It's the echo in the console room. Drive you mad, if you let it. Of course, I'm used to it. I've spent far more time on my own in here than I ever have with companions. It's just that they keep meeting, and discussing it, and sometimes they don't even know that I'm gone, so that's the overall impression people get. That I'm a social being. That I need company. Well, I'm sorry, but it's simply not true. I do plenty of things on my own. I'm perfectly comfortable in my own company. In fact, I find myself rather agreeable as a travelling companion.
But it's that echo. It makes you realize you're talking to yourself.
"Can't you feel any smaller?" I wait. Nothing happens. Apparently not. "You disappoint me, old girl."
I suppose she has more important things on her mind than spatial or sensational compression. We've been in the vortex too long; she's starting to struggle. Problem is I don't really know where to stop. Specifically, where to start my investigation. 'Investigation' is another very good word.
I should have a deerstalker. Deerstalkers are cool. I start towards the stairs, to go and see if I have a deerstalker. But this is how I ended up with the pipe, which didn't work out how I thought, and the truncheon, which I'm not going to use, don't remember acquiring and frankly it disturbed me to find one, and the handcuffs, which one can only assume I should return to River. I am rather beginning to suspect that these have been distractions, and that I have accepted them gladly.
Why is that, I wonder?
The thing is, I really do want that deerstalker now. I hover mid-step on the top stair, torn between this genuine desire, and the knowledge that I've been distracting myself far too long. Also, there's an odd juddering noise coming from the time rotor.
I think of River, and what she's done to my last two hats, regardless of cool. I can't put a deerstalker through that.
"Right, then," and I clap my hands, not just to show that proceedings have really begun, but to call myself out of that yearning trance, "what have we got?"
"We have a thing that can walk in and out through walls, but that doesn't narrow it down all that much, that could be species or technology or any old thing, so that's out. It kills Time Lords, or it wants to steal the matrix, but then again, who wouldn't, so that doesn't help me either. We have the murder weapon, crafted from Tirinnanoc ash, which can be traced, certainly, and is in all likelihood my best bet. Yes, that's it, wonderful idea. Go and look at that, find out who might have some, run that down, great.
Haven't done it. Why haven't I done it?
Seriously. I'm still just standing here. I know where I have to go and when I have to be there and yet, haven't done it.
Because the last few days have been strange and fairly terrible, and all of it hangs on me like lead and antimatter. The fact that I've taken the telephone off the hook weighs heavy too. Stars look dimmer. Burnt out. And, just like that, I know where I'm going.
"Let's go, you and I," I tell my toiling, beautiful machine. "Let's get away from it all."
Honestly, I think if I'd asked her to stop in the heart of a star she would do it, just to stop. I didn't, though. It's one of the easiest stops in all of existence and history.
Since there is nothing in it, it has no official name. On any given star map, it is about a square centimetre of perfect blankness. Which doesn't look like much on paper, and is very useful indeed when you're trying to pin up a star map with thumbtacks. Out here, in real life, it is a world quite large enough to accommodate the loneliness of one small, single-occupancy Tardis. All the stars that one might want to look at are tiny and distant, spots of light through the thumb-tack holes in the big black map.
Unofficially, it has been variously called Peace, Madness, Solitude and the Hole In The Universe. None have yet looked out at it and knocked their head on glass and sighed, "Just tonight. Please, just tonight."
I have not landed, but am adrift in a vacuum. Nothing waits beyond the door, pleasant or otherwise. It is the one place in the universe where, theoretically, I cannot be disturbed. There is a great deal of relief to be gained from just this.
"Tardis, I shall take dinner in the Deco lounge, short of a fiery apocalypse I do not wish to be disturbed, and if we do not already have a Deco lounge we'd better have by the time I get there. All streamlined, and statues holding the ceiling up. And with a Lempicka on the wall, I like her, haven't seen Tamara in years now. And an eight-millimetre projector."
Hours pass. Everything is going well. I have eaten. Abbott and Costello have met Frankenstein's monster, improved his quality of life and moved on, which I can't help but respect. They are now accepting private investigatory work from a boxer. I suspect the boxer is about to become invisible, and I am happily waiting to be proven right.
The film ends. Rather abruptly and before I know anything for sure. Cuts out. The projector has apparently stopped working. So I set down my cola and popcorn and look it over. It has, apparently, been switched off at the power point. I sonic it back on, and it switches off again.
"Is that you, old girl?"
The lights gutter. My Lempicka disappears from the wall. And the room, then, starts to feel smaller. Not in the way I wanted earlier in the console room. In a way where it might, just slightly, be closing in on me. Might, just slightly, be about to disappear. "Oh, no-no-no, no, darling, please, don't, not-"
"-Now." This, I find myself addressing to the monitor. The Deco lounge, whether it was already there or was new tonight, is gone. I have been placed back in the console room, which is thankfully the exact size it was when I left it. "Not to be disturbed, I said! Tamara de Lempicka, I said! Vintage comedy, I s…"
I don't mean to trail off. That's a bit too vintage comedy, for me. But as I was scolding her I noticed a reading on the monitor which should certainly not be there.
'Two life-signs', it says.
"That's not possible," I tell her, but nothing changes. Stubborn old thing. But it really is impossible. That life-sign was not there when I went downstairs to eat, and could not have come from anywhere outside. I decide to challenge her, pulling the monitor round over the typewriter. As slow as I can type it, "Analyse life-signs."
First sign identified – Doctor.
Second sign analysis – unknown.
"What is the matter with you? I mean, really, of all the nights to make me come up here and fix things-" In all of this, I am taking the sonic from my pocket and finding the setting. There are firewalls and passkeys for the Tardis setting. Can't have just anybody doing the work on her, can I? "When was the last time I asked you for a night off, I suppose, is the main thrust here…"
Again, I am forced to trail off, because the sonic would appear to be in cahoots with my poor mad darling. Can't find a thing wrong with her.
So, just to be sure that I'm right, I request a breakdown on that second life-sign.
She's working on it when the second life-sign makes itself really quite apparent. I see it first distorted in the contours of the time rotor, and so it is not immediately familiar.
Then it starts to come around the console. A white mask, with large round eyeholes rimmed in black. Close enough, this time, that I can see a pair of pale eyes beyond them. The same loose, dark clothes. Same bluish, organic stakes sliding down out of the sleeves.
Between greeting this creature and apologizing to the Tardis, I choose the latter. The one which will never willingly try to kill me.
I move sideways, trying to keep the console between us. "You've come a long way. Brave of you too, to come and visit me, after the last time we… nearly met." I say that, despite being very aware of moving backwards down the stairs. It jumps at me then and I scatter, putting the rail between us. Now that it's started it doesn't want to stop, and drives me backward by inches with little thrusts and jabs. I get the distinct impression that I'm being toyed with.
"Well, go on, speak to me! Who and what and why are you? And on that last point let me clar-" It lunges at me, the arm stretched long, so fast and so close that I have to cross my eyes to watch the blade pass my nose, "-ify. Why are you here, why did you kill the Keeper and why haven't you killed me yet, if you're so great?"
It would appear to have stopped. It stands, with its feet square to its shoulders, its mask shaded dark by the back-light from the coolant system underneath the console. And it's let me get all the way up back up the stairs, in front of the hallway that will bring me back downstairs out of its way.
"Something I said?"
Its right arm lashes out, and the blade attached slices clean through one of the pipes. Coolant splashes down and starts to spread around its feet, and in high-pitched kettle whistles, the Tardis screams. It hops, almost gingerly, out of the puddle. There are words coming out of my mouth which even I don't understand, but I do know that I mean it.
It shakes its feet dry and starts to climb the stairs. Towards me again. Blue coolant still rolling off the end of the blade, dripping.
"Right, that's it, you, whatever you are, have crossed the line that broke the camel's back, or something like that, bloody humans, some strange phrases, but the fact remains, you are in real trouble now, and make no mistake." It is on the top stair. I raise up the sonic and point it.
Nothing happens.
It flies at me, bounding forth off one foot. This time it does not intend to miss. And so I turn and run.
But that doesn't mean it's not in trouble. It's in worlds of trouble. Once I figure out how to make those terribly inconvenient stabbing motions stop.
