.
2. Keeping things from people was her MO, and although she was okay with that, it had got to a point where, with certain things, it had begun toxifying her own thoughts and she felt the desperate need to get this one off her chest. She had declared that she was awfully stupid for not doing anything about it sooner. But eh – she’d been too scared. Understandable
3. And when she said it had begun toxifying her own thoughts, she meant that on multiple levels. The thing was ruining her. It had crept inside long ago and it had been making her happiness rot and wither ever since. All this time, she’d just lived with it, letting the rot ruin everything it touched – and that included the outside world. It had destroyed her life, and she was sick of it.
4. She checked the scars on her arm. Still very much there, from days she’d rather forget, but would never be able to forget.
5. Also, she’d googled it and WikiHow had suggested telling someone was a good place to start.
Her list stopped, partly because she was quite certain she’d exhausted her entire list of good reasons to tell the Doctor about the thing, but also because she’d just walked past a room, and from the inside, she was almost certain she could hear someone crying. Within an instant, she’d turned around, and knocked on the door. There was no response, but the sobbing persisted, and perhaps quicker than was appropriate, Lizzie shoved the door inwards, to see, curled up in the armchair in the corner of the room, was a little old man.
He looked up as she walked in.
“Erm… hi,” Lizzie murmured.
“Who – who are you?” the man spluttered, making a move from his chair – except, he quickly sat back, taking deep gulps of breath. Lizzie immediately realised that this had probably been a bad idea, but she decided she couldn’t just leave when someone was crying. With that in mind, Lizzie walked a bit further over towards the Lord.
“I’m… erm, I’m Lizzie. We’re here to… hunt the ghosts.”
At that moment, the man almost lurched forward, as if she’d said something that had riled him up. It was, obviously, concerning the ghosts.
“You – you see the ghosts as well?”
Lizzie thought for a few seconds, as she pulled a piano stool over from beside the grand in the corner of the room. “Yeah.” Though not, perhaps, in the way the Lord saw ghosts.
“I – I’m not mad, am I, they all say I’m mad – please, please tell me I’m not mad.”
Lizzie gently placed her hand over the Lords – it was skinny, and decrepit, and pale. As she glanced around the room, she realised what a state this part of the house was in. It reeked, and mucky sheets covered the windows. The dust in this part of the house was thicker than the already-thick layer covering everything else, and it was completely pitch black, barring a tiny, flickering candle. The shelves were bare of any personal mementos, and as Lizzie gazed around, she realised that what this room truly meant, was neglect.
“You’re not mad.”
“But they all left me, they ran from me –”
“And that’s a judgement on their hearts, not yours.”
The man took in another long, rasping breath, perhaps because it seemed as if there was no clean air in the room. “They say it’s not real.”
“Oh… they’re definitely real. Even if not everyone sees something, that doesn’t make it not real.”
And Lizzie really hoped she was right. She really hoped the Doctor was right.
As she watched the old man, she had no idea what she could possibly say to him, that would perhaps give him some assurance that there was goodness in the world. His eyes wandered, as if he were looking for something, but wasn’t sure where to find it. Maybe there was nothing that would make it easier. When she’d been in a state not far off him, she’d been almost impossible to get through to.
“You’re gonna get help. Trust me.”
Lizzie wanted to say more, she felt as if she had to, but then she had to look away from him, as tears were brimming in her eyes. She put a hand to her mouth, to try and stifle the audible sobs coming from it. It had touched something raw within her, and she shook her head, as she realised the weight of what was happening. As she realised that after this, she would have to tell the Doctor.
Lizzie turned back to the old man.
“It’s not gonna feel like… anything positive is gonna happen. In fact, you’re never going to be able to get these ghosts out of your memories,” Lizzie shrugged, as if it were the simplest thing in the world and she’d grown used to it. There are… horrendous days coming, and I… I don’t think I can say anything to you to make them more bearable.”
She glanced over her shoulder to see Mr Carson enter the room, then started to speak to the Lord of the Manor again. Some people need to change their attitudes, she thought. That’d help.
“Maybe things will be okay. One day. All I can say is stay strong and you’ll get there.”
It was a rubbish speech. Really, not very good at all – but it was all she could muster. After all, she was well versed in what she was talking about – but not how to deal with it. All she could say was it’s dreadful, and draw it out a bit to make a rather majestic sounding speech. But everything else was just conjecture and maybes. But one day, perhaps she would be able to return and be able to give him some better words of advice.
She needed to speak to the Doctor.
On her way out, she turned to Mr Carson. “You need to treat him so much better than you are. I’ve been stigmatised my whole life, because of people like you. Change things, do it now.”
Lizzie, for once, did not feel her usual need to apologise after her harsh words.
***
The Doctor greeted Lizzie as she arrived back and sat in her deck chair. She didn’t reply, because she was too busy mulling over the words she was going to use in her head.
"As I thought," the Doctor glanced at the little screen on the ecto-rod. "The ghosts are just projections coming from the big time-space gash. And that's the real concern."
There's no just about it, Lizzie thought, irritated by the Doctor's dismissive attitude. But she had something important to say. “I need to tell you something.”
Lizzie forced herself to say that, so there was no backing out. No matter how much time she would spend finding the right words to strong together, at least now she would have to say them at some point.
“Okay.”
The Doctor looked fine about it – but then, perhaps he assumed she was going to say she’d accidentally lost one of the books from the library, or something. In contrast to the Doctor’s chilled out appearance, Lizzie felt sick to her stomach, which churned with a visceral anxiety and a desperate desire to vomit. She was certain her breaths were becoming shallower, and as every second passed, she felt her heart ricocheting in her ribcage, having to try desperately hard to get the blood pumping around her.
Lizzie knew it had to be now, she’d got herself into such a state over it, there was no way she could back out and not have a nervous breakdown. Other than Maggie, who didn’t really count because she was basically magic, the Doctor would be the first person who knew – and by telling herself this, she was actually making herself feel worse. It almost felt as if every moment she had suffered during her teenage years because of it, and everything she had suffered from since, had been building up to this moment.
It was now.
“I have depression.”
A few moments of torturous silence passed.
It only dawned on Lizzie that actually, the Doctor had very little idea of the constant washing machine-like cycle her emotions spiralled through day in and day out, considering she was quite certain she’d not let him in on very much of it – and so perhaps this would come as rather out of the blue. Or maybe, the Doctor being the observant sort of person he was, had noticed it ages ago, and had been waiting for her to say something. Lizzie had no idea, however she was clearly going to keep guessing until the Doctor said something.
“Right…”
“I mean,” Lizzie tried to scramble for some words, believing that she had to defend herself, even though she knew that she didn’t. “I’ve known for a while. Like, since I was a teenager. And I guess you’ve probably known too. But even though… I’ve known, I’ve still not been able to… accept it, if that makes sense?”
The Doctor nodded – and even if he didn’t understand, he could accept it. Although, she thought, perhaps, that the Doctor did understand it. Especially with what he said next.
“Lizzie – why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he placed his hands on top of hers.
“Because… I’m not great at talking…”
“Well, have you tried getting any help, or…?”
Lizzie thought about that question, as it was one that had a multitude of different answers and she wasn’t sure which one was best. She hadn’t tried getting any help. “Back when I was a teenager, Maggie noticed and I was diagnosed – and they put me on antidepressants and like a tiny bit of counselling but that was it.”
She tried to calm herself down – the terrible provisions for young people with mental health issues always made her incredibly angry.
“And like, even when that happened I didn’t really… grasp what I was dealing with, so when I started taking responsibility for my own healthcare I just sort of… neglected it. I was too scared.”
The Doctor drew her hands closer to him, and looked her in the eye, and said, “Lizzie Darwin. Please – don’t be scared any longer. I’m here for you now, and we’re going to do something about this – I swear.”
Lizzie shook her head, and it was then that she realised she was crying. “It’s not like… saving the universe, you can’t just – can’t just push a button and save everything. I probably won’t ever be able to ‘cure’ myself of this, all I can do is… live with it.”
No matter how much it hurt. And sometimes, it was those moments of just living that were the hardest. When she had to just... sit and do nothing, just chat about anything random.
“Lizzie… please. I promise – I’m going to help you.”
“And I feel awful, because I should’ve helped that Lord guy, but…”
The Doctor quickly shook his head, and interrupted her. “You shouldn’t feel guilty, Lizzie. I know you, and I know that you always need to help. But sometimes, you can’t help, you can’t even tell someone everything is going to be okay. And I know that when you, Lizzie Darwin, are faced with those situations, you just can’t resist trying. Even when all you can say, is stay strong.”
“But it doesn’t help”
“But what matters is you tried. Many people wouldn’t. Many people would’ve heard the crying, and would’ve walked on. And… the same goes for yourself. You need to help, but you don’t know how.”
His lovely words made her smile, briefly. But she still didn’t feel reassured.
"You will get through this. Or at least - you won't, but perhaps I can help to ease the pain."
There was a silence between the two of them. And it wasn't the awkward street-corner silence of days gone by. They were together, now, as they truly were. Lizzie didn't feel better - but she hadn't expected to. There was no quick fix, no magic words she could speak to suddenly make herself euphoric 24/7. Lizzie Darwin would never be able to heal everything. All there was, was just... plodding onwards through life. Perhaps she could feel a glimmer of optimism, somewhere deep inside her. Perhaps, one day... things might be easier.
Lizzie was not a hollow, empty shell. She could be happy. People would look at her and think she was just miserable. Or people would say just stay strong, it's just a phase. What people did not understand was that she was ill. She could be happy, yes. But she could also be sad. And it was for to cope in the way she needed to.
It wouldn't always be easy. People seemed to judge her, to say she should always be happy. Life wouldn't always treat her well. Sometimes she seemed to believe that she had to be happy, and that if she wasn't, she was a failure - but it was okay to be sad.
All she could do, was muster up the grit and resiliance to drag herself on.
But for now, there was just the two of them. Sitting, and talking. To the sound of the grandfather clock, as time passed slowly by.
Neither of them spoke, because both of them understood. There were no words that could communicate that.
“Doesn’t this society just… make you sick?” she said eventually.
“In what way?”
“In all ways. Just then, I guess, it was their treatment of people who… see things differently.”
She thought back to some of the harsh words that Carson had used to describe his master, and how much the words had just made her skin crawl.
“Like,” she continued, “they treated that lord guy as if he’s weird and stupid and all sorts of other nasty things. But they don’t recognise that he is a human and isn’t just making things up. I don’t know, I just find it really upsetting…”
“I suppose if you can’t see something, you can’t know it’s there. It’s just a… misunderstanding.”
There was a deathly silence in the room for the briefest of seconds, and then the Doctor turned to Lizzie, to see that she was glaring at him.
The lord saw the ghosts. Why should that be discounted? To Lizzie, it was like her head. She was sad, sometimes. But just because the Doctor couldn’t see those thoughts, that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
“So many people have been stigmatized because there’s people like Mr Carson around – I mean, in my time. So don’t say ‘oh, it was a misunderstanding’, as some kind of defence for their rubbish attitudes.”
There was an awkward pause, before the Doctor eventually apologised, and Lizzie accepted it, even though she’d been surprised and disappointed at what he’d said, because of all people, she’d expected better from him. To be fair on him, he probably hadn’t meant anything by it – and it was probably that the words had just come out wrong. But even so. Sensitive subject.
Lizzie un-buried her face from her hands, and looked up at the Doctor.
“One of the worst things for me is this feeling that you’re just… not doing anything worthwhile. Like, there’s things that you could be doing, but you just, I don’t know, can’t bring yourself to do them. And it just… sucks your passion out of everything.”
The Doctor gave her a funny look, and Lizzie looked at him awkwardly, because it was a bit of a weird and sudden thing to say.
“Yes,” the Doctor murmured. “All the time.”
That made her feel a bit better, at least – that the most powerful and god-like person she’d ever met at least felt similar to her at times.
“I run,” the Doctor leaned back on the sofa, and Lizzie looked at him, as it seemed a bit random, before suddenly remembering what he was talking about. “Every single day of my life is me, running. Running from stuff I’ve got to do. And every single day, that stuff that I’m running from, it haunts me. Making me feel so, so guilty about everything I’m running from. But I can’t get rid of it. It’s always following me. I – I know that one day, I’ll have to confront that stuff. And I know that it could kill me.”
Lizzie turned to face him, and he was staring at the marble bust on the mantelpiece. It was of a titan, hunched over, on its knees, looking up as if it were searching for mercy that wouldn’t ever be found.
“I guess… I don’t know, but surely that stuff isn’t important when you’ve got people like Cioné and Iris and people you love?”
“That’s what I try and do,” the Doctor said. His voice was emotionless and empty – not sad. It was as if there wasn’t any emotion there for sadness. “But sometimes, the fear seems stronger than it.”
“Fear,” Lizzie observed, “is a very powerful emotion.”
The Doctor agreed with her. He’d seen it exploited more times in his lives than he’d care to imagine.
“Lizzie,” he started. “There’s something I never told –”
Suddenly the room shook violently beneath them, and the marble bust of the titan rocked on the mantelpiece, flopping off onto the floor like a child rolling down a hill and accidentally realising it was the edge of a cliff-face. It was only the briefest of tremors, but it had great force – the artworks tore, and fell off the walls, while several of the books came catapulting from their shelves, the equivalent of bricks being lost from their buildings during an earthquake.
Both the Doctor and Lizzie were thrown onto the floor, and were given a quick dusting of plaster from the ceiling, like a baker sieving icing sugar over a recently prepared Victoria sponge. The gas in the light fitting erupted in a fireball, as if suddenly the entire room had been thrown into the sun, before the sun was extinguished, leaving them in nothing but a cold, cruel darkness.
The door of the drawing room burst open, like it had been locked and had been thrashed and bashed at by a gigantic fist, giving into the pressure, unable to hold it off anymore. Except, there was nobody there to have opened it. Nothing was on the other side, apart from the long, dark corridor, leading to some other distant wing of the house. The lights there were off as well, and all that could be seen were shadows. But the shadows were terrifying, and it was as if the shadows in that corridor were holding something truly terrifying, and truly scary.
“What on Earth,” the Doctor’s eye opened, to see the eye of the broken marble bust in front of him. He stood up, helping Lizzie out from a conglomeration of books and maps and a globe that’d come crashing down from the stop of one of the bookshelves.
When they both stood up, they looked at each other, and there was no sound.
No sound at all.
Not even from the grandfather clock.
It was almost comical as they both looked over to it in unison, but during the room-quake, the workings had broken. Its glass face had been pulverised, and the gold cogs of its brain and heart were spilled all out on the floor in front of it, as if the old grandfather had vomited up its insides.
There was something else wrong as well – but neither of them could quite work out what it was. Obviously something was drastically peculiar in itself – the entire room had just shaken beneath them. But something else.
Something else…
They both realised at exactly the same time, as they looked over at the door of the drawing room, and it was still closed. It didn’t make sense, because during the chaos, the door had been forced open, as if a great hand had been thrashing and bashing and –
There was a new door.
Within an instant, the Doctor was already by the brand-new frame, looking at the brand-new hinges and the brand new panelling, and the brand new doorway that had suddenly opened up in the house. The drawing room was at the heart of the property – but it seemed as if this brand-new door and brand new corridor that hadn’t existed before led to another heart, buried even deeper inside.
The corridor was bloodcurdling. Still hidden by the shadows, it looked as if it went on forever into some new, secluded dimension. The Doctor didn’t dare step past the doorframe, as if by stepping through, he’d never be able to get back.
“Lizzie… I’m terribly sorry.”
Lizzie was looking down the corridor, trying to pick out whether that was a shape moving in the shadows, or whether she was just making things up, or –
“What for?” she asked him.
“I’ve put us both in terrible danger.”
The Doctor grabbed the new door, and tried to force it shut – but it would not budge from its spot. It was jammed wide open, a gateway for whatever was down the corridor to walk through.
“But – this is the dimensional thing, yeah?” she walked over to him, as he took out the sonic screwdriver, and pointed it down the corridor, although from the look on his face, it looked as if he didn’t need to bother.
He knew something. She knew he did. And he’d done something. It all began to fall into place in her head – the Doctor had known something was wrong with this house along. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so quick to cancel a trip to somewhere he himself had cited as one of his favourite places in the universe. The Doctor was rubbish at hiding his emotions –
Except, he wasn’t.
The Doctor was devious, and he knew what he was doing. He had been lying to her, manipulating her, preparing her for whatever awaited them. He had known that something was going to happen here. For all their time together, she’d thought he could read his face with ease. It seemed that now, she was beginning to doubt herself – because somehow the Doctor had hidden his true intentions away from her. Lizzie couldn’t help but ask how long he’d been doing that for.
She remembered when they’d been looking through his diary, and he’d talked about his previous-self, how he was a master-manipulator, and how he had changed. When she looked at him, she didn’t see him. Not the person she knew.
“Doctor, please,” she looked at him. “Tell me you haven’t been lying to me.”
The Doctor looked at her, for the briefest of seconds in the eye, and then he looked away, because he couldn’t bear it any longer.
“I’m so sorry, Elizabeth Darwin. I really, truly am. But – this isn’t just a small paranormal investigation with a few ghosts. And, I knew that from the start, I did, but –”
She looked at him, as if to say ‘tell me’. She didn’t even need to voice the words aloud, because he knew.
“Lizzie – we’re at the end of time.”
***
THE SHADOWSTAR ALLIANCE
SOMETIME IN THE 52ND CENTURY
Dr Siddiqui’s metal walking stick clicked and clicked and clicked against the glass floors of the ShadowStar’s base of operations. Beneath him, he could see a sun exploding, and above him, he could see a million stars being born. Such birth and death on a universal scale only marked one thing.
Elle Mthembu’s office.
The ShadowStar’s base of operations always orbited around a few select locations in the universe – in those locations, there had to be star birth, and star death, simultaneously. The ship would be positioned so Elle’s office floated around in space directly between the two. Supposedly it was because star birth and star death marked the most significant points in the universe, or some awful philosophy that Elle possessed.
It didn’t matter, though. The two hallmarks were chilling, especially now, more than anything else.
Fear was rising through his stomach. And this was Dr Siddiqui – the greatest drug lord in the empire. A man who had been king of an entire underworld. He was not scared of things – things were scared of him. And yet, now, it seemed that finally there was something that would not bow to his will. Something that could not be reasoned with, something that was all-powerful.
He had learned, many years ago, that people were chess pieces. You were either a pawn, or you were a king. But you were never the gameplayer. Once he had been a king, before they turned him into a pawn, maybe a rook at a push. The one difference between life and chess was that there was no gameplayer. You were at the mercy of probability, of the cold clockwork of the universe, tick, tick, always ticking. A chess game, a clock, and a web, where each vibration disturbed something else. He could allegorise the universe so many times, but it didn’t matter.
The scanners had detected something, and it was not going to be pretty.
He arrived at the glass door, and knocked. Elle looked up from her computer, and beckoned him in.
“What is it?”
She knew immediately that something was wrong. Dr Siddiqui rarely showed his face from the basement of the space station.
“We’ve found something.”
Elle looked at him, waiting for him to continue, but he didn’t say anything. He simply stood, thinking of what to say.
“Go on! Spit it out!”
Eventually, he decided there was no other option.
“We’ve detected massive temporal convergences, all around one specific point in history.”
“Right? So we neutralise it? It’s a procedure we’ve carried out so many times before?”
Although as she said it, she knew it was not going to be as simple as that.
“The Doctor is there. The Doctor, and Elizabeth Darwin.”
Those two constantly get themselves into trouble, Elle mused.
“And Evangeline Cullengate.”
“… what.”
It did not make sense. What would Evangeline Cullengate want with the Doctor and Lizzie?
“30th September, 1837, the house of the Dun family. It’s as if time is just… I don’t know, the scanners can’t even decipher it. Total temporal collapse, on an impossible scale. It’s like something is forcing its way through the dimension, trying to break out. And you heard me correctly – we’ve detected vortex manipulation devices. Cullengate’s ministerial fleet has just cracked through the time vortex, and is currently flying towards Earth back in 1837.”
Elle was going to ask him if it was a joke, but it was all way too outlandish and preposterous to be a joke. Siddiqui read her next thought aloud.
“Yes – that is what total temporal collapse means. That the exact point in space-time they are stood on is caving in on itself. It’s because something is putting pressure on it. The Doctor and Darwin have found it… and it seems Cullengate is interested as well.”
“Keep all eyes on Cullengate and her team. Whatever is going on here… it’s huge.”
***
“Good evening!” a voice called over from behind them. The Doctor and Lizzie turned in unison, to see her. The woman, sat in an armchair. She wore a sleek suit, a set of pearls draped around her neck. At the moment, she’d be recognisable almost anywhere in the universe.
Considering their previous encounter, she was even more recognisable to them.
“Prime Minister,” the Doctor walked away from the door and over to her. “Good evening.”
“Doctor,” she held out a hand, and he shook it. “Pleasure to finally meet you in person, Miss Darwin.”
Lizzie did not shake her hand, instead she looked at the Doctor, wanting to know how she’d managed to get here, and why she was here. All she could see was confusion – to him, the chain of events made sense. Though it seemed that not even the Doctor had expected Evangeline Cullengate.
And all the time, it was as if she were out of the loop, looking in. Events that were to do with her, and yet they wouldn’t tell her. She felt like she was no more than a child, and she felt patronised and humiliated.
“What are you doing here?” the Doctor asked Eva.
“I could be asking you the same – except, I think you need to explain to dear Lizzie before you speak to me.”
“She’s right,” Lizzie turned to face him. The words came out more abruptly than she thought they would. It was as if the hurt had forced them out – that somebody who had respected her for once was just making it up. “What is all this?”
“I’ve explained already,” the Doctor walked towards her, and she backed away.
“No, you haven’t.”
“Okay, look. I knew there was something wrong with this house. There’s a pressure point here – something is pressing, hard, on space-tie, trying to force itself through. And it’s serious – the scale on which this is happening, Lizzie, is enough to break down the entire temporal structure. The jenga tower of time, Lizzie. Something, right now, is pushing on it, and it’s going to collapse. As for her,” he pointed at Evangeline. “I’ve got no idea.”
Evangeline laughed to herself – it was more of an old-lady tut.
“Miss Darwin. The Doctor is a liar. A compulsive one at that. He just can’t stop.”
“Doctor, please. Explain to me, what’s she talking about?”
“You’ve not even come close to explaining everything yet,” Evangeline laughed/tutted again. Lizzie was stood there, in between the middle of the two of them, actively despising the old lady to her right, and feeling betrayed by the man she’d called her best friend to her left. At that moment, she hovered, exactly as she had done so many weeks ago outside her flat, when she couldn’t decide whether to walk away from the Doctor, or whether to come closer.
She wasn’t sure if she’d made the right decision.
“It’s about you, Lizzie.”
The room fell deathly silent. Not even Evangeline made any snarky comments now – instead she watched them both, like an eager television viewer anticipating the next twist.
Lizzie was going to say something, but she didn’t. She let him continue.
The Doctor sighed – and he started to tell her everything.
“The Memory Graveyard.”
Three, simple words. Unrelated to the situation they were in now – the fragments of a past adventure. When they’d journeyed through bad memories, all to save the Doctor’s little girl.
The Doctor continued.
“Somehow, the Memory Graveyard was linked to your home – you remember, we accessed it from the pond out the back?”
They had – the Doctor, Lizzie, and Iris, had trusted each other, and even though they had no idea what awaited them, they were okay with facing it, because they were all together.
The Doctor continued.
“I had no idea why, but I needed to know – why was it connected to you? So I’ve been keeping an eye on it. And I was alerted when it started pushing through the fabric of time, at this point. I didn’t plan on saying anything – just to keep looking at it from a distance. But when we got Carson’s letter, and I thought, why not? Better to check it out in person.”
The Doctor paused – he was looking for more words, but it was hard. The next bit was going to be the toughest.
“This place, Lizzie – your care-home is built on the site of this manor. The Memory Graveyard, it’s like it’s… overlaid on this spot, in another dimension. Somehow, it – it’s got something to do with you, and I don’t know what. But the graveyard is coming through, it’s breaking down the walls of all time.”
It was the story of her whole damn life.
She didn’t say anything, she stood at the side of the room keeping her stupid mouth shut, thinking that it’d make things better for everyone else, and thinking that it would make things better for her. And because of that, she’d convinced herself, over time, that she couldn’t. Couldn’t what? Couldn’t do anything. For every single waking second, she’d always hidden herself away because of people saying and doing things, and it had turned her into someone who was scared. Finally, she realised the sort of people who had done that to her. It was the two sorts of people surrounding her. The sort of people who had killed her confidence over time, and who had reduced her into the person she was.
They were both watching her now.
“No,” she said. “I’m not doing this.”
The Doctor looked over at her, guilt plastered all over his face, and he held out a hand. “Lizzie, please –”
“This can’t be anything to – to do with me –”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor shrugged. And her skin crawled. Because that was all it was to him. A simple shrug. “I know what it is, you see – what’s pushing on the pressure point in space-time.”
Cullengate said nothing. Lizzie said nothing. But she was crying – she’d just realised it now.
“But I’m – I’m –”
“I don’t understand it myself yet,” he moved over towards her, placed a hand on hers, and she recoiled, walking over to a bookshelf.
“What’s she doing here, then?” Lizzie turned to Evangeline. Very few people made her skin crawl in the same way as the old woman opposite her. She had never spoken to anyone with the same contempt she spoke to her.
Cullengate smiled, an old-ladyish, gummy smile. “Oh, Miss Darwin. Who says I have a clue?”
Lizzie knew she was lying to her. But then she stopped, and doubted herself, because she’d thought exactly the same of the Doctor. She was doubting it all – Lizzie stopped, and took a deep breath, and tried all the coping techniques she’d ever been taught, but they were useless, because she was trying them all at once.
“I know you’re lying to me,” she turned to Evangeline.
“Oh, of course I am. I know exactly what is going on.” Evangeline sat stroking the ears of Evangeline’s shaggy golden retrievers sat at her feet – Lizzie hadn’t noticed them arrive. She didn’t stand up, but proceed with a deadly nonchalance.
“As Prime Minister of the Empire,” Evangeline took a breath, clearly enjoying herself. “I get lots of jolly powers – including control over the Earth’s interdimensional activities, at every point in history. When I saw the Earth colliding with this… memory dimension, I felt a responsibility to investigate. Acting on behalf of the people, of course.”
Lizzie glared at the woman, who clearly took note, even though she didn’t care at all.
“You see – the Memory Graveyard belongs to me.”
“You mean – it’s the Empire’s?” the Doctor stepped out of the shadows. He had been silent ever since explaining the situation to Lizzie. It seemed like a good place to interject.
“No,” Evangeline sighed. “It’s mine. I built it – from the federal reserves, of course,” she shrugged, as if it were obvious. “It’s my insurance.”
“Against?”
“The Daleks.”
The atmosphere in the room ran colder than it had been before. The ghosts of the Daleks had a greater impact than any true spectre or phantom.
“Every disgusting, brutal, hateful, awful, event in every life, ever," Evangeline whispered the 'ever'.
“It’s a goldmine for the Daleks,” the Doctor spat.
"And the Time Lords," Evangeline continued. "You misunderstand me. My people are terrified of the Time War, Doctor. The Memory Graveyard is going to keep it safe. I will let it through into this dimension. A last line of defence, to be unleashed against this godforsaken war."
“Look,” the Doctor ran up to her, and although she was sat down, her presence towered over him. “I hate this war, I despise it, with everything inside me. But if you think I’m going to let you exploit a universe full of people, just so you are so, so wrong."
“And a broken Time Lord? Well, we found a truly rich source of bad memories to extrapolate it from…”
Evangeline murmured it. It was barely audible, one would have to have been listening very, very intently. But somehow, both the Doctor and Lizzie were silent in an instant, and the words clawed themselves deep into them. It was at that moment that both of them realised they were vastly more out of depth than they’d imagined previously. Although they were already at the end of time, the notion Evangeline had suggested was almost more bloodcurdling and chilling and bile-filled and spine-tingling than anything else.
Evangeline looked as if she couldn’t wait to tuck into the next part of her little emotionally-torturous feast. Unable to resist it any longer, she embarked on the next part of her tale.
“The Memory Graveyard is powered from the mind of one person. Of course, Doctor – with so much history behind you – you were the only viable candidate.”
One of Cullengate’s golden retrievers nuzzled close up to her leg, seemingly enjoying himself just as much as his mistress.
Lizzie looked at the Doctor, and at his silence. The Doctor’s face was a mix of confusion, and of fear – it was a fear she hadn’t seen from him before. The Doctor had a dark side, of course he did – everyone did. And when he spoke of the Daleks, it was always truly prevalent. Though his face now was one of the most terrified man in the universe. The old man was so childlike then. A fearful child is a truly heart-breaking spectacle, and the Doctor looked exactly like one.
Of course, everyone knows that the most terrified thing in the entire universe is a bunny rabbit, taking its chances and throwing itself across a road, in a desperate bid to reach the other side – but failing at the last minute. If one could slow down time, as their car was mere milliseconds away from transforming that sweet, innocent fluffball into bloody, shredded roadkill, one would see a fear that would chill their blood until it became harder than the hardest ice. It is a peculiar mix of a life flashing before the rabbit’s eyes, and the anxiety of what lies beyond the grave, and a look of sheer nakedness. The look is one of, ‘why me?’. Why did the universe look at its list of subjects and sign the clipboard stating the life of that rabbit is to be claimed on that fateful day, perhaps by a hurried commuter, a car of kids on the school run, maybe a trucker one his way from Carlisle to Poole? If one could slow down time like this, it would change the person.
With vulnerability sloshed all over his face, his eyes bared exactly that resemblance. Lizzie saw it, and she wanted to cry more. Evangeline saw it, and she grinned.
“No – no, no, that isn’t possible,” the Doctor spluttered. Now it was not Lizzie’s turn to have no idea what was going on – instead it was his.
“You’re there now,” Evangeline was still sat down, smiling up at him, and yet the Doctor was so, so tiny. “After all – the Memory Graveyard takes place at every single moment across all of history. You’re powering it, Doctor.”
“I can’t be, I would know, surely, I would.”
The Doctor suddenly realised the oak-panelled walls had collided with his back and his cranium, and he reached out a hand to nurse it, but suddenly he couldn’t find his hands.
“It’s going to start sinking in, now you’re aware,” Evangeline continued. “Oh, Elizabeth,” she stood up, walking over to Lizzie. Lizzie stepped away from her, but Evangeline placed a mocking hand on her cheek. “Such a beautiful little girl. A life wasted on a man like the Doctor.”
Lizzie put her other hand on Evangeline’s, and moved it away from her face. No –the Doctor had lied to her, he’d got it wrong before. But would she leave him to a woman as vile as Evangeline Cullengate? Certainly not. He needed her help, more than anything. As Lizzie backed away, shaking her head, Evangeline smiled sadly. Lizzie was good at reading faces. Lizzie’s face was hard to read, apparently. But now so many things had happened, so many people had hidden themselves from her, and –
She didn’t know anymore.
Lizzie didn’t know who she was. She didn’t feel like herself. She was somebody else, looking at a body without a heart, without a brain.
“The Doctor and Elizabeth Darwin,” Evangeline was stood in the middle of the Doctor and Lizzie. “Such a pretty little fairytale. So magic – the sad old man and the sad little girl, who journeyed through time and space in their bigger-on-the-inside box. It’s sad that it doesn’t get a happy ending. Though – I suppose life isn’t like that.”
***
The book was closing. Lizzie was falling back, letting words and pages and chapters and covers and blurbs and paragraphs and punctuation wash over her. The Doctor was, somehow, moving away from her, although he was stood right by the wall. So was Evangeline – and then Lizzie realised that it was herself who was somehow falling backwards. It was as if somehow, she was crashing through a horizontal chasm, with the drawing room and Evangeline and the broken grandfather clock that would tick-no-more, steadily falling away from her.
Away.
From.
Her.
***
“Lizzie?”
Muffled voices, far away. They didn’t mean anything, just words, cascading together, like waves in the sea, always rolling over and over but in the end, just blurring into one, lapping up at the shoreline.
They were going to the beach.
They should’ve been at the beach.
Instead, somehow, they were in a trap, and there was the wicked witch, and she’d taken the wizard away to her dark, ancient tower, where she’d trapped him for eternity, to live forever with nothing but the company of bad dreams and memories and –
“Lizzie?!”
“Lizzie?”
“Lizzie?”
Lizzie was not in the old house anymore.
For some reason, she was on a leather settee, and there was a steaming mug of tea in her hands. It took her a few seconds just watching the bubbles on the top of tea, before she realised something.
Her hands were different.
Not massively different, of course – they were still her own hands. But when she looked at them, there was definitely something new.
Or not new?
Her hands were older. Of course, they were still the hands of someone in their twenties, but they were… thinner, sort of? Skeletal, perhaps. Veiny.
She dared to look away from her hands. There was a woman sat opposite her – she seemed vaguely familiar, but it was like that thing, where you can remember
the plot details from a film, and you just can’t quite put your finger on what film it is.
The room was nice, though – the woman sat in an armchair, and there was a glass coffee table in the middle of them. A few artworks hung up on the walls, and there were French doors, looking out onto a vast, extensive garden. It was high summer, by the looks of the flowers and the plants – seas of crimsons and violets and golds. At the far end was a blossom tree, and a small fishpond as well, with a sundial beside it. The sun streamed in through the windows, filling the entire room to bursting with bright, midday light.
Lizzie looked down at her hands, and she was still sure they were different.
And her clothes were as well.
There was a mirror on the far wall, and she caught sight of herself. At first, nothing registered – she was still her, she was still Lizzie Darwin.
Except, she was older.
Not hugely older, but a few years, perhaps.
“Lizzie,” the woman opposite said. “I know this is hard for you, and it was a very brave thing for you to do – to be able to recount this for me.”
Lizzie didn’t know what to say, and then she said the obvious.
“I – where am I?”
There was an awkward silence, but for once she didn’t feel stupid, because she genuinely had no idea.
“Take another sip of tea, Lizzie. I think the stress of recounting the incident that led to your departure was, perhaps, a little bit much all for one session.”
Lizzie took a sip of tea, and, of course, it healed everything.
She knew who she was.
Elizabeth Darwin, of course. And, this was her counsellor. She came here every week, on Wednesdays, at half-past-twelve. They drank tea, and Lizzie recounted her stories. Lizzie Darwin knew exactly where she was, and she knew what she did. She could remember everything about her life.
Lizzie Darwin could also remember that the incident in the Victorian manor, the incident that had led to her leaving the Doctor, had taken place five years ago.
“So that’s that,” Lizzie shrugged. “That’s the story of how I left the Doctor. And… five years later, here I am.”
She was so stupid – of course she was older. Five years older to how she’d been then. And Lizzie had lived five years of a life – a happy life. A life always haunted, but a happy life, still. Her memories of her time with the Doctor would always be there.
But they were no more than a fairytale.
"As I thought," the Doctor glanced at the little screen on the ecto-rod. "The ghosts are just projections coming from the big time-space gash. And that's the real concern."
There's no just about it, Lizzie thought, irritated by the Doctor's dismissive attitude. But she had something important to say. “I need to tell you something.”
Lizzie forced herself to say that, so there was no backing out. No matter how much time she would spend finding the right words to strong together, at least now she would have to say them at some point.
“Okay.”
The Doctor looked fine about it – but then, perhaps he assumed she was going to say she’d accidentally lost one of the books from the library, or something. In contrast to the Doctor’s chilled out appearance, Lizzie felt sick to her stomach, which churned with a visceral anxiety and a desperate desire to vomit. She was certain her breaths were becoming shallower, and as every second passed, she felt her heart ricocheting in her ribcage, having to try desperately hard to get the blood pumping around her.
Lizzie knew it had to be now, she’d got herself into such a state over it, there was no way she could back out and not have a nervous breakdown. Other than Maggie, who didn’t really count because she was basically magic, the Doctor would be the first person who knew – and by telling herself this, she was actually making herself feel worse. It almost felt as if every moment she had suffered during her teenage years because of it, and everything she had suffered from since, had been building up to this moment.
It was now.
“I have depression.”
A few moments of torturous silence passed.
It only dawned on Lizzie that actually, the Doctor had very little idea of the constant washing machine-like cycle her emotions spiralled through day in and day out, considering she was quite certain she’d not let him in on very much of it – and so perhaps this would come as rather out of the blue. Or maybe, the Doctor being the observant sort of person he was, had noticed it ages ago, and had been waiting for her to say something. Lizzie had no idea, however she was clearly going to keep guessing until the Doctor said something.
“Right…”
“I mean,” Lizzie tried to scramble for some words, believing that she had to defend herself, even though she knew that she didn’t. “I’ve known for a while. Like, since I was a teenager. And I guess you’ve probably known too. But even though… I’ve known, I’ve still not been able to… accept it, if that makes sense?”
The Doctor nodded – and even if he didn’t understand, he could accept it. Although, she thought, perhaps, that the Doctor did understand it. Especially with what he said next.
“Lizzie – why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he placed his hands on top of hers.
“Because… I’m not great at talking…”
“Well, have you tried getting any help, or…?”
Lizzie thought about that question, as it was one that had a multitude of different answers and she wasn’t sure which one was best. She hadn’t tried getting any help. “Back when I was a teenager, Maggie noticed and I was diagnosed – and they put me on antidepressants and like a tiny bit of counselling but that was it.”
She tried to calm herself down – the terrible provisions for young people with mental health issues always made her incredibly angry.
“And like, even when that happened I didn’t really… grasp what I was dealing with, so when I started taking responsibility for my own healthcare I just sort of… neglected it. I was too scared.”
The Doctor drew her hands closer to him, and looked her in the eye, and said, “Lizzie Darwin. Please – don’t be scared any longer. I’m here for you now, and we’re going to do something about this – I swear.”
Lizzie shook her head, and it was then that she realised she was crying. “It’s not like… saving the universe, you can’t just – can’t just push a button and save everything. I probably won’t ever be able to ‘cure’ myself of this, all I can do is… live with it.”
No matter how much it hurt. And sometimes, it was those moments of just living that were the hardest. When she had to just... sit and do nothing, just chat about anything random.
“Lizzie… please. I promise – I’m going to help you.”
“And I feel awful, because I should’ve helped that Lord guy, but…”
The Doctor quickly shook his head, and interrupted her. “You shouldn’t feel guilty, Lizzie. I know you, and I know that you always need to help. But sometimes, you can’t help, you can’t even tell someone everything is going to be okay. And I know that when you, Lizzie Darwin, are faced with those situations, you just can’t resist trying. Even when all you can say, is stay strong.”
“But it doesn’t help”
“But what matters is you tried. Many people wouldn’t. Many people would’ve heard the crying, and would’ve walked on. And… the same goes for yourself. You need to help, but you don’t know how.”
His lovely words made her smile, briefly. But she still didn’t feel reassured.
"You will get through this. Or at least - you won't, but perhaps I can help to ease the pain."
There was a silence between the two of them. And it wasn't the awkward street-corner silence of days gone by. They were together, now, as they truly were. Lizzie didn't feel better - but she hadn't expected to. There was no quick fix, no magic words she could speak to suddenly make herself euphoric 24/7. Lizzie Darwin would never be able to heal everything. All there was, was just... plodding onwards through life. Perhaps she could feel a glimmer of optimism, somewhere deep inside her. Perhaps, one day... things might be easier.
Lizzie was not a hollow, empty shell. She could be happy. People would look at her and think she was just miserable. Or people would say just stay strong, it's just a phase. What people did not understand was that she was ill. She could be happy, yes. But she could also be sad. And it was for to cope in the way she needed to.
It wouldn't always be easy. People seemed to judge her, to say she should always be happy. Life wouldn't always treat her well. Sometimes she seemed to believe that she had to be happy, and that if she wasn't, she was a failure - but it was okay to be sad.
All she could do, was muster up the grit and resiliance to drag herself on.
But for now, there was just the two of them. Sitting, and talking. To the sound of the grandfather clock, as time passed slowly by.
Neither of them spoke, because both of them understood. There were no words that could communicate that.
“Doesn’t this society just… make you sick?” she said eventually.
“In what way?”
“In all ways. Just then, I guess, it was their treatment of people who… see things differently.”
She thought back to some of the harsh words that Carson had used to describe his master, and how much the words had just made her skin crawl.
“Like,” she continued, “they treated that lord guy as if he’s weird and stupid and all sorts of other nasty things. But they don’t recognise that he is a human and isn’t just making things up. I don’t know, I just find it really upsetting…”
“I suppose if you can’t see something, you can’t know it’s there. It’s just a… misunderstanding.”
There was a deathly silence in the room for the briefest of seconds, and then the Doctor turned to Lizzie, to see that she was glaring at him.
The lord saw the ghosts. Why should that be discounted? To Lizzie, it was like her head. She was sad, sometimes. But just because the Doctor couldn’t see those thoughts, that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
“So many people have been stigmatized because there’s people like Mr Carson around – I mean, in my time. So don’t say ‘oh, it was a misunderstanding’, as some kind of defence for their rubbish attitudes.”
There was an awkward pause, before the Doctor eventually apologised, and Lizzie accepted it, even though she’d been surprised and disappointed at what he’d said, because of all people, she’d expected better from him. To be fair on him, he probably hadn’t meant anything by it – and it was probably that the words had just come out wrong. But even so. Sensitive subject.
Lizzie un-buried her face from her hands, and looked up at the Doctor.
“One of the worst things for me is this feeling that you’re just… not doing anything worthwhile. Like, there’s things that you could be doing, but you just, I don’t know, can’t bring yourself to do them. And it just… sucks your passion out of everything.”
The Doctor gave her a funny look, and Lizzie looked at him awkwardly, because it was a bit of a weird and sudden thing to say.
“Yes,” the Doctor murmured. “All the time.”
That made her feel a bit better, at least – that the most powerful and god-like person she’d ever met at least felt similar to her at times.
“I run,” the Doctor leaned back on the sofa, and Lizzie looked at him, as it seemed a bit random, before suddenly remembering what he was talking about. “Every single day of my life is me, running. Running from stuff I’ve got to do. And every single day, that stuff that I’m running from, it haunts me. Making me feel so, so guilty about everything I’m running from. But I can’t get rid of it. It’s always following me. I – I know that one day, I’ll have to confront that stuff. And I know that it could kill me.”
Lizzie turned to face him, and he was staring at the marble bust on the mantelpiece. It was of a titan, hunched over, on its knees, looking up as if it were searching for mercy that wouldn’t ever be found.
“I guess… I don’t know, but surely that stuff isn’t important when you’ve got people like Cioné and Iris and people you love?”
“That’s what I try and do,” the Doctor said. His voice was emotionless and empty – not sad. It was as if there wasn’t any emotion there for sadness. “But sometimes, the fear seems stronger than it.”
“Fear,” Lizzie observed, “is a very powerful emotion.”
The Doctor agreed with her. He’d seen it exploited more times in his lives than he’d care to imagine.
“Lizzie,” he started. “There’s something I never told –”
Suddenly the room shook violently beneath them, and the marble bust of the titan rocked on the mantelpiece, flopping off onto the floor like a child rolling down a hill and accidentally realising it was the edge of a cliff-face. It was only the briefest of tremors, but it had great force – the artworks tore, and fell off the walls, while several of the books came catapulting from their shelves, the equivalent of bricks being lost from their buildings during an earthquake.
Both the Doctor and Lizzie were thrown onto the floor, and were given a quick dusting of plaster from the ceiling, like a baker sieving icing sugar over a recently prepared Victoria sponge. The gas in the light fitting erupted in a fireball, as if suddenly the entire room had been thrown into the sun, before the sun was extinguished, leaving them in nothing but a cold, cruel darkness.
The door of the drawing room burst open, like it had been locked and had been thrashed and bashed at by a gigantic fist, giving into the pressure, unable to hold it off anymore. Except, there was nobody there to have opened it. Nothing was on the other side, apart from the long, dark corridor, leading to some other distant wing of the house. The lights there were off as well, and all that could be seen were shadows. But the shadows were terrifying, and it was as if the shadows in that corridor were holding something truly terrifying, and truly scary.
“What on Earth,” the Doctor’s eye opened, to see the eye of the broken marble bust in front of him. He stood up, helping Lizzie out from a conglomeration of books and maps and a globe that’d come crashing down from the stop of one of the bookshelves.
When they both stood up, they looked at each other, and there was no sound.
No sound at all.
Not even from the grandfather clock.
It was almost comical as they both looked over to it in unison, but during the room-quake, the workings had broken. Its glass face had been pulverised, and the gold cogs of its brain and heart were spilled all out on the floor in front of it, as if the old grandfather had vomited up its insides.
There was something else wrong as well – but neither of them could quite work out what it was. Obviously something was drastically peculiar in itself – the entire room had just shaken beneath them. But something else.
Something else…
They both realised at exactly the same time, as they looked over at the door of the drawing room, and it was still closed. It didn’t make sense, because during the chaos, the door had been forced open, as if a great hand had been thrashing and bashing and –
There was a new door.
Within an instant, the Doctor was already by the brand-new frame, looking at the brand-new hinges and the brand new panelling, and the brand new doorway that had suddenly opened up in the house. The drawing room was at the heart of the property – but it seemed as if this brand-new door and brand new corridor that hadn’t existed before led to another heart, buried even deeper inside.
The corridor was bloodcurdling. Still hidden by the shadows, it looked as if it went on forever into some new, secluded dimension. The Doctor didn’t dare step past the doorframe, as if by stepping through, he’d never be able to get back.
“Lizzie… I’m terribly sorry.”
Lizzie was looking down the corridor, trying to pick out whether that was a shape moving in the shadows, or whether she was just making things up, or –
“What for?” she asked him.
“I’ve put us both in terrible danger.”
The Doctor grabbed the new door, and tried to force it shut – but it would not budge from its spot. It was jammed wide open, a gateway for whatever was down the corridor to walk through.
“But – this is the dimensional thing, yeah?” she walked over to him, as he took out the sonic screwdriver, and pointed it down the corridor, although from the look on his face, it looked as if he didn’t need to bother.
He knew something. She knew he did. And he’d done something. It all began to fall into place in her head – the Doctor had known something was wrong with this house along. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so quick to cancel a trip to somewhere he himself had cited as one of his favourite places in the universe. The Doctor was rubbish at hiding his emotions –
Except, he wasn’t.
The Doctor was devious, and he knew what he was doing. He had been lying to her, manipulating her, preparing her for whatever awaited them. He had known that something was going to happen here. For all their time together, she’d thought he could read his face with ease. It seemed that now, she was beginning to doubt herself – because somehow the Doctor had hidden his true intentions away from her. Lizzie couldn’t help but ask how long he’d been doing that for.
She remembered when they’d been looking through his diary, and he’d talked about his previous-self, how he was a master-manipulator, and how he had changed. When she looked at him, she didn’t see him. Not the person she knew.
“Doctor, please,” she looked at him. “Tell me you haven’t been lying to me.”
The Doctor looked at her, for the briefest of seconds in the eye, and then he looked away, because he couldn’t bear it any longer.
“I’m so sorry, Elizabeth Darwin. I really, truly am. But – this isn’t just a small paranormal investigation with a few ghosts. And, I knew that from the start, I did, but –”
She looked at him, as if to say ‘tell me’. She didn’t even need to voice the words aloud, because he knew.
“Lizzie – we’re at the end of time.”
***
THE SHADOWSTAR ALLIANCE
SOMETIME IN THE 52ND CENTURY
Dr Siddiqui’s metal walking stick clicked and clicked and clicked against the glass floors of the ShadowStar’s base of operations. Beneath him, he could see a sun exploding, and above him, he could see a million stars being born. Such birth and death on a universal scale only marked one thing.
Elle Mthembu’s office.
The ShadowStar’s base of operations always orbited around a few select locations in the universe – in those locations, there had to be star birth, and star death, simultaneously. The ship would be positioned so Elle’s office floated around in space directly between the two. Supposedly it was because star birth and star death marked the most significant points in the universe, or some awful philosophy that Elle possessed.
It didn’t matter, though. The two hallmarks were chilling, especially now, more than anything else.
Fear was rising through his stomach. And this was Dr Siddiqui – the greatest drug lord in the empire. A man who had been king of an entire underworld. He was not scared of things – things were scared of him. And yet, now, it seemed that finally there was something that would not bow to his will. Something that could not be reasoned with, something that was all-powerful.
He had learned, many years ago, that people were chess pieces. You were either a pawn, or you were a king. But you were never the gameplayer. Once he had been a king, before they turned him into a pawn, maybe a rook at a push. The one difference between life and chess was that there was no gameplayer. You were at the mercy of probability, of the cold clockwork of the universe, tick, tick, always ticking. A chess game, a clock, and a web, where each vibration disturbed something else. He could allegorise the universe so many times, but it didn’t matter.
The scanners had detected something, and it was not going to be pretty.
He arrived at the glass door, and knocked. Elle looked up from her computer, and beckoned him in.
“What is it?”
She knew immediately that something was wrong. Dr Siddiqui rarely showed his face from the basement of the space station.
“We’ve found something.”
Elle looked at him, waiting for him to continue, but he didn’t say anything. He simply stood, thinking of what to say.
“Go on! Spit it out!”
Eventually, he decided there was no other option.
“We’ve detected massive temporal convergences, all around one specific point in history.”
“Right? So we neutralise it? It’s a procedure we’ve carried out so many times before?”
Although as she said it, she knew it was not going to be as simple as that.
“The Doctor is there. The Doctor, and Elizabeth Darwin.”
Those two constantly get themselves into trouble, Elle mused.
“And Evangeline Cullengate.”
“… what.”
It did not make sense. What would Evangeline Cullengate want with the Doctor and Lizzie?
“30th September, 1837, the house of the Dun family. It’s as if time is just… I don’t know, the scanners can’t even decipher it. Total temporal collapse, on an impossible scale. It’s like something is forcing its way through the dimension, trying to break out. And you heard me correctly – we’ve detected vortex manipulation devices. Cullengate’s ministerial fleet has just cracked through the time vortex, and is currently flying towards Earth back in 1837.”
Elle was going to ask him if it was a joke, but it was all way too outlandish and preposterous to be a joke. Siddiqui read her next thought aloud.
“Yes – that is what total temporal collapse means. That the exact point in space-time they are stood on is caving in on itself. It’s because something is putting pressure on it. The Doctor and Darwin have found it… and it seems Cullengate is interested as well.”
“Keep all eyes on Cullengate and her team. Whatever is going on here… it’s huge.”
***
“Good evening!” a voice called over from behind them. The Doctor and Lizzie turned in unison, to see her. The woman, sat in an armchair. She wore a sleek suit, a set of pearls draped around her neck. At the moment, she’d be recognisable almost anywhere in the universe.
Considering their previous encounter, she was even more recognisable to them.
“Prime Minister,” the Doctor walked away from the door and over to her. “Good evening.”
“Doctor,” she held out a hand, and he shook it. “Pleasure to finally meet you in person, Miss Darwin.”
Lizzie did not shake her hand, instead she looked at the Doctor, wanting to know how she’d managed to get here, and why she was here. All she could see was confusion – to him, the chain of events made sense. Though it seemed that not even the Doctor had expected Evangeline Cullengate.
And all the time, it was as if she were out of the loop, looking in. Events that were to do with her, and yet they wouldn’t tell her. She felt like she was no more than a child, and she felt patronised and humiliated.
“What are you doing here?” the Doctor asked Eva.
“I could be asking you the same – except, I think you need to explain to dear Lizzie before you speak to me.”
“She’s right,” Lizzie turned to face him. The words came out more abruptly than she thought they would. It was as if the hurt had forced them out – that somebody who had respected her for once was just making it up. “What is all this?”
“I’ve explained already,” the Doctor walked towards her, and she backed away.
“No, you haven’t.”
“Okay, look. I knew there was something wrong with this house. There’s a pressure point here – something is pressing, hard, on space-tie, trying to force itself through. And it’s serious – the scale on which this is happening, Lizzie, is enough to break down the entire temporal structure. The jenga tower of time, Lizzie. Something, right now, is pushing on it, and it’s going to collapse. As for her,” he pointed at Evangeline. “I’ve got no idea.”
Evangeline laughed to herself – it was more of an old-lady tut.
“Miss Darwin. The Doctor is a liar. A compulsive one at that. He just can’t stop.”
“Doctor, please. Explain to me, what’s she talking about?”
“You’ve not even come close to explaining everything yet,” Evangeline laughed/tutted again. Lizzie was stood there, in between the middle of the two of them, actively despising the old lady to her right, and feeling betrayed by the man she’d called her best friend to her left. At that moment, she hovered, exactly as she had done so many weeks ago outside her flat, when she couldn’t decide whether to walk away from the Doctor, or whether to come closer.
She wasn’t sure if she’d made the right decision.
“It’s about you, Lizzie.”
The room fell deathly silent. Not even Evangeline made any snarky comments now – instead she watched them both, like an eager television viewer anticipating the next twist.
Lizzie was going to say something, but she didn’t. She let him continue.
The Doctor sighed – and he started to tell her everything.
“The Memory Graveyard.”
Three, simple words. Unrelated to the situation they were in now – the fragments of a past adventure. When they’d journeyed through bad memories, all to save the Doctor’s little girl.
The Doctor continued.
“Somehow, the Memory Graveyard was linked to your home – you remember, we accessed it from the pond out the back?”
They had – the Doctor, Lizzie, and Iris, had trusted each other, and even though they had no idea what awaited them, they were okay with facing it, because they were all together.
The Doctor continued.
“I had no idea why, but I needed to know – why was it connected to you? So I’ve been keeping an eye on it. And I was alerted when it started pushing through the fabric of time, at this point. I didn’t plan on saying anything – just to keep looking at it from a distance. But when we got Carson’s letter, and I thought, why not? Better to check it out in person.”
The Doctor paused – he was looking for more words, but it was hard. The next bit was going to be the toughest.
“This place, Lizzie – your care-home is built on the site of this manor. The Memory Graveyard, it’s like it’s… overlaid on this spot, in another dimension. Somehow, it – it’s got something to do with you, and I don’t know what. But the graveyard is coming through, it’s breaking down the walls of all time.”
It was the story of her whole damn life.
She didn’t say anything, she stood at the side of the room keeping her stupid mouth shut, thinking that it’d make things better for everyone else, and thinking that it would make things better for her. And because of that, she’d convinced herself, over time, that she couldn’t. Couldn’t what? Couldn’t do anything. For every single waking second, she’d always hidden herself away because of people saying and doing things, and it had turned her into someone who was scared. Finally, she realised the sort of people who had done that to her. It was the two sorts of people surrounding her. The sort of people who had killed her confidence over time, and who had reduced her into the person she was.
They were both watching her now.
“No,” she said. “I’m not doing this.”
The Doctor looked over at her, guilt plastered all over his face, and he held out a hand. “Lizzie, please –”
“This can’t be anything to – to do with me –”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor shrugged. And her skin crawled. Because that was all it was to him. A simple shrug. “I know what it is, you see – what’s pushing on the pressure point in space-time.”
Cullengate said nothing. Lizzie said nothing. But she was crying – she’d just realised it now.
“But I’m – I’m –”
“I don’t understand it myself yet,” he moved over towards her, placed a hand on hers, and she recoiled, walking over to a bookshelf.
“What’s she doing here, then?” Lizzie turned to Evangeline. Very few people made her skin crawl in the same way as the old woman opposite her. She had never spoken to anyone with the same contempt she spoke to her.
Cullengate smiled, an old-ladyish, gummy smile. “Oh, Miss Darwin. Who says I have a clue?”
Lizzie knew she was lying to her. But then she stopped, and doubted herself, because she’d thought exactly the same of the Doctor. She was doubting it all – Lizzie stopped, and took a deep breath, and tried all the coping techniques she’d ever been taught, but they were useless, because she was trying them all at once.
“I know you’re lying to me,” she turned to Evangeline.
“Oh, of course I am. I know exactly what is going on.” Evangeline sat stroking the ears of Evangeline’s shaggy golden retrievers sat at her feet – Lizzie hadn’t noticed them arrive. She didn’t stand up, but proceed with a deadly nonchalance.
“As Prime Minister of the Empire,” Evangeline took a breath, clearly enjoying herself. “I get lots of jolly powers – including control over the Earth’s interdimensional activities, at every point in history. When I saw the Earth colliding with this… memory dimension, I felt a responsibility to investigate. Acting on behalf of the people, of course.”
Lizzie glared at the woman, who clearly took note, even though she didn’t care at all.
“You see – the Memory Graveyard belongs to me.”
“You mean – it’s the Empire’s?” the Doctor stepped out of the shadows. He had been silent ever since explaining the situation to Lizzie. It seemed like a good place to interject.
“No,” Evangeline sighed. “It’s mine. I built it – from the federal reserves, of course,” she shrugged, as if it were obvious. “It’s my insurance.”
“Against?”
“The Daleks.”
The atmosphere in the room ran colder than it had been before. The ghosts of the Daleks had a greater impact than any true spectre or phantom.
“Every disgusting, brutal, hateful, awful, event in every life, ever," Evangeline whispered the 'ever'.
“It’s a goldmine for the Daleks,” the Doctor spat.
"And the Time Lords," Evangeline continued. "You misunderstand me. My people are terrified of the Time War, Doctor. The Memory Graveyard is going to keep it safe. I will let it through into this dimension. A last line of defence, to be unleashed against this godforsaken war."
“Look,” the Doctor ran up to her, and although she was sat down, her presence towered over him. “I hate this war, I despise it, with everything inside me. But if you think I’m going to let you exploit a universe full of people, just so you are so, so wrong."
“And a broken Time Lord? Well, we found a truly rich source of bad memories to extrapolate it from…”
Evangeline murmured it. It was barely audible, one would have to have been listening very, very intently. But somehow, both the Doctor and Lizzie were silent in an instant, and the words clawed themselves deep into them. It was at that moment that both of them realised they were vastly more out of depth than they’d imagined previously. Although they were already at the end of time, the notion Evangeline had suggested was almost more bloodcurdling and chilling and bile-filled and spine-tingling than anything else.
Evangeline looked as if she couldn’t wait to tuck into the next part of her little emotionally-torturous feast. Unable to resist it any longer, she embarked on the next part of her tale.
“The Memory Graveyard is powered from the mind of one person. Of course, Doctor – with so much history behind you – you were the only viable candidate.”
One of Cullengate’s golden retrievers nuzzled close up to her leg, seemingly enjoying himself just as much as his mistress.
Lizzie looked at the Doctor, and at his silence. The Doctor’s face was a mix of confusion, and of fear – it was a fear she hadn’t seen from him before. The Doctor had a dark side, of course he did – everyone did. And when he spoke of the Daleks, it was always truly prevalent. Though his face now was one of the most terrified man in the universe. The old man was so childlike then. A fearful child is a truly heart-breaking spectacle, and the Doctor looked exactly like one.
Of course, everyone knows that the most terrified thing in the entire universe is a bunny rabbit, taking its chances and throwing itself across a road, in a desperate bid to reach the other side – but failing at the last minute. If one could slow down time, as their car was mere milliseconds away from transforming that sweet, innocent fluffball into bloody, shredded roadkill, one would see a fear that would chill their blood until it became harder than the hardest ice. It is a peculiar mix of a life flashing before the rabbit’s eyes, and the anxiety of what lies beyond the grave, and a look of sheer nakedness. The look is one of, ‘why me?’. Why did the universe look at its list of subjects and sign the clipboard stating the life of that rabbit is to be claimed on that fateful day, perhaps by a hurried commuter, a car of kids on the school run, maybe a trucker one his way from Carlisle to Poole? If one could slow down time like this, it would change the person.
With vulnerability sloshed all over his face, his eyes bared exactly that resemblance. Lizzie saw it, and she wanted to cry more. Evangeline saw it, and she grinned.
“No – no, no, that isn’t possible,” the Doctor spluttered. Now it was not Lizzie’s turn to have no idea what was going on – instead it was his.
“You’re there now,” Evangeline was still sat down, smiling up at him, and yet the Doctor was so, so tiny. “After all – the Memory Graveyard takes place at every single moment across all of history. You’re powering it, Doctor.”
“I can’t be, I would know, surely, I would.”
The Doctor suddenly realised the oak-panelled walls had collided with his back and his cranium, and he reached out a hand to nurse it, but suddenly he couldn’t find his hands.
“It’s going to start sinking in, now you’re aware,” Evangeline continued. “Oh, Elizabeth,” she stood up, walking over to Lizzie. Lizzie stepped away from her, but Evangeline placed a mocking hand on her cheek. “Such a beautiful little girl. A life wasted on a man like the Doctor.”
Lizzie put her other hand on Evangeline’s, and moved it away from her face. No –the Doctor had lied to her, he’d got it wrong before. But would she leave him to a woman as vile as Evangeline Cullengate? Certainly not. He needed her help, more than anything. As Lizzie backed away, shaking her head, Evangeline smiled sadly. Lizzie was good at reading faces. Lizzie’s face was hard to read, apparently. But now so many things had happened, so many people had hidden themselves from her, and –
She didn’t know anymore.
Lizzie didn’t know who she was. She didn’t feel like herself. She was somebody else, looking at a body without a heart, without a brain.
“The Doctor and Elizabeth Darwin,” Evangeline was stood in the middle of the Doctor and Lizzie. “Such a pretty little fairytale. So magic – the sad old man and the sad little girl, who journeyed through time and space in their bigger-on-the-inside box. It’s sad that it doesn’t get a happy ending. Though – I suppose life isn’t like that.”
***
The book was closing. Lizzie was falling back, letting words and pages and chapters and covers and blurbs and paragraphs and punctuation wash over her. The Doctor was, somehow, moving away from her, although he was stood right by the wall. So was Evangeline – and then Lizzie realised that it was herself who was somehow falling backwards. It was as if somehow, she was crashing through a horizontal chasm, with the drawing room and Evangeline and the broken grandfather clock that would tick-no-more, steadily falling away from her.
Away.
From.
Her.
***
“Lizzie?”
Muffled voices, far away. They didn’t mean anything, just words, cascading together, like waves in the sea, always rolling over and over but in the end, just blurring into one, lapping up at the shoreline.
They were going to the beach.
They should’ve been at the beach.
Instead, somehow, they were in a trap, and there was the wicked witch, and she’d taken the wizard away to her dark, ancient tower, where she’d trapped him for eternity, to live forever with nothing but the company of bad dreams and memories and –
“Lizzie?!”
“Lizzie?”
“Lizzie?”
Lizzie was not in the old house anymore.
For some reason, she was on a leather settee, and there was a steaming mug of tea in her hands. It took her a few seconds just watching the bubbles on the top of tea, before she realised something.
Her hands were different.
Not massively different, of course – they were still her own hands. But when she looked at them, there was definitely something new.
Or not new?
Her hands were older. Of course, they were still the hands of someone in their twenties, but they were… thinner, sort of? Skeletal, perhaps. Veiny.
She dared to look away from her hands. There was a woman sat opposite her – she seemed vaguely familiar, but it was like that thing, where you can remember
the plot details from a film, and you just can’t quite put your finger on what film it is.
The room was nice, though – the woman sat in an armchair, and there was a glass coffee table in the middle of them. A few artworks hung up on the walls, and there were French doors, looking out onto a vast, extensive garden. It was high summer, by the looks of the flowers and the plants – seas of crimsons and violets and golds. At the far end was a blossom tree, and a small fishpond as well, with a sundial beside it. The sun streamed in through the windows, filling the entire room to bursting with bright, midday light.
Lizzie looked down at her hands, and she was still sure they were different.
And her clothes were as well.
There was a mirror on the far wall, and she caught sight of herself. At first, nothing registered – she was still her, she was still Lizzie Darwin.
Except, she was older.
Not hugely older, but a few years, perhaps.
“Lizzie,” the woman opposite said. “I know this is hard for you, and it was a very brave thing for you to do – to be able to recount this for me.”
Lizzie didn’t know what to say, and then she said the obvious.
“I – where am I?”
There was an awkward silence, but for once she didn’t feel stupid, because she genuinely had no idea.
“Take another sip of tea, Lizzie. I think the stress of recounting the incident that led to your departure was, perhaps, a little bit much all for one session.”
Lizzie took a sip of tea, and, of course, it healed everything.
She knew who she was.
Elizabeth Darwin, of course. And, this was her counsellor. She came here every week, on Wednesdays, at half-past-twelve. They drank tea, and Lizzie recounted her stories. Lizzie Darwin knew exactly where she was, and she knew what she did. She could remember everything about her life.
Lizzie Darwin could also remember that the incident in the Victorian manor, the incident that had led to her leaving the Doctor, had taken place five years ago.
“So that’s that,” Lizzie shrugged. “That’s the story of how I left the Doctor. And… five years later, here I am.”
She was so stupid – of course she was older. Five years older to how she’d been then. And Lizzie had lived five years of a life – a happy life. A life always haunted, but a happy life, still. Her memories of her time with the Doctor would always be there.
But they were no more than a fairytale.
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next time - fire forgottenThe Doctor is gone.
Lizzie left the Doctor five years ago. And Evangeline Cullengate is holding the universe to ransome. A great battle is about to take place. Old friends will unite against the Prime Minister's evil, and they will stride across the skin of a broken world to save the man who saved them. And at the head of them is Elizabeth Darwin. But a far greater battle is waiting for her. |