Chapter 2: The Blue Police Box

Blue police boxes don't just drop from the sky. But this one certainly gave the impression that it had, this dreary mid-winter morning in Harrow, north of London.

Dr Alice Quick stomped on the brakes of her car and stared up in disbelief at the upright snow-covered intruder impacted several centimetres into her reserved parking space at Northwick Park Hospital.

Students! It would be just like the interns to have craned in a surprise for her. Though she wasn't sure of the occasion. Christmas and New Year had passed and it wasn't her birthday.

What worried her most was whether anyone had gotten hurt while playing this practical joke. Had the police box fallen off the crane? It had clearly struck the ground with great force. Its windows were shattered and the surrounding asphalt was cracked and raised up. Though the snow was much disturbed with footprints, it was still possible to make out the shape of where a body had been lying outside the police box's double doors.

Quick drove into the nearest empty parking space. (Her boss was going to be furious!) Then, still staring at the police box, she pushed back her shoulder-length black hair and rummaged in her handbag for her iPhone. Someone in the Accident and Emergency department, where she worked, would know what had happened. She was just flicking down her list of contacts when she heard the howl.

It went right through her - the loneliest and most desolate sound she had ever heard. Involuntary tears rose in her eyes and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. But the howl hadn't come from an animal. This she knew immediately, without questioning how she knew. A person had made that howl. Someone so desperately unhappy that words alone could not express the unendurable rawness of their grief, fear, remorse, and torturous, agonising loneliness.

The nurturing instincts that had driven Quick to become a doctor, rose up and compelled her. She had to find and help the person making that sound.

Her finger was still poised to call Accident and Emergency, but the screen flashed up the name 'Chang' and the phone started chiming. A&E were calling her. At least, one of the interns was. Still shaken from the howl, she answered the call.

"Where are you?" Chang's voice bellowed. There was an awful lot of noise where he was. He could scarcely be heard above the shouting and running footsteps in the background.

"I'm in the car park," said Quick. "Somebody crashed a blue police box into my parking space." She wondered if the intern would laugh at the success of his practical joke.

But Chang's voice was tense and not the least bit guilty. "I know," he said. "Come to A&E at once. We've got a situation in here."

"Is it the man who howled?"

"Howled?" asked Chang. "What are you talking about?"

Quick was taken aback. "I heard a howl just a minute ago. It came from A&E."

"Oh, you mean the shouts of the raving loony currently somersaulting over the tables in here?" Chang's voice was frantic.

"The…? Never mind, I'm on my way," said Quick. She shoved her phone back into her handbag and started hurrying towards the hospital entrance door as fast as she could through the snow.

oOoOoOo

"He was found lying unconscious face down outside that blue police box about twenty minutes ago. Security heard a crash and thought there'd been a car accident. But on their next sweep, they found him and called our department," said Chang.

He and Quick were walking down the corridor towards the waiting room.

"We got him onto a stretcher and wheeled him inside, but he woke up and tried to escape," said Chang. "He's barely breathing, there's something very strange about his heartbeat, but somehow he can still run and jump like an Olympic athlete. We've been chasing him for at least five minutes."

"Who is he?" asked Quick as they entered the waiting room. It was pandemonium. Injured people waiting for treatment had pressed themselves up against the walls to stay out of the way of the sprinting horde of security staff, nurses and even two uniformed policemen who had come in to get their faces stitched up and had joined in the fray.

"We don't know," said Chang. "I think he's homeless. I searched his pockets before he came to. No wallet. No ID. There's a key on a chain around his neck and I found this in his pocket." Chang held up a long silver, white and black device.

"Oh, thank you!" The device was promptly snatched out of his hand by a pale man, apparently in his mid-twenties, with floppy dark hair, a quizzical face, and large expressive eyes. He was wearing a tattered brown suit with blue pinstripes that seemed to have been made for a different-sized person. "I thought I'd lost it!" he said, holding up the device and beaming at it. "I haven't been without a sonic screwdriver since Terileptil blew my last one up." The man kissed the device, gave them both a cheeky grin that was long on charm and short on sanity, winked at Quick, and suddenly ducked.

The arm of a large male nurse, clutching a syringe full of tranquilliser, whistled over his head, missing him completely.

The young man straightened up. "Who do you think I am? ET?" he asked the nurse. "I have absolute power over time and space. I won't let humans catch me and perform experiments on me!"

The nurse took another swing and the young man ran for it.

"Wait, Brian!" said Quick, holding out her hand at the nurse. "He's manic. I don't want to see him pumped full of drugs until I find out what drugs are already in his system."

"Good luck catching him without the tranquilliser," said Brian dolefully.

Quick did her best. She chased after the young man. The others were already slowing down with exhaustion. But the young man seemed tireless and ready for a few more circumnavigations of the room. He vaulted over the waving arms of the policemen with a grin at Quick, and landed with his back to her.

Then Quick heard the howl again, and shivered to hear it so close. It came from the young man. There was no question about that, though she couldn't see his face. Some of the desperation from the howl infected her and she held out her arms. "Don't keep howling. Please! Let me help you," she said.

"Howl?" asked Chang at her side. He was out of breath from running. "What do you mean howl? He didn't make a sound."

The security staff and policemen were staring at her strangely and Quick realised it had happened again. She had heard something that no one else had. A blush rose in her face.

But incredibly, the young man stopped and turned to face her. "You can hear me?" he asked in amazement.

Quick didn't have time to reply. Sensing their chance, the security staff and policemen descended upon him like a rugby scrum, until all she could see of him were his legs kicking in the air. They wrestled him to his feet, with the two policemen on either side of him, pressing all their weight onto him to keep him still.

"I don't want to embarrass you, but that feels really good," he told them.

"Hear that, Meadows? He fancies you," said one of the policemen to the other.

"Shut up, Banksy." Scowling, Meadows pulled the young man's arms behind his back.

Quick brought a wheelchair and Meadows and Banksy pushed the young man down into it, handcuffing his wrists to one of the arms of the chair. He was still clutching his sonic screwdriver and he was furious.

"You ungentlemanly monsters! How dare you manhandle a girl like this?" he shouted.

"You're not a girl," said Quick.

"I'm not?" the young man stared at her in surprise. Then he sighed in relief. "Thank goodness for that! I thought I might have been a girl with a very big Adam's Apple."

"You should be so lucky," said Quick, folding her arms. There was nothing wrong with being a girl. She was a girl. She turned to the panting horde of policemen, security staff and nurses. "Thank you for catching him. I'll take care of him from now on."

They were already backing away in relief, now that the young man was caught, heading back to their tasks looking a trifle more exhausted and irate than usual.

When Quick turned back to the young man, he was awkwardly manipulating his sonic screwdriver to point at the handcuffs binding him to the wheelchair. The tip glowed blue and a grin spread across his face, but sensing trouble, Quick snatched the sonic screwdriver away.

The young man pouted at her. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Quick."

"Yes, you are."

"Ha ha, I only hear that joke ten times a day," she deadpanned. "I'm Dr Quick," she added in a more normal voice.

"Snap! My name is the Doctor too."

"No second name? Just the Doctor?" she asked, wondering if he was hiding his real name or simply couldn't remember.

"Yes, just the Doctor. Mind if I call you Quick? It could get a little confusing otherwise. Two Doctors..."

"Go ahead," said Quick.

The Doctor beamed at her as if she were a long lost friend. "Please to meet you, Quick. I'd shake your hand, but I'm a bit tied up right now." He looked longingly at his sonic screwdriver in her hand.

She stuck his sonic screwdriver into her coat pocket. "I'm sorry, Doctor. But I can't let you go until I've run a few tests. You're not yourself at the moment," she said.

"You have no idea how true that is," said the Doctor with feeling, as Quick started wheeling him through the waiting room. The patients were leaving the protection of the walls now that the chase was over. They were muttering to each other and glaring at him.

"I'm sorry about the disturbance. Sit down, please," Quick told them. "We'll get to you as soon as we can."

"Where are you taking him?" asked Chang.

"One of the examination rooms, I suppose."

"They're full up," Chang warned her. "This idiot chose a busy time to go crazy on us."

Quick gave Chang a pained look, and he walked away looking a little sheepish.

"Crazy? You think I'm crazy? You don't know crazy until you've seen the Time Lords on the last day of the Time War, like I have," the Doctor bellowed after Chang. Then, to Quick's alarm, he gasped and doubled over in pain. As the howl of loneliness once again tore through her mind, the Doctor's manic but cheery composure shattered and he started ranting. "Master! I know you were scared, but why did you have to run away when the Dalek Emperor took control of the Cruciform? You were our last and only hope - the perfect warrior! The Time Lords resurrected you to save us. You didn't even stay long enough to see how corrupted they became. Now they're dead and you're dead, Gallifrey's gone, and I'm all alone!" Tears started to streak his face.

Alarmed, Quick dabbed at his tears with an unused tissue she fished out of her pocket. The people in the waiting room were staring at the Doctor in a blank, dehumanising way, as if he were something particularly interesting on reality TV. She couldn't possibly examine him here.

"I'll take you to my office, Doctor. You're not alone," she said.