A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. Colliding with the gravel of a main road the sound then coalesces with the steady beating of footsteps, drawing themselves closer to the origin of the ghastly noise. By now nothing of the original echo remains, but the fear and trembling it brought about in the Doctor and Penny remains like a phantasm. Irreverently they bolt up the driveway of a house, now unbounded of faux pas by this spectral admission. The Doctor twists round a corner. He holds his sonic screwdriver out in front of him. It is a utility, that occasionally opens doors. There is no need for him to be waving it about. But necessity is an abortion of the moment, and the Doctor clutches it with the confidence that a weapon would provide. He knows it offers no offensive capability, but it soothes his mind. Blood, suddenly, blood is everywhere. It's orange blood.
"We're too late!" the Doctor nearly collapses to the ground in distress but manages to instead hold his ground.
Penny, his faithful and astute companion, witnesses the horror of the blood. It's everywhere, painted in the manner that a child may attempt to define a landscape on a blank canvas, with fingerpaint. It's the orange that unnerves her. The invariable red of human blood suddenly becomes a curse. In her mind she begs to know why there couldn't have been a single incident of discolouration in blood she had seen. At least then she could have lied to herself about the origins of this alien snuff installation.
It's midday in an idyllic Norfolk front garden. The grass shimmers from the reflective sunlight, a reminder of the heavy rain that passed not less than an hour ago. An ascending hexad of neglected flowerpots forms part of a centerpiece, counterpointed by an overgrown fern that towers over its horticultural subordinates, inciting fear in the same ineffectual way as a newspaper columnist. A feral cat has taken a shit in one of the pots. It reeks, but the residents haven't noticed yet, as it is masked by the aroma of lavender, turning into a pungent combination that smells like really shitty lavender. Not more than half a mile away, a man is held captive by a creature of such fierce hatred that it has somehow evaded the penetrating smell of shit lavender. It deliberates on the fate of this victim.
Back in the garden, a blue telephone box from the future materializes. The doors swing open and reveal a paradoxically spacious interior, as well as the Doctor and Penny who promptly acclimatize themselves to this new locale.
"I wonder on earth where we are?" says the Doctor as he steps onto the surface of an alien world, one that statistically he is likely to have never visited before, and in consideration of the Drake equation, has serious potential for intelligent life. It is not entirely unfeasible that he has arrived on a planet in which the inhabitants are conceptions of pure malevolence. Surely chance would sooner or later see him encounter such unfiltered evil. After all, the endless granite quarries and jumpsuit-wearing human colonists had proven to be exceptionally accommodating during his travels. An entropic discord sooner or later was bound to occur. Suddenly he noticed that Penny was beaming at him.
"This is my house," she said, ecstatic. And as if all at once his speculation was realized. They had landed in Norfolk, and it smelt like shit.
The Doctor, trying to mask his disgust, can only manage to ask her again. "Is it?" He feels as if he is choking on the wind.
"Yes. That's a stroke of luck," she maintains.
"Is it?"
"Yes." Penny is now trying to unlock her front door. There is a novelty walrus statuette guarding it, with a hidden cavity in its ass where an emergency spare key waits.
"Where are you going?" The Doctor demands.
"Just to get something," she says opening the door and stepping inside.
"Okay." But for the Doctor he would prefer to be almost anywhere else in time and space right now. Not only did it smell unpleasant, but there was a presence that he found impossible to account for. If his travels across the universe had provided him with anything, he had gained a remarkably acute intuition, and danger here in Norfolk was a certainty. He removed his top hat and began to pat his head. What could possibly exist in this terrestrial deadend that could endanger their lives?
Penny closes the door, trying to temporarily expel the divergent instances of experience she had received during her travels with the Doctor. Somewhere, sometime, someplace, something had drastically effected her ability to function. It began as a sort of residual headache, a sense of emptiness and insatiability. Her psyche had transmuted into a checklist of every minor symptom of every common psychological disorder in a matter of days. By no means did she feel a recurring need to lie to the Doctor about any matter, but this time was different, it felt more invasive and something that he was, at least partially, responsible for. Like an effeminate prison inmate's asshole, the scope of her reality had been stretched beyond its capacity in merely a few days. Moving herself through the laborious humanity of her living room she sat in the kitchen, and poured water into a glass. The way the water distorted her reflection uncannily mimicked her condition. The Whomans, Davros...the list was endless; ontological attacks, a transmission through space decaying rapidly. Penny Lane no longer meant anything. It never meant anything but a goddamn Beatles song; a gag her parents would have used to lighten the mood at parties when she were at the younger age in which it was acceptable to trophy a child. Penny Lane was nothing but propagation of wit and musical taste. There is a fucking horse in the house frolicking about in the lounge. How did she miss it? Must have been the humanity.
"Neigh," it whinnies.
She throws her glass of water at the horse, not sure why she had originally poured it considering her strong aversion to anything that isn't strawberry scented. It fragments into shards that embed themselves into a red carpet. In a curious physical deviation not a single piece of glass has lodged itself into the horse, amounting Penny's provocation into nothing more than soft impact and a shattering sound. The horse, now lackadaisical and snuggling into the fabric of the carpet, looks at her and smiles. At least that's what it looks like it is doing, horses have such a patronizing overbite, and if they had a capacity for anything besides neighing, their smiles would surely be accompanied by raucous laughter.
"Neigh," says the horse.
"Neigh," says Penny.
She is really pissed off now at this grinning mass in her lounge. There is no reason for it to be so happy, and she tackles it, momentarily tripping on the edge of the red carpet. She slams quite hard into its body, but it doesn't seem to mind. The horse's mouth, still gaping, shifts Penny into view, who reacts by grappling it with both of her hands, sticking her nails into the horse's muzzle, pushing the fucking thing shut.
"Neigh."
Perhaps in reaction to the pressure on its jaw, the horse perfunctorily slides backwards. Penny's feet are now swinging into its belly, and she begins crying, her sobs synchronized with the kicks. Now the horse has been violently awoken from its ecstasy, no longer smiling and ineffectually trying to move upright, but she weighs on its body. Both animals are crying out, her tears fading into the fibre of the red carpet, in which scattered glass occasionally catches the falling droplets, crystallizing into new and more precarious glassware. Her fingers crumple the horse's jaw, a sudden fragility which repels her, and something slides out of her empty hands and breaks into a virulent nasal assault; a liquid that isn't strawberry scented. Penny nearly tumbles off the chair she is seated on as she realizes she has dropped her glass of water on the ground amid her existential lamentation. Then she feels it coming, an inexorable ocean of acid that sweeps over the red carpet. It becomes the moat for a small table, upon which resides a photograph of a man who now oversees this familial castle, Penny's father actually, a man so deranged in his parenting skills that for years he force-fed his daughter nothing but strawberries.
Neigh."
"Got what I want," Penny exits from her house. Contrary to what she had said, she had nothing except a hollow feeling that lingered on the back of her neck.
"Good." The Doctor begins pacing down the driveway. "Let's go and investigate."
"Investigate what?"
"Apart from that," he points towards a pile of bones in the garden, "we need to find out where that distress call came from."
Penny's gaze remains on the bones. Up until now she hadn't seen them. It bothers her how dismissive the Doctor can be of such macabre sights. Company with him is guaranteed emotional claustrophobia; never is she given sufficient time to absorb the death and decay that regularly transpires during their travels.
A monk in brown robes emerges. It had come from behind her house, and it walks towards her with a deliberate and eerie caution, as if unaccustomed to movement itself.
"Is that a monk?" she mumbles, primarily questioning her own senses.
"Look behind you!" calls the Doctor, but Penny has already seen the curious new figure.
"Is that a monk?" repeated again, reality is still not cogent.
"Yes!"
Unconvinced and somewhat frightened she runs over to the Doctor, who is examining the street, mentally cartographing the area and considering the ideal placements of alien booby traps and misanthropic dogs.
By now the road leading outside of Penny's home was glistening post-rainfall like wet tar, concaves in the ground produced by erosion filled with water making their journey onwards a veritable obstacle course.
A screaming comes across the sky.
"What was that?"
"Sounded like a gunshot!" exclaims the Doctor, leaping into action, at last in his element.
They hurry into the back of a strangers house and confront the sight of the orange blood.
"Look, Doctor. Orange blood," Penny stammers, trying to confront the situation as best she can.
"Yes, the alien blood." It is clear that they are both operating on a similar wavelength, postulating alien origins of the murder scene.
"What alien has orange blood?"
"I don't know," yet there was a distinct hesitation. His tone suggested he did know, and so Penny was not surprised when he glanced at her somberly adding, "but it could be Zygon."
TO BE CONTINUED...