The Talons Of Dr Woo
Chapter One
He awoke in a bed with crisp white sheets. Waking was slow and he only gradually became aware of his surroundings, it was light and there were other people in the room, moving about not paying attention to him. Why wasn't he in his own bed? He tried to move just a little and was rewarded with a sharp pain in his left leg, ouch, not trying that again in a hurry. He tried very gently to move other parts of his body, right leg seemed alright, arms O.K., something up with his ribs though, and the left side of his head felt tender. Touching it intensified a headache he realised he had had all along. It was hard to take in his surroundings without sitting up or moving his head too much and changing the focus of his vision seemed to take far more effort than it should have. The people moving about near him seemed to be dressed in white and there was a faint smell of disinfectant in the air, he must be in a hospital, oh dear, what had happened, he didn't seem to remember anything too clearly.
A feeling of thirst arose and refused to go away, his throat began to feel drier and drier. He looked around, next to the bed was a covered jug of water and a glass, moving slowly using his hands to lift his body he pulled himself into an upright position and poured a drink. Out of the babble of voices around him he picked out one, a woman's voice, saying, "It looks as if our time traveller is awake."
He closed his eyes for a moment, it seemed easier to shut them and just let his mind drift. His imagination carried him between the stars, through swirling nebula and around red dwarfs. After some time, he had no idea how long he sensed someone near by and opened his eyes again. A young female face was gazing down at him. "Hello, how are you feeling?" The nurse asked sympathetically.
"Woozy, are you one of the Sisters of the Infinite Schism?"
"No, I don't think I am, Sister is over in the office. I'll see if Dr. Ross is still in, he may want to see you again, now you are more awake." She turned to go.
"Nurse."
"Yes."
"What year is it?"
"It's 2011, the same as last time you asked. I'll see if Dr. Ross is free."
An indeterminable passage of time later he had another visitor. A short, bearded man in his forties, wearing a grey suit rather than a white coat, attended by the same nurse. The man picked up the notes from the bottom of the bed, and addressed the nurse, "Is he lucid?" He had a soft Scottish voice, pleasant but he had a beard, slightly too bushy around the mouth, almost like a cat who had got a bird, and for some reason bearded men were not to be trusted.
"He still seems confused Doctor, he asked me what year it was again."
The doctor turned to the patient, "Good evening, I'm Dr. Ross, and you seem to be a man of mystery Mr. ?"
A name, they wanted a name, trouble was he couldn't think of one. That wasn't right, was it? Not only couldn't he remember how he got here, he couldn't remember his name. Not good.
His hesitation in replying seemed to make the nurse uncomfortable, "Doctor." She began to break the silence.
"Yes." Said Dr. Ross.
"Yes." Said his patient at the same time.
"Sorry." The nurse said to him, "I was talking to the Doctor."
"That's it. The Doctor, I'm known as the Doctor."
"Doctor is a title, rather than a name." Interjected Dr. Ross, "As in, Doctor, Ross."
"Just, The Doctor in my case."
"You've been in some kind of accident." Said Dr. Ross. "Do you remember anything about what happened to you?"
"No." He replied, "But I'm finding it hard to remember anything clearly." He looked hard at Dr. Ross, "You've drugged me haven't you?"
"A mild sedative, you were quite disturbed when they brought you in here. We'll reduce the dose and see if that helps things become any clearer."
We'll do more than, reduce, the dose, he thought to himself.
"O.K., we'll have another little chat tomorrow after a good nights sleep." He turned to the nurse keep up the Risperdal and Paxipam down to 20mg." Then he left.
Later the drugs trolley came around accompanied by two nurses, when they reached him they poured him a glass of water and passed him a little plastic pot with two yellow tablets in it one round and one lozenge shaped. The nurse with the trolley, a harsh looking middle aged woman, saw him looking at them, "They'll help you sleep." She said not totally convincingly. He popped them into his mouth and took a swig from the glass. When the trolley moved on he popped them out of his mouth again and into his pajama pocket.
The next morning the Doctor was sat it Ross's office. Earlier, after he had palmed more medication, an orderly had turned up with a wheel chair, he insisted he could walk, at least with the help of a stick, but apparently hospital policy dictated it had to be the chair, as he was pushed along he noticed some of the doors were locked, the orderly had used a swipe card to open them. He was now positioned facing the desk, but Dr. Ross, dressed in his grey suit, with a grey tie. was on his feet, pacing the room.
"You're looking a lot better, tell me has anything else come back to you?"
The Doctor, conscious he was wearing pajamas and a dressing gown which were not his own, ran a hand through his hair so that at least looked tidy. "Feeling much better, thank you for asking."
"Do you recall a name, perhaps or where you live?"
"I told you, I am known as the Doctor. Maybe you already known a bit more about me than you are letting on"
"I assure you we know very little about you. You were transferred here from A&E at Queen Elizabeth's when it was clear you were somewhat confused. You had no wallet or phone or other identification on you."
"And yet when I woke up, I heard one of the nurses say 'Our time traveller is awake'"
"Did you?, I'm sorry, they are not supposed to talk about patients like that."
"But she did, and I heard her. It's a strange thing to say if you know nothing about me, how could she know?"
"How could she know what, are you claiming to actually be a time traveller?"
"I didn't originate the claim did I?"
Ross sighed. "All right, look you have no name, that we could find, and when you were admitted you were wearing somewhat unusual clothes. I have them here." He picked up a folded tweed jacket, shirt, trousers and red braces from a side desk. "We thought maybe you had been in fancy dress do you recognise them as yours?"
"Definitely."
"Well we searched the pockets and this is all we came up with."
"A key, and some money. Nothing so odd about that I should say."
"Count the money."
The Doctor took it and the key, his TARDIS key. "Four shillings and sixpence, oh and a half penny."
"Not a very useful amount of money."
"Isn't it? I don't know maybe I can get a bag of chips or two on the way home. How much are chips in 2011?"
"You won't find many chip shops taking shillings."
"Won't I? Inflation, the misers curse, erodes your savings whilst your back is turned?"
Ross tried to get back to the point. "So when a man with no identity, was found with old money in his pockets and who kept asking what year it was, the nurses nicknamed him the time traveller."
"Obviously without expecting him to actually be a time traveller."
"Obviously. You don't remember your accident, you don't seem to remember your name, but I think you are too intelligent, too aware not to know you do need some help, that these things need remembering."
The Doctor paused, there were some things he seemed to have forgotten but he was not quite an amnesiac basket case. "Something is wrong here, certainly. Whatever sort of scrape I got into I do not know what it is, but I do know who and what I am."
"A time traveller?"
"A Time Lord, the last of the Time Lords, from Gallifrey in The constellation of Kasterborous."
"Could not an alternative theory explain the facts more easily?"
"Such as I am a numismatist, with an interesting wardrobe that got a bump on the head?"
"A numismatist?"
"A collector of old coins. From your point of view I can see it would sound more likely."
"Tell me about the time travel then, where do you remember being?"
"A million places, I remember marching down the Menin Road, blistering heat with sticky mud sucking at my boots, feet aching and blistered. I remember sitting in a dinner in Utah in 1965, eating bacon and maple syrup, Tainted Love playing on the radio."
"These experiences could be had today."
"Why walk down the Menin road in 2011, when you could get the bus? Clambering through the ruins of a blasted Washington, the hum of mutated insects heavy in the air, someone has found a record player and wired it up to a portable generator, their listening to the Inkspots, 'I don't want to the world on fire.'"
"It is possible that following your unknown trauma, your brain is taking in clues from outside, being referred to as a time traveller, hearing people being called 'Doctor', and it has constructed an identity around these clues until your actual memories return."
"Until I'm in my right mind again."
"Until you are feeling better, yes."
"It would be more probable, but it isn't the case, this once. Maybe, from your point of view, I'm a real doctor."
"Surgeons often wear bow ties, but you look rather young to be a surgeon."
"Well I'm older than I look, and I know that the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone is connected to the knee bone, and the knee bone is connected to the leg bone." The Doctor sang, "And leg bone is connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone is connected to the foot bone and the foot bone is connected to the toe bone. Now hear the word of the Lord". He finished on a crescendo and looked at the rather surprised face of Dr. Ross in front of him, "No, I'm not that sort of doctor. Although I can be sure my hip bone is not connected to my leg bone at the moment, not in the precise way it should be, anyway."
"And although you remember being a lord you do not remember how you sustained your injuries?"
"A Time Lord. Look you're a medical doctor aren't you. Besides being a psychiatrist I mean."
"Of course, all psychiatrists are medically qualified, otherwise we would be mere psychologists."
"Quite, then you should have a stethoscope handy, maybe only as a kind of badge of office, even if you rarely use it."
"In my draw."
"Right, two hearts, listen." The Doctor open his pajama top and bared his chest.
"You saying you have two hearts?"
"And two heart beats, listen."
Ross picked up the instrument and walked over to the Doctor. He then listened on both sides of his chest. "Sorry I can only hear one heart."
"Let me try." The Doctor listened, one heart beat. He was momentarily confused, had he had a single heart attack? Then he remembered something. "The stuff I was found with, was there a watch, an old fashioned fob watch, with spiral engravings on one side?"
Dr. Ross had clearly had enough. "Just the key and money I'm afraid, sorry, that's all for today, I'll see you again very soon.. " He trailed off not having a name to finish with.
"Doctor." Said the Doctor as if talking to an idiot child.
"See you soon, Doctor." said Dr. Ross with badly disguised ill-patience.
After being wheeled back, the Doctor sat in his bed contemplating how the interview had gone. He enjoyed being in peoples faces, but maybe that approach had not worked too well in this case. If this place was what it appeared to be an early twenty first century psychiatric hospital, then he had just convinced the authorities he was blisteringly insane, which may not get him out of here too quickly. Even without his sonic screwdriver, he was pretty sure he could easily get through the locked doors or get hold of a swipe card, but in his current condition the one thing he could not do was run, and some of the staff here, the larger ones, looked as if they were used to dealing with escaping patients. If this place was not what it appeared to be, and someone was playing an elaborate game with him then so far so good. Otherwise he may just have made things more difficult for himself.
Still he needed time to recover, maybe best to stay put. Funny if he had been more badly injured he could just have regenerated and been right as rain in no time, but sometimes you just had to take the slower route. He also could not think of anywhere to escape to, he had no idea where his TARDIS was. He's let this one play out a little longer until he knew what was going on.
A policeman visible as a flash of yellow in the drab ward was talking to one of the nurses at the door of their little office. After a couple of minutes the nurse pointed at the Doctor's bed and the policeman came over. He was a big lad and towered the recumbent Doctor, his top was bristling with pieces of equipment making him look like a luminous yellow Batman.
"Good morning Sir." He gestured towards a chair next to the bed. "May I?"
"Be my guest."
No longer looming over the bed, the policeman, as everyone else did, asked how he was feeling.
"Much better." The Doctor replied, honestly.
"The nurse tells me you are still having trouble remembering what happened to you."
"It still hasn't come back."
"And your name?"
"Still a little hazy on that one." Said the Doctor, diplomatically.
"That's a shame. There is probably not a great deal we can do today then. You see, between you and me, Sir, you may not remember much about how you ended up in here, but your injuries are consistent with an assault, the sort that normally would go with a robbery. That's why we became involved, when you were admitted to Queen Elizabeth's."
"So you think I was mugged?"
"Did you have a phone or a wallet on you when you arrived?"
"No, I did not." The Doctor didn't mention the only phone he owned he kept in a police telephone box and he didn't carry a wallet, only his psychic paper in a leather holder. Come to think of it, that was missing, along with his sonic screwdriver.
"Sorry, to be the bearer of bad tidings, there maybe a more innocent explanation, but our job is to investigate to see if there is a less pleasant answer, and if there is to see what we can do about it."
"Look, it's possible you are right, but I can't help you at the moment."
"If anything does come back to you, and in my experience it usually does, here's my card, give me a call." He passed the Doctor a police business card with Sergeant Perris written on it in Biro, and a list of police numbers on the back.
"Thank you officer, I'll give you a call if anything comes back to me."
Sergeant Perris rose from his chair. "Goodbye Sir, hope your feeling more yourself soon, keep taking the pills."
"I will." The Doctor lied. He had no doubt he had been attacked but could he have been mugged, it seemed a little pedestrian after the risks he had taken in the past? He, the Doctor, the bogeyman Sontarians told each other stories about around camp fires, the reason Daleks had trouble getting to sleep at night, robbed in an alley. How much heroin could you buy from the sale of a sonic screwdriver and some psychic paper. Mind you, he had once had to regenerate after falling and banging his head on the TARDIS console, so it didn't pay to get to above himself.
A couple of days later he was was back in Ross's office, this time he had walked there under his own steam, but still with an orderly to accompany him, and open the swipe-card doors. There was a laptop open on the desk facing away from him.
"Morning Doctor." Said the Doctor.
"Good morning to you Doctor." Said Dr. Ross
"Please let's not be so formal John will do."
"You have a name for me now?"
"John Smith, well Dr. John Smith, but John, or Mr. Smith will do just fine."
Ross paused, the Doctor wondered if this was going to work. He was going to prove his sanity by making up a sane sounding fictitious identity. 'John Smith' had worked before, a sort of double bluff, it sounded fake so it had to be real, besides he had met real John Smiths, there were loads of them.
"Do you recall anything else?"
"A little, living here in London, working for the U.N."
"For the U.N., that sounds a very important role."
It seemed he was being checked for self aggrandisement again. "No, nothing special just as a scientific adviser to their Intelligence Taskforce."
"You are a real qualified doctor then, you did remember that much?"
"A doctor of science, rather than medicine."
"And your doctorate is in?"
"Astrophysics." replied the Doctor without hesitation, thinking, 'go on ask me anything, I'm pretty sure I can bluff that one.'
"Your accent does seem local, but do I detect a very slight bit of a Gaelic twang now and again, from the Emerald Isle maybe?"
In the past, the Doctor thought, he had sported slightly Gaelic accents, slightly Irish or Scottish but not presently though. "Do you, I don't hear it."
"And Gallifrey in the constellation of, what was it, Castor-something?"
"Kasterborous, a figment of my fevered imagination, I'm afraid."
"You seem very sure of the name."
"The constellation of Kasterborous exists." Replied the Doctor, failing to mention that it could not be seen from Earth. "But Gallifrey does not." Sadly true enough.
"Well, I did a little ferreting around after our last little chat, and as ever Google was our friend. I couldn't find anything on Kasterborous, probably as I couldn't spell the name,but I did find Gallifrey." He swung round the lap top to show the Doctor. It was on Google maps, and showed a tiny village at the bottom of what looked like a mountain, elevation was hard to judge from the aerial photograph.
"Interesting, I must have heard the name somewhere, you said the mind picks things up to construct it's fictions."
"True, what sounds like madness may have method in't."
"Hamlet."
"Indeed, and who are we to argue with the Bard?"
"Such stuff as dreams are made of?"
"Quite, you maybe interested to know that I did some digging, Gallifrey as you can see is a hamlet itself, one larger house with a few supporting cottages, to the west of Galway. I checked the history of the house, it was until relatively recently in the hands of one family. It's last owner was a Mr. Lord, Timothy Lord, he died and his son a Timothy also, sold the house and moved to London."
"Ha, Hamlet, hamlet I see what you did there." Said the Doctor as if he had not heard the rest.
"'Tim Lord', the name means nothing to you? It might not be your name but someone close yo you."
This was getting out of hand, thought the Doctor. Someone was definitely trying to do his head in, was it Ross or was he a sincere dupe of some higher power? A torrent of what could be mistaken for self aggrandising delusion rose to his lips, but he held back deciding to continue playing along. "The last of the Tim Lords, assuming I have no children, nope, can't say that comes as an eureka moment."
"Well it could be a clue, think about it."
"I'll mull it over."
"And the John Smith stuff?"
"Yeah, sort of made it up. Sorry."
"I'll arrange for you to have access to the internet. Normally it's the last thing our patients need, it just helps them find fresh conspiracy theories, but if you do some research it may help."
The Doctor had to allow himself to be accompanied into a side office to gain internet access, through another swipe card door, but once in there and logged on to a guest account, he was left alone to his own devices. The rest of the hospital's intranet was fire-walled off from his location but it only took him a couple of minutes to find a back door and gain access. The whole system checked out, a large hospital IT network just as one would expect. If someone had set this thing up for his benefit they had gone to a lot of trouble. Patient's records and a vast database of emails and staff records where all there. The locked doors didn't seem to have any central control however, and could not be over ridden from a computer, he could setup a fake staff account for himself but he would still need an actual card to open anything.
The village of Gallifrey appeared as promised on maps of Ireland, slightly to the northwest of Galway. Looking at Street view, which covered this far flung area surprisingly well, he saw a landscape of low dry stone walls, stunted windswept trees, and uneven close cropped grass. The original cottages were tiny roofless ruins, but next to them were new modern single story homes. The larger house was intact, a stark, enigmatic, vaguely Gothic pile, that Rassilon himself might have felt at home in.
He next searched for Tim Lord, and found that there were a number of actual members of the House Of Lords with Tim, or Timothy, in their names and titles. When he refined his searches he found Tim Lord, previously of Gallifrey, had a small online presence. He was present on the electoral role and seemed to to be the owner of a house in Wimbledon. There was a business site selling antiques which must have been the page Ross had found, it was cleverly designed to appear near the top of any vaguely relevant search list. There was an eclectic range of goods on offer, furniture from many periods, wartime memorabilia, clocks, ornaments, weapons, all photographed and inviting reasonable offers. There was also an eBay account offering less valuable goods. Interestingly, thought the Doctor, it was the sort of operation a time traveler short of a bob or two might setup, but he didn't recall doing it.