Chapter 1 – Coattails
Trying to remember life before hand – that is, before I met the Doctor – is more difficult than I would have originally thought. I remember people, my family, friends and the like but my memories, though they are still dear to me and hold emotion for me seem to have dulled, faded into shades of grey after the brilliant color of experiencing life with the only one I've ever met who lives it to the fullest degree. But I would imagine that after having spent even one day with the Doctor anyone's life before would seem utterly mundane, even normal – a word which amounts to that of a strong swear word to him. Because, you see, the Doctor is a being who doesn't take the time to recognize the definition of that word and because of that, he is the only one I believe exists who truly lives.
This is my story of traveling with a Lord of Time starting from when we met and through a whirlwind of insanity, hilarity, love, and absolutely wonderful madness.
I'm still getting used to it.
My parents died within the same year of each other. Mum had cancer on her bones. She died only weeks after being diagnosed. Dad was quick to follow. I think I'm the only one who still believes he died of a broken heart. Well, the Doctor believes it too actually.
Dad took Mum's death with difficulty to put it mildly. He struggled in the beginning as he attempted to continue on with his life until he stopped going out. He stopped seeing people and a little while after that he stopped seeing me as well. I would sit outside his bedroom door in the house and waited until he decided to come out. I always believed that he would eventually.
He never did.
Daddy missed her so much he let himself waste away until he was no more as well.
I was twenty years old when I realized what it felt like to be alone.
Like anything else though, you manage to become accustomed to loneliness. I was able to as well, living day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. I had my friends from my job and a few I was still in contact with from school. My brother called me whenever he remembered which was about once a month if I was lucky. He had moved to the United States several years earlier in pursuit of his career. I stayed in the old house I grew up in. It seemed wrong to sell it.
On I went, allowing myself to get into a routine. Though my parents left more than enough money for me to live on I went to work every morning and came home to the empty house every evening. The only fluctuation in the daily ordinariness was my writing. Nearly every night I would sit with a pen and paper or at my computer and write, allowing the world outside the old house to pass me by. Sometimes I wrote about my day or I would jot down stories that would come into my head. It relaxed me and it helped me to believe that maybe being ordinary wasn't so bad as long as I didn't fully accept it.
For four years I kept going until I started to feel the normalcy bubble waver. Even now I'm not exactly certain when it all began but the only thing I have to mark the point in time with is the very first time I saw him. It probably started before that but for some reason things became clearer to me after that day. Though he denies it I still believe the Doctor had some sort of influence over that instance.
It was midday on a weekend – a stormy day. I was out with my friend Kathleen, or Kat as I called her. We were shopping, enjoying a laugh with each other. I reveled in being around Kat because she helped me to forget if only temporarily. She was a sort of dampening field and she also didn't ask many questions.
The rain had softened to a drizzle enabling Kat and I to move outside from one shop to the next one. There was some shoe place that she wanted to stop in. We were talking, moving with the crowds of people also enjoying a day of shopping, or simply running in and out of the shops to avoid the rain.
I had been filling Kat in on the latest gossip at the bank where I worked when I found that she wasn't focusing on me at all.
"Are you even listening to me?" I said sounding slightly offended. She wouldn't hear me until I touched her on the shoulder, "Kat?" I said.
She held out her hand and stopped us both on the sidewalk and put her face close to mine so she could whisper in my ear. "Across the street, do you see him? I saw him watching us when we walked onto the street and he's still looking at us." Her voice shook a little as she spoke to me. She kept her back facing the street and her eyes on me as I looked up and quickly scanned the opposite side of the street. There were clusters of people moving in all directions – I didn't see any person that stood out.
"I think he's gone, Kat." I said to reassure her. She did tend to over react sometimes. Some bloke must have only taken a glance at us and moved on. Kat turned lightly on her feet and looked again. She shook her head and turned quickly back to me. "He's still there," she hissed. "The tall one, long brown coat," she paused and glanced again out of the corner of her eye. "I think he's looking at you more than me."
I did my best to fight the urge to roll my eyes and looked again.
The rain became heavier and people began opening their umbrellas again all around us creating a sea of black spotted with a bright color every now and then. That's what made him easier to spot. He stood motionless among the moving bodies that passed him with his hands in his pockets almost directly across from where Kat and I huddled together. The rain didn't appear to bother him at all. He only continued to look at us even when I met his gaze he didn't falter or move to look away.
We watched each other, the both of us getting soaked. His once disheveled dark hair was plastered to his forehead. Neither of us moved. I wasn't sure if I could move. It was as though he had caught me in some sort of invisible trap only with his eyes. Soft brown eyes - they were deeper than I could see. They were haunted eyes in his apparently young face.
It scared me.
I broke our gaze and looked at my feet taking a moment to realize that Kat had been trying to pull me out of the downpour.
"Come on, Alice," she said, her eyes darting every now and again to the man across the street.
I nodded to her and started walking away risking only one glance over my shoulder. He was still there, just standing and looking. There was nothing I could see from his behavior that he was about to run at us or start following us – nothing to get me to run, which is what I felt I wanted to do as Kat and I walked quickly down the street to another shop.
"I said he was only looking at you, didn't I?" Kat hissed at me as I brushed the wet hair out of my face.
"It doesn't matter," I said quickly. "He's probably just some weirdo. He'll get caught soon enough."
I went up to the window of the shop after we walked in and looked down the street through the sheet of rain on the outside. He had vanished.
--
The following Monday I phoned in to the bank and told them I wouldn't be in for work that day, not because I couldn't stand the thought of going in that day but because I truly felt awful. I was detached – only going through the motions before I went back to bed later that morning. That's when I really became aware of the depression – the emptiness that I had been carrying with me for I couldn't tell how long. My thoughts and dreams were darker as the memories were bubbling to the surface of my consciousness. I couldn't not think about them – my most horrifying memories; my parents' deaths, my high school sweetheart finally breaking up with me, my ginger haired cat that was hit by a car when I was a child. Memories I believed I had forgotten because they'd been so long ago were being drudged up inside my head allowing me to dwell upon them.
I cried a lot that day, alone in my house. All I could do was focus on the memories – any attempt to distract myself went unheeded.
Around midday I was able to finally go to sleep and when I woke in the afternoon I found my thoughts easier to control. The memories were quiet for the moment. I was able to do a little house work in the evening while my thoughts were being kept at bay. I carried a bag of waste to the bin outside and I slowed and looked up at the sky. The air was crisp and I could see the red-orange light of the setting sun behind the clouds. I tossed the bag into the bin and let the lid fall closed with a clatter.
The street was silent as it normally was in the older neighborhoods. There was the rustle of the leaves on the ancient trees that shaded the house and the sound of a car or two driving down a lane a few streets away. I stood and allowed it to fill me as I listened when there was a sharp snapping sound. I opened my eyes but didn't move immediately. There was a large brown blur of something out of the corner of my eye. I whirled around in time to see the flick of a brown coat tail whip around to the side of the house.
The temporary peace I'd found shattered as anger built up inside of me. I was in no mood to deal with an idiotic pervert. If I met him I would not be held responsible for what would happen to him as angry as I was.
"Oi!" I yelled and started after him with no thought as to who he was or if he was dangerous or anything of the sort. I reached the side of the house and saw a rustle in the bushes that led to the back garden.
The back garden.
I bolted back around the house and flew through the front door planning to head him off. Through the kitchen and out the back door I ran out onto the grass.
"Oi, you!" I bellowed at the surrounding foliage. "I know you're here! If you don't come out I'm calling the police." I walked across the garden to the back wall, brushing my fingers along the thick ivy that covered it. I moved along the perimeter of the garden and found nothing. Everything had fallen silent as it had been before my shouting save or my footsteps in the grass. I gave up and stomped back to the back door only turning to glare at the garden, "This isn't funny." I said as I slammed the door and locked it behind me.
I wasn't going mad. I knew somewhere in my head that what was happening to me wasn't madness but it was only a flicker of a belief at the time. I thought I was literally losing my head.
That night my writing took a different turn. After I made certain that every single window and door was locked I wrote of a stranger, tall and dark in a brown coat that went down to his ankles.
My memories returned as I dreamed but they had become mangled, distorted the more I thought on them. I would see monsters, darkness and shadows in them. Real life images from my past were being contaminated by my own mind and made to be worse than they had been originally. Soon I found myself beginning to believe that my parents died of the darkness itself, a darkness that seemed to be consuming me as well though I wasn't aware of it yet.
As for the man in the brown coat he also added to my mounting theory that my sanity was indeed slipping. After the evening in the garden I got glimpses of him during the next few weeks. I would see him or even sense that he was near. Some instances I would catch a movement so quick that I would question whether anything had been there or not. In others I would turn and see the back of a tall man wearing a long brown coat and dark uncontrollable hair walking away from me. I would try to follow but always I would lose sight of him or I'd be jostled by a crowd of people moving in the opposite direction from him. It was maddening.
--
One morning about a month from the back garden incident, I was in the bank office. My memories were being held under control for the time being but the strange things got stranger. I stepped out of the office suite to get to the loo only to rest my head a bit. Keeping focused on the job had become much more of a challenge. It drained me to the point that all I wanted to do after work was fall into bed and give in to more of the dark dreams. I walked past the stalls in the ladies room and through the door in the back that lead to a rest or powder room. No one in the office ever decided on what to call it.
My heart was set on lying down on the small sofa for a moment but I couldn't get to it.
In the middle of the room stood an enormous wooden box painted blue with two narrow doors on the front and lettering along the top paneling that read
POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX
I stared at it wondering how anyone could have gotten it in that little room in the first place and also in sheer disbelief. I took a step towards it. It definitely was a box. I put my hand up to it and pressed it flat against the wooden surface. The wood felt warm, comforting beneath my touch.
The front door to the loo opened and I quickly went out of the makeshift powder room. A woman I didn't know looked up at me, slightly startled by my sudden presence.
"I wouldn't go in there just now," I said, pointing to the door I'd just come out of. "Looks like someone's been sick in there."
The woman relaxed and nodded, "We should probably put up a sign or something until it gets cleaned up."
"Good idea," I said as I passed her and opened the door to the corridor.
I didn't know why I felt that no one else should discover what I had seen in there. It was just a box after all. It could be just a prank someone was trying to pull for all I knew. But I couldn't help but feel I'd be betraying something if I told anyone. I went reluctantly back into the office. Teddy and Jordan – one a friend of mine, the other an overachieving, pompous, snotty nosed ass – were standing at the front window speaking in hushed voices.
Jordan's low mutterings reached my ears as I passed. "…if he comes around again we should tip off security."
I froze and turned, robot like to the two men.
"I agree," Teddy replied. "But he's not really doing anyone harm by making laps around the building."
"They should be informed of any suspicious activity," Jordan said, sticking his jaw out importantly.
"Er," I said as I approached them, trying my best to appear casual. "Sorry, but who's acting suspicious?"
Teddy smiled warmly at me, "Nothing to worry about, Alice. Just some weirdo probably."
I had heard that before.
"Look," Jordan whispered. "He's coming round again."
The three of us clustered together and peered out the window as though we were in a cheesy spy film. I took in a sharp gasp when I saw the man coming around the corner. The messy hair, dark eyes, and long brown coat. He strolled up the walk, his hands in his pockets looking at nothing in particular until he passed the window we were staring out of. He turned his head quickly looked at the three of us, then at me. He kept his eyes on me until he passed and then looked ahead again.
I stiffened as my brain quickly snapped to a decision. I found myself at the front door and wrenched it open, stepping out onto the walk. No one was there as I looked around me in every direction. He had gone. Again, he'd gone as though he'd never been there. I sighed helplessly and clenched my fists in frustration when I felt a pressure on my arm.
Teddy had followed me out.
"Alice, what the hell are you doing? You don't even know who he is…do you?"
"It doesn't matter." I said flatly.
"Come back inside. If he's bothering you that much I'll get Jordan to call security." He started to pull me to the doors.
I yanked my arm out of his grip, "Get off, Teddy!" I snapped at him feeling an unrecognizable hatred boil up inside of me. "Leave me alone for just a bit, can you do that?" Every word rang with spite and anger at him though I had no reason in the world to say anything of the sort to my friend.
Teddy's face changed instantly. He let me go and backed away, every crease in his face showing how hurt he was by my words. He mumbled an apology and went back inside leaving me alone leaning against the wall of the building.
I crashed right then, allowing the pain of my thoughts to wash over me as I cried. I had never let my guard down as weak as it was but as I stood there I opened the flood gates as though I had given up fighting and waited for it to consume me. I remember thinking, believing that this is what going mad feels like.
"You were right," said a low and gentle voice. "This isn't funny. Not at all."
I opened my eyes but didn't look up. Someone stood in front of me wearing a brown suit with blue pin stripes underneath a long brown coat. His hands were in his pockets, a slight breeze lifting the coattails at his ankles.
"I should know," he continued. "I have a flawless sense of humor, of course."