II
Having promised her mother that she would call someone, Diane got on the phone with a friend from college, who had taken one too many magic mushrooms in their younger days, and had all sorts of non-traditional ideas about life in the universe. She figured if anyone she knew would have a resource for this sort of thing, it would be her.
Thus she obtained the phone number of Destiny Melodia, a local psychic, and the following day, she found herself in her mother's house, watching Miss Melodia meditate on the living room rug.
The round, pretty, showy, middle-aged black woman spoke with what sounded like a muddled Jamaican/Nigerian/Louisiana Creole accent, when she tutted and boasted and counselled about her psychic abilities in the car on the way between Diane's house and her mother's.
But after a minute or two on the floor, she looked up at Diane, with complete seriousness in her eyes. With a stone-sobre, totally sane, local accent, she said, "There is something disturbing this house. All is not well. Do not allow your mother back here. In fact, I'm not even sure we should be here."
Melodia's words chilled Diane to the bone. She did not believe in psychics, but something about this house had made the audacious lady drop the psychic dog-and-pony-show, and become subdued.
"What do you mean something is disturbing this house?" Diane asked.
Melodia closed her eyes and appeared to be trying to concentrate. She seemed to try and get comfortable, wiggling her hips a bit to settle into a better position, and said with a deep scowl, "Some activity has descended upon this space."
"Do you mean like a ghost?"
"It's not a presence, it is activity.I don't know how else to describe it. And anyway, it doesn't feel like a human disturbance. It feels like… crashing. Like… two parts of the universe trying to occupy the same space at the same time… no, that's not quite it…"
Diane stared at her, while she continued to muse. She was torn between the creepiness and seeming earnestness of Melodia's words and manner, and the fact that her words sounded completely bonkers.
"Well, thank you for your time…"
Within two minutes, they were closing the garage door, walking down the driveway back to the car that would return them to Diane's house.
Destiny Melodia displayed a total lack of ability to describe what she'd felt in the house, her manner remained restrained on the car trip and after, as though she herself were as disturbed as Diane's mother's house. All pretence of an accent, or a particularly esoteric personality, was gone. Was this bit all part of the act?
Though tellingly, Miss Melodia did not accept payment.
"I am not the one to help you," she said frankly to Diane as she pushed the check back across the breakfast bar. The two of them, and Lillian, sat and had tea. "What you need is a physicist. Someone who knows about dimensions and fields of energy and things like that."
"Wow. You think?" asked Diane
"What does that even mean?" Lillian wondered aloud.
"Also, here's an idea: I know a Dr. Cheryl Cohen at the University of Denver," Melodia suggested. "She's a former professor of mine. She works for the theology school, but her background is in secular studies of comparative religion. Her mind is totally open to…phenomena, shall we say, and maybe she can tell you something, that I can't. Something… historical, or psychological, or archetypal. Meta-physical. Supernatural. I don't know."
Diane jotted down the name Cheryl Cohen on a Post-It, and mused that perhaps she'd call tomorrow.
"Perhaps?" asked her mother, loudly. "What's this perhaps?"
Diane was out front, the following afternoon, weeding her mother's yard when a taxi cab pulled up and Dr. Cheryl Cohen climbed out. She gave the driver a bill, and said "Keep the change," and the car sped off.
Dr. Cohen was about five feet tall, with curly grey hair, an eggplant-coloured silk top and a chunky necklace with Egyptian symbols around her neck. She had an easy, sardonic smile and a peppy walk.
"Hi!" Diane said, wiping her hands on her jeans. "Thanks so much for coming."
"No problem," said Dr. Cohen. "I do a lot of these sorts of things."
"You do?"
"Yeah," shrugged the professor. "People think they have a ghost or something… who you gonna call?" She asked the question with a wink.
Diane chuckled, because she'd wondered the same thing.
"Well, anyway, thanks."
"I just hope I can be of some help."
They walked up the driveway and into the house through the garage.
"Now, what's the significance of the postman?" asked Dr. Cohen.
"Significance? I don't know how to answer that. He was our postman for years, from the time we moved here, until after I'd gone off and got married. Eventually he retired, but my parents sort of kept in touch with him. He died in '79."
"A friend who brings things to the family," said Cohen, thinking. "Okay. Did he and your mother have anything in particular in common? Something they used to talk about?"
"Not that I can think of," Diane answered. "They both voted for Lyndon Johnson in '64, but didn't everyone? He used to like the banana bread my mother made for him at Christmas and Easter."
"Johnson… baked goods…What else do you know about him?"
"Erm," Diane said, thinking hard. "I think he never married, never had any children. He was from Florida."
"Okay, so a single man from a sunny place. A person might ascribe to him a certain air of freedom than they might to someone, from say, Minnesota, with a wife and five kids."
"Wait, are you thinking that my mother hallucinated Mr. McPhail, based on his… what, his role in her life? The role he plays in her brain, in her memories?"
"I think there's a good chance," said Cohen. "Oftentimes in these cases, the manifestation is all in the subject's mind, and we find that there's a symbology involved. Something archetypal or personally significant – equally likely. It's like a waking dream. Only, it's more violent on the psyche because…"
Dr. Cohen was interrupted by a knock at the front door. Diane was interested in what the professor was saying, and she found herself irritatedly saying, "Hold that thought," as she went for the doorknob. She unlatched the chain, disengaged the locks and opened the door.
And there, clear as you like, was George McPhail, in living colour.
Diane gasped hard.
The postman gave two blinks when he saw Diane. "Oh, hello, ma'am," he said. "I've got a package for Mrs. Handler. Is she here?"
Diane's jaw hit the floor, and she began to hyperventilate.
"It's all right," said Mr. McPhail. "I'll try again tomorrow."
"Oh… oh… oh my God!" she spat. Her heart raced, and she instinctively stumbled backwards.
McPhail gave a mild exclamation, and lurched forward to try and help her, and Dr. Cohen did the same. They helped her to the sofa, where she continued to stare at the postman with utter disbelief.
"I'm sorry, have I done something?" he asked. He looked askance at Dr. Cohen.
"No, she's just not feeling very well today," the professor said calmly. "
"Can I do anything? Call an ambulance?" he asked.
Cohen suggested that maybe she should just let her friend rest with her feet up, and see what happens. Mr. McPhail agreed that this was best, and then he bade them good day, and left.
Cohen shut the door behind him, and locked it, engaging the chain once more.
"That was Mr. McPhail, I take it."
Diane couldn't speak. She just nodded.
"You're sure he's dead?"
Diane nodded.
"Okay, so… yeah, that's weird."
Diane nodded again.
"I might be out of my depth here," said Cohen. "I know of an organisation I can call on your behalf. I have an ex in New York who works for them."
By three-thirty the following day, Lillian Handler's living room was filled with officers from UNIT, though Lillian herself was nowhere near it. The place was stifling. Diane stepped toward the window on the right-hand side of the front door and opened the curtains, then slid open the window. She then did likewise with the same-sized window on the other side of the door. She smiled, took a deep breath, and felt much better.
One large, broad-shouldered man, Colonel Compton, seemed to be overseeing the operation while others moved through the space with instruments meant to measure… God knew what.
"So, you were married to Dr. Cohen?" Diane asked Compton.
He smiled. "No. We just dated for a couple of years. She's a firecracker."
"I could see that about her," Diane nodded. "How'd you meet?
"At a symposium on the supernatural," said Compton. "Led by this weirdo out of Philadelphia. Turned out to be total bunk, but at least I got a lifelong friend out of the deal. How is Cheryl?"
"Oh, I've only met her once," said Diane. "Yesterday. But she seemed all right. So nice of her to put me in touch with you."
"She likes to be of help. I'm having coffee with her this evening."
"That'll be nice," Diane commented. Then she eyed the officers in the living room with their machines and probes. "What exactly do those things do?"
"They check for traces of alien activity," he said.
"You folks think this might be extraterrestrial in nature?"
"Well, we don't know, but it's kind of what we do."
That was when the tall, disheveled British man with the glasses came out from one of the bedrooms. She had noticed him before, and the fact that he didn't wear a uniform like the others. He had gone in there a few minutes before, looking vexed, and shut the door. He was wearing grey trousers and a grey, orange and green broadly-striped sweater with a collared shirt underneath. As he emerged, he slipped his index finger behind his crooked spectacles and rubbed his eye.
Another Brit, a stouter black man of more average height and of a more generally put-together air, approached him. "Well?"
"He's coming," said the taller man.
"Thank Heaven," said the second man.
"Who are those guys?" asked Diane.
"Gentlemen," the broad man called out. "Please come meet someone."
The two non-uniformed personnel crossed the living room.
"This is Diane Wesson, she's the daughter of the owner of the house," said Colonel Compton. "Mrs. Wesson, this is Dr. Lawrence Fortis, and Dr. Abel Enger. Both of them are physicists with UNIT, in London."
Diane shook hands with both of them. "I'm glad you're here. The, erm… clairvoyant-type-person I hired suggested I needed a physicist, not a psychic. I thought that was curious."
"What's curious is that she knew that," said Fortis. "She sensed something?"
"Yes," Diane said. "It disturbed her. It was something strong… she wouldn't even accept payment."
The two physicists looked at each other in surprise. "Well, Mrs. Wesson, what we have found is…"
"Alien?" she asked, excitedly.
"Actually no," Dr. Enger answered. "Our instruments have not picked up any alien interference. What we have found is a time anomaly."
"Excuse me?" she asked.
Fortis sighed audibly. "A time anomaly," he said. "Time, for lack of a better way to put it, has a mind of its own. It acts almost of its own free will."
"It acts?"
"Yes."
"Are you serious with this?"
"Quite," said Enger. "Something is happening here… with time. We don't know what. The two of us are not at all qualified to work that out."
"Once again, I feel bloody helpless in the face of intangible energy with which I have no idea what to do. With which I wouldn't even have the first idea of how to begin doing something," Fortis complained, almost with a bitter laugh.
"So, we've called in a specialist," Dr. Enger told Diane, while patting his colleague comfortingly on the shoulder. "He knows about this stuff."
"He knows about… time," Diane said flatly. "And how it… acts."
"Yes," Fortis agreed. "You think we're barmy, I can see that, but trust me – you ain't seen nothing yet. When the Doctor gets here, things will get a right sight weirder. I know this from experience."
"Has this been approved by Colonel Mace?" asked Colonel Compton. "I don't want to step on any toes, division-wise."
"It's fine," Enger assured him. "The Doctor is on the payroll. Not that anyone actually pays him."
That's when they heard the grinding gears, the squiggly sounds of time-travel growing louder upon the air.
"What in God's name is that?" asked Diane, covering her ears.
"That is the sound of… well, the universe's largest time anomaly, arriving here to help with a time anomaly," Fortis explained with a bemused smirk.
He pushed past his conversation-mates, and attempted to follow the sound. He turned right and found the back door, which opened up in the dining room. The TARDIS was materialising on the other side of Lillian Handler's backyard.
Fortis slid the door open and stepped outside, waiting for the Doctor (and probably Martha Jones) to emerge. Within ten seconds, they did.
"Jesus, what took you so long?" he joked.
"There was a jam-up on the motorway," Martha answered, shrugging. "Had to take the long way round."
He smiled. "Thanks for coming."
"No problem," the Doctor said, shaking Fortis' hand. "Hope we can help."
Fortis led them inside. Martha first, followed by the Doctor.
"Does Tish know you're in the States?" asked Martha.
"Yeah," Larry answered. "But..."
Immediately upon stepping foot in the home, the Doctor grabbed the doorjamb for leverage. He groaned, then cursed.
Martha turned, to find him slightly bent, and pressing his palm to his stomach.
"What?" she asked. "What's wrong?" She moved toward him, scowling with concern.
He stepped backward, out onto the back porch, and seemed to shake off whatever had come over him.
"Whoa," he said, running his eyes over the bricks and mortar and roofing, with something like fear. "This is going to be interesting."
"Why? What's happened?" Martha asked.
"Time Lord gut thing," he said. "This house has something fairly massive converging on it."
"Yeah, it made our Weirdness Detector go haywire," said Fortis.
"What the hell is a Weirdness Detector?" Martha wondered aloud.
"It detects weirdness, obviously," the Doctor told her, cheekily, and she gave him a dirty look. "My guess is that it's some sort energy or wavelength-measuring tool, of alien origin, and the good men and women at UNIT are not always sure what exactly it's detecting when it goes ding."
"Exactly," said Fortis. "We don't know everything it does, and don't know what else to call it. Anyway, Doctor, are you doing to be okay? I mean, if you can't come in the house because your guts are on fire, that might be a problem."
"I can come in, I just have to… brace myself."
"Are you going to be sick?" Dr. Jones wondered.
"Maybe. I'm going to try not to."
"Do you have something you can take for nausea?"
"No," he said, grasping the doorjamb again. He set one foot inside the house, and then the other, very slowly. He stood just inside the dining room, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. "The only way to stave this off is… well, inner equilibrium."
"Can I do anything?" she asked, taking his hand, studying him with worry in her eyes.
"Just stand by," he said. "An airsick bag might not hurt."
"Okay," she said. "I'll be right back. With that, she ran out the door and disappeared inside the TARDIS."
"When you're ready, Doctor, I'll introduce you to the major players inside."
"Okay," said the Time Lord, opening his eyes. For the first time, he noticed uniformed UNIT officers milling about the smallish house. "Is this really necessary?"
"What?"
"All the uniforms. Can we reduce this to essential personnel only?"
"You've got it," Fortis said. He moved toward Colonel Compton, and said, "Sir, the Doctor is requesting that all non-essential personnel be dismissed."
"Well, not entirely," said the Doctor, joining him, carefully at the Colonel's side. "I just need them to wait outside, maybe."
Compton called out, "You heard the man! Everyone, take a breather. Get all those beepy things out of here, as well!"
The UNIT officers all made their way to the garage door. Since the disturbance seemed to be somewhat focused on the front door, Diane and Compton had agreed that it should not be used, for the time being.
When the shuffling died down, Larry Fortis said, "Mrs. Wesson, Colonel Compton, this is the Doctor. His companion, Dr. Martha Jones, is outside taking care of a little task. Dr. Enger, I believe you already have met this man?"
"Yes," said Enger, shaking the Doctor's hand. "Very nice to see you again."
"Whew," Diane sighed. "Lots of doctors."
"Ah, well," the Doctor said. "The two of them, they're Ph.D.s, Martha's an M.D. and me, I'm just the Doctor. It's nice to meet you by the way."
Diane reached out to take and shake the hand he had offered her. "Just the Doctor?"
"Yes," he replied. "Is this your home?"
"It's my mother's home. I grew up here."
"And where is your mother?"
"At my house, about two miles from here, refusing to re-enter until we can guarantee that the 'ghost' is gone."
"The ghost?" asked the Doctor with wide eyes. "There's a ghost?"
In detail, Diane recounted the story from the time she had received the call from her frantic mother on Tuesday afternoon, including having seen the "ghost" herself, right up until the last few moments before the Doctor's arrival. Meanwhile, Martha had turned up with a couple of airsick bags, and was listening, catching up.
"The psychic told you that she felt crashing happening in this space?"
"Yes," Diane confirmed. "She said something had descended upon it, but it wasn't a human presence. It was like parts of the universe trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Then she took it back, and said that wasn't quite it."
"That's one seriously astute psychic," the Doctor told her, eyes widened again. "She was very, very close to the truth."
"That's exactly what we thought," Enger chimed in.
"So, your mother's convinced that the mail carrier is a ghost," Martha said. "But the Doctor is saying there's a wicked time anomaly here. Okay – I'm starting to see where this might go."
Diane looked at the two of them in disbelief. "Are you talking about time travel?"
"Possibly," the Doctor said, absently. "Tell me about the mailman, Mr. McPhail, is it?"
"What about him?"
"What does he mean to your family? To your mother, or you?"
"Dr. Cohen already asked this," Diane said, exasperated. "She thought it might be some kind of psychological phenomenon."
"No, no," the Doctor lulled. "I don't think that. I'm fairly certain McPhail was not an hallucination. I'm just trying to determine why he's fixated on this house."
Diane shrugged, and as she talked, the Doctor commanded the room by pacing back and forth in it.
"He was our mail carrier," Diane explained. "For years. He came every day just past noon, including Saturdays. My mother would sometimes make it a point to have the door on the latch when he came, so he could stick his head in and say hi. I think a few times, she invited him in for coffee."
"Hm, okay. Did you know him?"
"Sort of. I know of him. And I saw him on Saturdays. If I was out front helping in the garden, or playing hopscotch with my sister, I'd see him. I mostly knew what I knew about him because my mother talked about him."
"Nice bloke, then."
"I suppose so. What does any of this have to do with his ghost?"
"I dunno yet, Mrs. Wesson," the Doctor said. "But some kind of time convergence is leading Mr. McPhail back to this house on a repeated basis, so knowing his relationship to the house and the folks who lived here might… by the way, you said you saw him yesterday?"
"Yes, I did. That's how I know my mother isn't nuts. That's the only reason I'd have called in the National Guard and physicists from across the sea!"
"We're not the National Guard, Mrs. Wesson," said Colonel Compton.
"Whatever," she said with a wave of her hand. "The point stands."
"What time was that?" asked the Doctor.
"Just after noon," Diane said. She seemed to realise something only then, for the first time. "That's what time he would come by, back when he was alive!"
"Mm," the Doctor agreed. "What about the day before that? Did he come just after noon?"
"No," she realised. "I was here with Miss Melodia during that time, and nothing special happened. Except she got freaked out."
"And the day before that?"
"That's the day that my mother saw him," she said. "Just after noon!"
"And today?"
"No," she said. "Nothing today."
"Okay, so, Mr. McPhail is somehow involved in something that appears to be on a two-day cycle," the Doctor announced, still pacing, now studying the room, looking at the walls, making mental notes of what he could see. "He turns up every other day just after noon."
"Yeah. What does that mean?" Diane asked excitedly.
"I'm not sure," he said. "But it does beg the question, what is he doing on the day in-between?"
"What is he doing? What's that supposed to mean?"
He stopped pacing then, about six feet from the window to the left of the front door. He turned and took a good long look out the window, and he appeared to be deep in thought.
Then he resumed his pace, and after walking the length of the room one-and-a-half more times, he repeated the action in front of the window on the right.
Compton, Fortis, Enger and Wesson only saw a man pacing. Dr. Jones could see he'd got the scent of something.
"What is it, Doctor?" she asked.
He took her hand and pulled her forward. "Excuse us, gentlemen, Mrs. Wesson. I'm going to need a moment to confer with my companion."
He led her as close to the right-hand window as possible. There was a brown canister-swivel armchair and an end table in the way, but they were able to have an unobstructed view out the window.
"Look across the street," he whispered. "What do you see?"
Martha said, "Red brick house, big mint-green car in the driveway. Why?"
"Big mint-green car," he said. "Classic car. A 1963 Ford Fairlane Town Sedan."
"Okay," she said, nodding. "Now you might as well be speaking Chinese."
"It's in pretty good shape, don't you think?"
"Sure."
"But, you can tell it's been driven a lot over the past forty-five years. New hubcaps, the bumper's been dented a few times. The paint has gone matte over most of the car, except look at the front fender on the driver's side. It's shiny. It's been replaced."
"Yeah. Okay."
"And that red brick house," he continued. "What about it? What else do you see? Railings? Curtains? Vegetation?"
"I see yellow curtains in the front window," she answered, still whispering. "Red geraniums in a pot on the front porch, some sort of vine growing in the garden box."
"Good."
"Thank you," she said. "Are you going to tell me what this is about."
"Come here," he whispered, pulling her by the hand to the opposite window. "Look across the street. What do you see now?"
"Red brick house, big mint-green car in the… ohhhh!"
"Yeah."
"What the hell?" she asked, louder than he would have liked.
"Shh," he lulled. "What do you make of the car?"
"It's brand new, clearly. Shiny paint all over, no nicks on the bumper, the hubcaps are different…"
"…original. What else?"
"The curtains in the front window are printed orange and white. And the flower pot has something purple in it!"
"Mm-hm."
"Oh my God!" she hissed.
"The window on the right is looking into 2008. The one on the left is looking into some other time."
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