Rain splattered on to the front window screen. The grey light was fading as we hurtled through into a tunnel in our red Megane. He turned round in the driver’s seat, panic stricken and fraught with fear.
“You don’t tell anyone, you don’t know I’m here.” The Doctor said, although the face he wore was already dead.
We all remained silent – and the car ploughed on through the darkness.
By the time we’d reached the other side it was snowing. We’d arrived in this little town, a dark little community whose street lights blared a white, harsh lighting. It was as if we were in a different world, and maybe we were. I looked at The Doctor and he saw me in the rear-view-mirror. We were staring at each other in silence.
The other three in the car were people he could not remember. One was young; curly brunette hair and a youthful smile. She was in love with him, The Doctor. She’d met a long time ago, and worshipped the ground he walked on. She tried to touch him as he drove, touch his hair, touch his face. He could barely contain his anger, his disgust.
The other two were just two men who worked with the girl. They could barely care who he was, but the reason that we had all gathered together – here in this car, in this small out of the way town, was too important to brush off.
He took the car up a small hillside road, where snow covered the sides and glittered in the midnight moon. It was eerie, to know that we were the only ones around for miles. For no one was here, not any more; not in this war-zone. We pulled up in an overgrown, little driveway in the shadow of a huge barn. As we stopped and cut power to the engine, we were met with a wall of thick silence. It was overpowering. I felt excluded from the world around me, as if my presence alone was overbearing it.
“Why are we here?” I asked him, and no sooner had the words left my lips than a light in the house to the left of us had switched on. It lit up a small area of garden around it. Bushes and hanging baskets littered the pathway leading up to would have been the cosy little cottage in Alps if it weren’t for the war that consumed it. A woman opened the door and beckoned them to come.
We all got out with no questions. The Doctor led us, or rather we followed, towards the house. He hugged and greeted the woman. She was older, maybe in her late fifties. Her hair was covered by a blue bandanna sort of thing, though grey hair still flowed out from the back of it. She hugged each one of us as we entered. When it came to me she slipped something into my hand and looked gravely into my eyes.
“Only when she remembers,” she whispered.
I stepped into the entrance hallway. A fire roared from the living room, which now contained The Doctor, standing solitary by the hearth. I looked at him, as he stood deep in thought, and then looked at the item clutched in my hand. It was a bright silver ring encrusted with the most dazzling diamond I had ever seen. As I looked up, I caught his eye. Had he been staring the whole time? But by the worry in his eyes I thought that maybe he’d missed it. Why would such a thing of beauty make him worry?
We all gathered in the living room. The girl with the curly brown hair, I didn’t even know her name, had taken seat beside her darling Doctor. He seemed uneasy in his thought and repulsion was illustrated all over his face. The two men stood by the window, which looked out on the valley below. It was a huge vista of darkness, save for isolated torch light far away. They were close, I thought. I remember a shiver rattled down my spine: I knew what was coming. I knew. And so did The Doctor.
“Tea?” and by her accent I knew that the old woman was German. She scuttled off to the kitchen and filled an old kettle before returning and placing it on the fireplace.
I looked around while the water boiled. It wasn’t what I had been expecting of a nineteen-forties home. I expected less. I expected it to be bare, but it wasn’t. It was filled with ornaments and personal items, cushions and throws. Portraits and black and white pictures lined the walls. It was cosy, it didn’t seem as if this entire town would be overrun with Nazis by morning.
“Why are we here?” One of the men asked, disgruntled but serious simultaneously.
“Because I took you here,” The Doctor said, stressed.
“But why?” asked the other man.
The fire reflected in his pupil as he looked deep into my eyes. He knew from where I came. He knew what time I lived in, what horrors I’d read of and what horrors we would all, sooner or later, witness with our own eyes.
“Something is going to happen here tonight. Something of unspeakable terror,” He looked at me at those final words, “and I have come here to stop it.”
“What? What’s going to happen?” The men chimed in unison.
“Today is the the 19th of February 1943 and today is the day that Germany wins the war.”
The kettle whistled in the aftermath of his words. Even the young woman was rattled by what he had said, though her vacant eyes portrayed differently. The German lady wandered over to poor us all cups of hot, steaming tea. There was no milk though, nor sugar, but it was warm and that was all that I wanted right now. I noticed that it had started snowing again. It would be so beautiful if it weren’t for the impending doom.
The young girl snuggled into The Doctor. He tried to drink his tea awkwardly without throwing up, I thought. I didn’t know how he knew her but what made me even more curious was why he was trying to pretend that she wasn’t even there.
“Biscuit?” The old woman said, gesturing towards a tin.
I waved my hand in disfavour. She went round the group and repeated the question. Only the men accepted.
“How do you know?” one of the men asked. I questioned though how there was little terror in his voice.
“I just do. That’s all you need to know. And within an hour you’re going to start to believe me. Now, would you like to join me upstairs?” He motioned to me.
I put down my mug and followed him upstairs. He seemed to know his way around the house. Had he been here before? He took me into what looked like a child’s room, although no child slept in the empty bed.
“Doctor,” I said, “Why have we come here?”
The Doctor turned round and looked at me with a tear in his eye. “Because today is the day I continue the war.” He turned away from me. I thought I could hear a slight sobbing but when he spoke again his voice was clear and unbroken. “It all happens in this house, it all happens with that girl down there. She is the key. She’s the key, and I don’t know why, or how but it all happens with her.”
“Who is she?” I asked. “How do you know her?”
He turned back to talk to me face to face. “That’s not important right now.”
“You’re being evasive.”
“No, I’m being me. Now we need to think of something. I need to think of something. I need to… I need to….”
I felt the ring in my pocket. I’d stuffed it down there when I caught him looking at me. Now that we were alone I knew he hadn’t seen me with it; it would have been the first thing he would have asked. I wondered whether or not to tell him, but he wasn’t being himself. I think he wasn’t being himself, it was complicated. It was all wrong. This wasn’t The Doctor I knew – this wasn’t the man who had scooped me up in his time machine three months ago. This was an old Doctor. This wasn’t my Doctor.”
“Doctor, why have you brought her here if she is what they need?”
He stopped in his train of thought and furtively glanced at the clock on the wall. “Because it needs to be this way.”
“Doctor – I don’t understand. If she is the one who is meant to end this war tonight and allow the Nazis to win, then why on earth have you brought her to the scene of the crime? Why did we specifically try to find her and take her here and how the hell do you know her?”
“I don’t know her. I don’t. She’s just this girl, I don’t know.”
“For all the time I’ve known you you’ve never not known something, what is going on? Why aren’t you telling me anything?”
“I don’t… know.”
“Doctor!” I could have grabbed him and thrust him at the wall till he told me what was going on, I was that angry and frustrated.
“Ssh!” He put a finger to his lips. “They mustn’t hear.”
“And why not? They have every right to hear what we’ve got planned for their lives?” I whispered.
The Doctor looked at me and sighed. “I wish I’d met you earlier, then maybe I wouldn’t have done this to myself.”
“Done what?”
“Look at me,” he said, “this isn’t the man you know.”
“No, but it’s the man that I will one day know.”
He smiled.
“What did you do to yourself though?”
“I took you away from myself. You can’t go back. Do you know where I am right now? Right now in this whole universe, in the whole of time? I’m buying you Neptunian Ice Cream from fifty thousand years in the future to give to you three thousand years to go in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But you won’t be there, because I took you. And by the time you get back, I’ll be gone.”
“But you can’t be? What?” I felt sick. Life without The Doctor?
“I can’t return you. I can’t bring you back. I can’t take you back after this.”
“But you took me here – you can take me anywhere in time and space – you’re a Timelord! You have a TARDIS!”
“Yes… but I can’t.”
“But why not? Why won’t you?” I was getting hysterical now – it was as if someone had died.
“Because I say so.” Tears were streaming down his face now.
“Why?” I cried.
“Because if I take you back to him, back to me, then you’re going to die!”
It was as if the life in me had already been withdrawn. I felt all the air in me being sucked out by the sheer horror of it. Death?
“How? How?” How do I die and how do you know it – The Doctor I know isn’t you – you’re just his… his memories – you don’t exist!” I shoved him up against the wall with each final few words. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You asked!”
My hands went to his neck to throttle him.
“Stop it!” He pulled my hands away from him, he was smiling as he did so.
“What happens? How do I die?”
The smile was wiped from his face, “At home. In bed, when you’re eighty-eight and with three great-grandchildren by your side.”
“Seriously!” I withdrew a little from him.
“Now, these Nazis out there!”
“Doctor!”
“You’re going home, that’s final.” His voice had a tone of finality.
There was a knock on the door suddenly.
It was the young girl.
“Ahh, there you are,” she pointed drunkenly at The Doctor. “Sneaking off…” she giggled.
“Do me a favour?” He turned towards me, “get her away from me. She makes my skin crawl.”
I could not help but smile as he writhed on the spot.
“Come on, I’ll take you somewhere…”
I hadn’t any idea planned on taking her into another bedroom, but it somehow happened. She immediately threw herself under the covers and beamed from between the sheets. She barely looked older than twenty. It was hard to believe that she had the power within her to cause so much… desctruction.
“How do you know him?” she giggled.
“The Doctor?”
“Yes, if that’s his name.”
“I thought you knew each other?”
“Oh no. I do. I’ve known him for years and years and years. But I forget. Sometimes I forget.”
What an odd girl, I thought. “His name is The Doctor.”
Something happened. To this day I can not explain it, but somehow she seemed to emanate a crystal blue light. She seemed to illuminate the room in a frightening glow.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?”
She begun to slowly elevate into the air, bed sheets and all. She was floating as if by magic.
“Doctor! Doctor!” I cried. She kept on rising, and then a deep laugh menaced the room, echoing off the walls and hounding my ear drums.
“Your Doctor cannot hear you any more!” She turned her head as she said it, though the rest of her body was lifeless.
“Doctor!”
I ran to the door to scream for him, but some force had slammed it shut before I could get there.
“Your precious Doctor cannot hear you child, why won’t you listen to me? He cannot – hear – you!”
She pointed a finger at me and as she did so I felt my breath stolen from me. When I tried to scream though it was not my breath that had been taken but my voice. The entire room was filled with her laughing once more and she pointed once more, not me but to the window. It smashed and threw glass in every direction. Her body, still levitating, flew out the window and into the night.
“Doctor!” I screamed mutely. I ran to the door, which was now peppered with bits of glass. I ran out in to the hallway and back into the room where I had previously been with The Doctor. He was not there though. I hurtled down the staircase into the living room. The Doctor was calmly dunking a biscuit in what looked like my teacup.
I ran up to him, still vainly trying to speak.
But he didn’t look up. He didn’t even blink. I waved a hand in front of him, but he took no notice. I looked around – the other two were sitting staring into space. I looked at the German woman and she looked straight back at me. Her eyes were actually focussed on me – weren’t they?
“Can you see me?” I mouthed.
She nodded.
“Can you hear me?”
She nodded once more.
I ran up to her.
“Why can’t The Doctor hear or the other two see me?”
She tried to speak, but I thought her English must have failed her. She just merely looked at me and pointed towards my pocket.
The ring! The ring! I took it out and examined it. What was it that she had said when they had first arrived – “only when she remembers?” But, wait – she had! But how was I have meant to have used it? To wear it as protection? To give it to her?
“What is it for? How did you know that this would happen?”
The woman stumbled some words out, “Someone… gave it… long time now. Him,” she pointed.
I turned to look back at The Doctor, who was now looking at the staircase dreamily. Maybe he was waiting for me to come down any moment.
“What do I do with it?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Keine know.”
I went to The Doctor now, and knelt at his side. Crumbs were floating in the tea now, it was quite disgusting. He was chewing like a horse, the wet biscuit he’d just been dunking.
“Please, please hear me. She’s got out – she – she remembered! She remembered your name, who you were. I need to know what to do with this,” I hoisted the ring right up to his nose.
Nothing, no reaction whatsoever. It was as if I wasn’t even real. But then how did the German woman see me – and wait a minute, how did the German woman speak to me without him hearing?
“The Doctor – can he see or hear either of us?”
The woman shook her head. “Ring.”
My heart beat fast against my chest as my brain rattled through the thought process. Why had the ring done this to just two of us?
“What’s taking those girlies so long?” The Doctor said, trying enormously to make small talk.
“What do I do?” I moaned to The Doctor, “Tell me what to do!”
Suddenly I heard gunfire. It wasn’t far off – it sounded like it was just next door. I ran to the window – down in the valley there were little sparks of gunfire, and far off in the distance the sky was speckled with artillery fire. It had begun.
The others, too, had noticed this. They had also run over to the window. The Doctor was horror struck – he looked over to the staircase and shouted my name.
“Where are you? Where are you?”
He ran upstairs. I tried to follow as quickly as I could. He’d run into the room that I taken the young woman.
“Oh my god…” He was horror struck at the state of the room. “Gertze! Gertze! He shouted! Where are you?”
The old woman, I thought, he must mean her.
He ran back down stairs to the living room, “That old woman – have you seen her?” he said to the two men.
Both shook their heads. The Doctor looked frantic – I’d never seen him like this.
“You two – stay here. Just…. do as your told and stay here.”
He had already about-turned and was running out the front door. I followed invisibly after him. He flung himself into the car and had already switched the engine on as I took jumped into the car. He jumped at the sound of my door closing. He was staring at the place where I sat.
“Hello?”
I smiled back, in the vain hope that he may actually see me this time.
He began to reverse out of the driveway, though kept a curious eye on my lap. The gunfire outside had not ceased, but was growing ever more intense. It was as if the entire town was crawling with soldiers, though unseen by the deep darkness.
“Where are you taking us, Doctor?” I asked as he flew down the hill at enormously illegal speeds. It wasn’t until the bottom of the hill that we saw it. From the sky there was this huge glowing orb. It was crystal blue. It was her. She cast her light on the valley beneath her feet.
What was she doing so high in he sky? What was her plan? And how would her life be the key to rewriting history?
“Come on, Doctor, see me, look at me…” I sighed, stroking the dazzling ring in my pocket….
