Doctor Who BBCN16 - Forever Autumn (6 page)

window with a thump that made Martha wince. ‘It’s a jigsaw piece,’

he muttered.

‘The book?’

He nodded. It looked as though he was cleaning the window with his fringe. ‘It’s a stonking great jigsaw piece. It’s probably the piece that sits right in the middle, and I bet it’s got an eye or a hat on it or something.’

‘OK,’ she said, thinking about the analogy, ‘but even if we had that piece we still wouldn’t have the box with the picture on it, would we?’

‘Nah, but we could probably work the picture out from the other pieces – the energy splurge, the tree, the defence thingies, this mist. . . ’

He rocked himself back again and started pacing up and down like a caged animal. ‘Even with the pieces we’ve got, it should mean something.’ He whapped his forehead three times with the flat of his hand.

‘Come on, think, think, think.’

He stopped again by the window, looked out, and suddenly became very still.

‘What is it?’ asked Martha.

‘Look at this,’ he said quietly.

She jumped to her feet and joined him at the window. In the greenish murk below was an old man. He was staggering around in circles, one hand clamped over the lower half of his face, the other waving blindly about in front of him.

‘Someone’s had one too many,’ Martha said.

‘I don’t think he’s drunk,’ murmured the Doctor.

As they watched, the old man spun in a final clumsy pirouette and crumpled to the ground. Suddenly the Doctor was running for the door.

‘Come on.’

He thundered down the stairs, Martha in hot pursuit. Despite its name, the Falls Palace was only a small hotel, family-run, less than a dozen rooms. The owner, Eloise Walsh, a grey-haired, no-nonsense woman who wore half-moon spectacles, attached to a chain, perched on the end of her nose, was manning the front desk, and looked up in indignation as the Doctor swept past.

34

‘Hey, what’s the –’

‘Man down!’ yelled the Doctor, yanking open the main door without even breaking stride.

The old man was sitting in the street, hunched forward, rocking back and forth like a distressed toddler.

Martha saw immediately that the Doctor had been right. The man wasn’t merely drunk. It was evident from his panicky eyes that he was scared out of his wits. He still had a hand clamped over the lower half of his face, as if whatever he had seen was too terrible to speak of.

The Doctor dropped to one knee beside him. ‘Hey there, feller,’ he said softly, reaching out. The old man flinched back and the Doctor murmured, ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.’

‘That’s Earl Clayton,’ said a voice from behind Martha. She looked round to see Eloise Walsh standing at her shoulder. ‘What’s wrong with him – aside from the usual?’

The Doctor ignored her. He was speaking directly into Clayton’s ear, his voice so low that Martha couldn’t make out what he was saying.

His words didn’t appear to have any effect, however, until he touched the centre of Clayton’s forehead with the tip of his right index finger.

Instantly the old man relaxed, the tension leaving his shoulders, his hand dropping away from his face.

When she saw what had been done to him, Martha gasped.

‘Merciful Father!’ blurted Eloise Walsh and swiftly crossed herself.

The Doctor looked grimly appalled. He placed a hand on the old man’s shoulder and murmured, ‘I’m so sorry. We’ll find who did this, I promise.’

Clayton gazed up at them and made no attempt to speak. Martha wondered whether that was simply because he couldn’t, or because he had actually realised that he no longer had a mouth.

35

I
am not scared,
Martha told herself,
I am not scared, I am not scared.

‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’ said the Doctor.

‘No!’ she said, too loudly and too quickly.

‘Yes you are. And shall I tell you
why
you are?’

‘Is it because fear is a sign of intelligence?’ she said hopefully.

He wrinkled his nose in apology. ‘Oh, I wish I could say yes. But no, that’s not it. The reason you’re scared is because I was wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ she said. ‘You?’

He held up his hands. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, hard to believe, genius and all that. Though when I say wrong, perhaps I’m being a bit melo-dramatic. It might be more accurate to say I can see more of the big picture now.’

‘Are we talking about jigsaws again?’ she asked.

‘Mm, kind of, I s’pose. Remember when you asked if the mist was toxic, and I said it wasn’t?’

Martha didn’t like where this was leading. They were currently walking
through
the mist; they were surrounded by it,
wreathed
in it.

‘Ye-es,’ she said guardedly.

‘Well, that’s the bit I was wrong about.’

37

‘You mean to say it
is
toxic?’ She put out a hand and grabbed the sleeve of his long coat. ‘Oh, suddenly I don’t feel so well. I’m sure there’s a burning sensation at the back of my throat. That’s indicative of –’

‘Oh, yeah,’ the Doctor butted in cheerfully, swirling a hand in the green mist. ‘Poison, this stuff is. Only it doesn’t affect your body.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No.’ He tapped the side of his temple with a long forefinger. ‘It affects your mind. Works its nasty way down all those primitive little channels to all those dank little rooms where we keep our phobias and fears. And then it throws open the doors and lets ’em all out. There’s the storming of the Bastille going on in that noggin of yours, Martha Jones. Though to be fair,’ he conceded wistfully, ‘the storming of the Bastille wasn’t as impressive as the French would have us believe. It wasn’t actually much of a
storming
, more a kind of. . . light drizzle.’

‘I think I feel a bit better now,’ said Martha.

He gave an exaggerated wink. ‘That’s my girl!’

‘Still quite scared, though,’ she said.

‘Yeah, well, that’s OK,’ he replied. ‘Fear is a sign of intelligence.’

They were retracing Earl Clayton’s steps in an attempt to discover what had happened to him. Despite her brusqueness, Eloise Walsh had taken the old man under her scrawny wing. She had told the Doctor and Martha that Earl lived in the big house at the end of Har-rows Lane and that he always followed the same route home after a night’s drinking. The Doctor and Martha had been following her directions for over ten minutes, but so far all was quiet. In fact, they hadn’t come across a single soul since leaving the hotel. Martha thought that the good people of Blackwood Falls obviously had more sense than to venture out in a pea-souper like this.

‘Have you come across many mouth-removing aliens before?’ she asked, hoping a chat would allay her nervousness.

‘Not many, no,’ said the Doctor. ‘Came across one not long ago that took whole faces.’

‘Maybe this is that one’s little brother or something,’ she suggested.

‘Nah, the methodology’s completely different.’

38

‘Will Mr Clayton recover, do you think?’

‘He will if I have anything to do with it,’ said the Doctor grimly.

‘What if that thing does to us what it did to him?’ she asked.

‘Ha! I’d like to see it try and shut
me
up.’

They were passing a pair of tall, black, wrought-iron gates. In the murk beyond, Martha could see a thread of path weaving between flanking expanses of grass, from which loomed the vague suggestions of gravestones.

The Doctor stopped. ‘I see a light.’

‘Actually or metaphorically?’ asked Martha.

He pointed through the bars of the gate. ‘In there.’

‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.

‘It’s gone now. But it was there. Come on, let’s have a look.’

The gate creaked as they pulled it open.

‘Well,’ said Martha, ‘that was inevitable.’

The Doctor grinned at her and strolled casually ahead, sonic at the ready. The green mist swirled around them. Martha kept seeing shapes in it, which she informed herself firmly were all in her mind.

Soon the black gates were no longer visible, and she couldn’t help thinking that it was as though they’d been denied their only escape route. Suddenly, in the gloom to her right, she saw a yellowish blur.

‘Was that –’ she began, but the Doctor was already striding off through the grass between the gravestones. ‘Obviously it was,’ she muttered.

The mist was like an endless series of green curtains, parting to allow them access, then closing again behind them. As they neared the place where the yellowish blur had come from, they saw it a second time, and then a third, an eerie and mysterious wraith-like glow, which gradually resolved itself into something thankfully more mun-dane – a cone of mist-diffused light cast by a bobbing torch.

Seconds later they saw the vague outline of the person holding the torch. It was an old lady with straggly white hair, a long black skirt and a grey shawl like a dense swathe of cobwebs. There was a black cat prowling at her heels, and Martha’s heart skipped a beat. Not 39

witches again, she thought. She’d had enough witches to last her a lifetime.

The old lady had her back to them and was leaning over, looking down at something. The Doctor walked right up beside her and leaned over too.

That’s interesting,’ he said conversationally.

He was peering into what looked to Martha like a rabbit burrow, quite narrow but so deep that she couldn’t see the bottom, even though the old lady was shining her torch into it. The old lady turned to look at the Doctor, and Martha was relieved to see that her profile was not witchy at all. She was plump and bespectacled, with a perfectly normal nose and chin.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, as if the Doctor was intruding on her property.

‘Is that
really
the most pertinent question you should be asking right now?’ he said blandly.

She looked taken aback, but recovered quickly. Eyes flashing, she said, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘
That’s
the one!’ he said, and for a moment Martha thought he was going to slap the old lady on the back. Then his voice became sombre.

‘We’re investigating.’

‘Investigating what?’

‘We’re trying to find out who attacked Earl Clayton,’ said Martha.

The old lady looked over her shoulder and fixed Martha with a fierce stare. ‘Earl’s been attacked? How is he?’

‘He’ll live,’ muttered the Doctor.

‘So what are you doing here?’ Martha asked, and tried not to look too pleased at the Doctor’s expression of approval.

The old lady’s eyes narrowed. She glanced at the Doctor. ‘Who’s she? Your floozy?’

The Doctor looked at Martha, his face adopting an expression of wide-eyed innocence. In an equally innocent voice he asked, ‘Are you my floozy, Martha?’

‘I’m nobody’s floozy,’ Martha said, bridling.

‘She says she’s nobody’s floozy,’ the Doctor said.

40

The old lady hmphed as if she didn’t believe a word of it.

‘And she did ask a very good question,’ the Doctor continued. ‘What are you doing here?’

The old lady seemed to puff herself up. Almost defiantly she said, ‘I was drawn here. I felt that something was wrong.’

The Doctor’s expression hadn’t changed, but Martha could almost hear the cogs whirring in his head. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Now that’s even more interesting.’

Although Martha hadn’t seen him do it, the Doctor had put his sonic screwdriver away when they had encountered the old lady. Now he whipped it out again and examined the hole with it.

The old lady watched him for a moment and then asked, ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s an alien device,’ said the Doctor casually, though Martha could see that he was watching her reaction out of the corner of his eye.

She was silent for a moment, then she sniffed. ‘You from outer space then?’

He shrugged. ‘Could be.’

She turned to Martha. ‘Are you from outer space too?’

‘No,’ said Martha, ‘I’m from London.’

All at once the sonic began to emit a high-pitched, warbling shriek.

The black cat yowled and ran away.

‘Uh-oh,’ said the Doctor quietly.

‘What?’ said Martha.

‘They know we’re here.’

‘Who do?’ asked the old lady.

‘Whoever dug this hole.’

He turned the sonic off, jumped to his feet and spun around. This time Martha’s eyes were not playing tricks on her. Something odd was happening.

Several mini-whirlwinds had sprung up among the mist-shrouded tombstones. They were ranging about like spinning tops, gathering up autumn leaves which were strewn about on the ground. Within seconds the whirlwinds had not only collected every leaf in the immediate vicinity, but had started to mould them into half a dozen 41

roughly humanoid shapes, with thick stubby limbs and vaguely spherical heads.

Martha watched in horrified fascination as, with an eerie crackling of dry leaves, the closest of the whirlwind-figures raised one of its lump en hands and pointed at her.

Next moment she was aware of something spinning towards her face. She ducked instinctively and the spinning object – a
leaf
, she realised in amazement – whipped past, though not before the tip of it had grazed her cheekbone and opened a thin, stinging cut.