In her dreams, there's a man. Not, strictly, a handsome man, but he smiles at her like he loves her and then he's beautiful. When she wakes up she feels empty, blank, unfinished. The feeling is familiar, but the man in her dreams is new.
"Are there ghosts on the TARDIS?" Amy asks the Doctor.
He looks at her.
"Not as such, no," he says. "Why do you ask? Have you been seeing any?"
"I dream about- just some man. Over and over, ever since I came on this thing with you."
The Doctor looks sad, almost as sad as the man in her dreams. "I can't help you with that," he says.
"It's nothing," she says, waving a hand. "What did you mean, not as such?"
He tilts his head a little, his eyes going dark, his smile going sharp. "This old ship of mine," he says, "is a very old ship, and with a memory that goes back as far as hers does, sometimes she gets things a bit mixed up. Sometimes there are- echoes."
"Does this happen a lot?"
"Less than you might think. But sometimes."
The wardrobe room, the Doctor explains, is not so much a wardrobe room as it is a sort of wardrobe continuum. He uses terms like L-space and quantum-borrowing and meta-sartorial excitation, and what he manages to convey is that the TARDIS doesn't really have a room with clothes in it, it has a room-like area it sort of moves around to wherever in the universe the clothes it would like to have in its room-like area are, and everyone in the room, wherever, whenever, gets stacked up with everyone else in the room like cards in a deck.
What this means, really, is that there are ghosts in the aisles.
They appear the way afterimages do, when you press on your eyelids or stare at the sun: colors and shapes that have more to do with your brain than your eyes, moving and not moving in a way that starts to hurt if you think about it too hard. This is because they're not really there; this is also because they are really there.
That hurts too, if Amy thinks about it too hard.
There's a little man with a bow tie like the Doctor's picking out dress shirts for a boy in a kilt. There's a corner- if you walk far enough- where a handsome blond man fits one doll jacket after another on to his little panda toy. There's a section, just past the kinky lolita undergarments, where a man in a military greatcoat and a blonde chav are playing tug-of-war with a red kimono. Past the 1920's flapper mannequin, another blonde in a long striped scarf is trying on broad-brimmed hats. She gives herself wide-eyed stares in the mirror after each one, and if Amy watches her long enough she gets the feeling that the girl is looking back at her. In a clear space behind a wardrobe there's a little revolving stand of buttons and pins where a girl in a giant hideous leather jacket opens every drawer, and looks at every pin. Occasionally she fits one on between all the pins and patches already attached to the leather. In a patch of room near the center, all white plastic and round dents, like a golf ball, six old men in black and white robes adjust each other's identical outfits, looking like they're trying very hard not to look nervous. Towards the edge of everything, there's a changing room where a gorgeous man in a velvet coat is smashing all the mirrors. The blood that drips out of his hands fades away before it ever hits the floor.
Sometimes she forgets whether or not she's still dreaming.
"Does the TARDIS have ghosts?" she asks the Doctor.
"Oh, Amelia Pond," the Doctor says, and just looks at her with those old eyes of his. "All ships have ghosts. Mine more than most."
"Am I-"
In the 1980's-in-space nook, a woman tries on an iridescent sparkly belly-shirt that is a crime against humanity and her breasts. There's a mazelike set of high, threatening shelves that bristle with black leather S & M gear. A woman in a tan leather dress is attaching what might be a chain of spiked anal beads around a robot dog's thin neck. A purple, insectoid sort of man and yet another pretty young blonde (she thinks the Doctor might have a type) help each other into togas in the greco-roman section. Half a mile away, a boy in a yellow tunic argues with a man in cricket whites next to a stand of medievel plate armor. Half a mile away from them, a couple that looks like 1960's Barbie and Ken try on scuba gear, laughing. On a crowded golden platform a thin man in pajamas holds up a pair of brown pinstripe trousers- she knows those trousers- something cold and alien in his gaze. It feels like spying to catch all these little secret glimpses of the past, but more than that it feels like hunting.
"You have to stop watching them," the Doctor says. He comes up behind her shoulder, and together they watch the man in pajamas drape the trousers and then a matching suit jacket over the mirror, and stare at them.
"I'm looking for someone."
He glances over at her, sharp enough to cut.
"In my dreams, I see this man in my dreams. Always the same man, and I think, if I could just see him, just once, I'd remember who he was-"
He takes her hand, leads her over and around and behind, to a set of racks full of bright summer clothes and there he is, pale and translucent like all the other ghosts but oh, there.
There he is.
She still doesn't know who he is, or why he hurts her so much inside her heart.
They watch him.
"The TARDIS remembers everyone she ever lost," the Doctor says. "More than I can say about myself, really. Mind like a sieve."
"Is he dead?"
"Yes. But mostly, he was never alive."
"Did I know him?"
He kisses her forehead, and leaves her alone.
Just around the corner from the Victorian section, two girls, one with short hair and fierce 80's-ish make-up and the other with soft eyes and a frizzy mass of curls, try on corsets. The short-haired girl helps the curly-haired one off with her corset, then slides her hands shyly across her friend's breasts. In the Victorian section itself, a very pretty girl in full period dress clutches a great big furry coat to her chest and weeps into it. In a linen cupboard, on the top shelf, a red-headed boy in a crisp public school suit is curled in a tight ball. He breaths so slowly he might be asleep, or dying.
The man right in front of her fumbles with his belt, trips over a stray roller-skate, falls over. Laughs at himself. His smile is like a foreign country, like the stale taste of a dream just after waking up, something that someone could never hold on to or understand or remember. His name is written on her heart, where she can't read it, where it hurts the most, every beat of it.
Amy sits down on the floor. After a while, she starts to cry.