Chapter 3
The two recently-whisked travellers looked at each other, both harrowed and confused.
"That couldn't have been real," the Doctor said, looking about at the fabulous, multi-cultural Chicago afternoon, squinting against the sun.
"How could you tell?" she wanted to know. "Is this real?"
"This is real," he told her. "There's the TARDIS, there. But that business with the Red Coats and Andrew Jackson... it felt... out of time somehow. And the personal characteristics of almost everyone involved were exaggerated. It felt removed from this reality, or..."
Suddenly, Martha felt quite nauseated. She stumbled to the nearest bin and bent over, but acute as the feeling had been, it passed. Then it welled up again, and passed.
"Well, it appears I'm getting used to this," she commented, standing up straight.
At this, they both came to something of a realisation: this had happened to them before! This, being compressed and then forcibly whisked off to some other locale, but it had never been quite like this in the past. Normally, there was a lot of bravado involved and...
"Well, folks, hope you enjoyed our own Johnny Horton!" said the voice of the emcee as the song died down.
"Horton?" asked Martha.
"Yeah, how 'bout that," the Doctor muttered, almost without moving his mouth.
"And now, we hop across the Atlantic to Spain... but wait! There's more! Today is all about being international, so though the song is in Spanish, the performer is, in fact, Greek! Mario Frangoulis sings for you..." A soft flute played in the background as the emcee spoke.
But the introduction was interrupted once again by a feeling of being squashed, stretched out like a string and then snapped like an elastic band into some other place.
A hallway, poorly lit. The world appeared to be painted in shades of grey and light blue and lavender. Martha and the Doctor found themselves standing side-by-side, facing a door.
Someone or something was banging from the inside. The sound started out slow, soft, but over the next twenty seconds, it became loud and furious.
Without speaking, they both walked forward toward the door. They each took a deep breath, the Doctor motioned for quiet, and he reached out and stealthily turned the knob and swung the door open, not too far, but not just a crack either.
Within a couple of seconds they registered all of the sights and sounds coming at them through the dim light.
There was man, lying on a bed. Sheets were dishevelled and strewn everywhere - on the bed and on the floor. The beautifully-carved headboard of the four-poster bed was what they had been hearing, as it banged increasingly quickly against the wall. The reason was a woman with thick dark hair, upright, straddling him, grasping the headboard and bounding up and down, back and forth, for all she was worth.
With a gasp, the Doctor pulled back and shut the door, still managing not to make a sound. After a few seconds, they heard the urgent, high-pitched sounds coming from inside the room, often associated with headboard-banging activity. Martha and the Doctor both burst out giggling, then stumbled quietly down the hall, so as not to be heard.
They found that they were in a medium-sized house, though opulently furnished, one floor, and judging from the décor in the parlour, it was perhaps 1920. The Doctor took a peek through the curtains, and muttered, "It's a beach house. Hm - looks like a storm is gathering."
A blonde woman, with her hair pulled back so tightly into a bun that Martha wondered if she could shut her eyes, stuck her head out through what turned out to be the kitchen door. "There you are! You'd better get this to La Señorita. It's nearly six o'clock."
Martha looked about, to see who the blonde was talking to, but there was no one, save for her and the Doctor.
"Are you talking to me?" Martha asked.
"No, I'm talking to the Ana's other favourite handmaid," the blonde said, rolling her eyes. She reached back into the kitchen, never shutting the door, and came back out with a tray, handing it to Martha. "Here you go."
"Er, okay," said Martha, looking over the tray. It contained an open French roll with preserves, a pot of tea and a cup, some fresh fruit and a small slice of ham. "Breakfast. Ana's room. The one at the end of the hall." She was waiting to see if the blonde would correct her.
The blonde just looked at her with tedium, and nodded. "Stop stalling. If you don't get in there quick, the two of them are going to fuck themselves into a stupor and will lose track of time again, and then Señor Colerro will catch that boy in the house again, and there will be shooting, and then an inquest, and they'll want to question me... I just don't have to stomach for it. So go."
Martha looked at the Doctor with questioning eyes, and he nodded subtly, letting her know she should probably just go with the flow, to see where it would take them. She walked past him, heading back down the hall to the room where the loud lovers were trying, though not very hard, not to be caught.
"And you," the blonde said to the Doctor. "You'd better get out of here before Señor sees you. What are you doing here at this hour anyway?"
"Erm..." he began, nervously fondling the hair on the back of his head. With wide eyes, and a surprised mouth, he looked at Martha, then back at the blonde.
"Oh," the blonde sighed. "Enough said. Madre de Díos, is everyone in this house having a backstairs affair?" She went back into the kitchen, still muttering to herself.
"Where are you going to go?" asked Martha.
He shrugged. "No idea. I'll catch up with you later, let you know if I work out... anything."
Martha nodded, and went back down the hall. She knocked on the door at the end, noting that there was currently no noise. "Señorita, it's breakfast."
"Thank you, Martha, come on in," the girl's voice said from inside, much to Martha's surprise.
Martha struggled to turn the knob with both hands full, and went into the room. The girl, Ana, was already standing, pulling a transparent white lace robe over her otherwise naked body. The young man chose this moment to stand up and reveal himself with utterly no shame. Martha averted her eyes and set the tray down on the desk on her right.
"So, thank you for being on-time again," said Ana. "We didn't realise what time it was."
"Well, apparently, that's what I'm here for."
"And why did you call me Señorita just now?"
"Erm... I..."
"It's okay. There's no need to keep up appearances for Miguel. He knows you're my best friend," Ana said. "He doesn't mind. He would never judge."
Ana fluttered round the bed and threw her arms around Miguel's neck and gave him a good snog that Martha felt she really shouldn't be seeing.
"Well, that would be a bit on the hypocritical side, wouldn't it?" Miguel said to Ana as soon as they finished their liplock.
"Obviously," she said.
The lovers were engrossed in one another for the moment, and Martha took the opportunity to look them over. Obviously, Ana's family was one of some repute, with at least two "staff" in their beach house. Ana's father was not keen on Miguel, and had clearly threatened his life if he ever came near the daughter again... though it didn't seem like much of a well-kept secret that Ana and Miguel were still shagging their brains out, in spite of it all. The couple relied on Ana's best friend, who was also her "favourite handmaid" to wake them in time to get Miguel out of the house before Ana's father found him there, and murdered him.
And Martha thought she knew why. Looking him over as well, she noted that his hair was curly and hung long enough to cover his ears and get in his eyes, and along with an off-white linen tunic, he was wearing a brown pair of trousers that, in the twenty-first century, would have been called "cargo" trousers. They were dirty, and various metal implements stuck out of the numerous pockets. Miguel was a lowly fisherman - not the sort of boy that a semi-wealthy man in 1920 would want his daughter canoodling with.
"Querido," said Ana, pulling her lips away reluctantly. "You'd better go. I'll meet you at the dock in thirty minutes."
"Okay, then. Thanks, Martha," Miguel said, opening the bedroom window. He climbed through it, falling to the ground below, which, Martha guessed, was only about six feet. Ana tossed his black canvas jacket out after him, blew a kiss, and shut the window.
"What's at the dock?" Martha asked, knowing it probably sounded daft.
"Indeed, indeed," Ana said. "There is nothing there for me. I just like to see him off every day, is that so wrong? Besides, you're one to talk!"
The Doctor slipped out of the house through the back door, as he had been told to do by the uptight blonde in the kitchen. Apparently, Martha was a known servant in the household, the daughter's favourite (perhaps her only friend), and he himself was someone not normally allowed on the premises. The blonde seemed to know him, but didn't like him much. This was proof enough to him that this scenario was not right, and not entirely real - for them to fall into some situation where they were already known and doing some sort of role-play, it was fairly irregular. He sort of knew what was causing it now, ever since hearing the emcee in the park back in Chicago, but there were still about a thousand unanswered questions.
He looked up at the sky, then out at the water - he had been right a little while ago when he'd commented to Martha that there was a storm gathering. The clouds were threatening to obscure the sun, just now beginning to peek over the horizon, but really, it was the angry sea that gave it away. The tide was practically a wall of white, the waves high and foamy, and breaking well past where reasonable breakers normally lie. The sea seemed impatient somehow.
And in the din of the waves crashing upon the shore, the Doctor thought he heard something, some distant whisper. Though, he couldn't be sure that he was hearing it, rather than feeling it, or receiving telepathic messages from the universe.
It was a message of possession, possessiveness. "Mine, mine," it was saying. "You are unworthy of such a treasure, and shall pay."
It gave the Doctor a chill. It was not a voice, exactly, and whatever it was, it didn't necessarily intend the message for him. It was almost a living thought that wafted upon the air...
"Oye, wait up!" he heard from behind. He stopped and turned.
Jogging toward him, with his shoes and jacket in hand, was a man with curly hair blasting off as he ran. As he came to a stop beside the Doctor, and his hair fell in his face. He tossed his shoes to the sand, and began to pull on his jacket.
"Hi," said the Doctor. If he was not mistaken, this was the young man he had seen very briefly, beneath the very headboard-savvy girl whose name seemed to be Ana. Now that he was dressed, the Doctor could clearly see he was a fisherman. No wonder the girl's father didn't like him.
And he himself was not liked on the property because he was a friend of the fisherman's. And now, embroiled in a tryst with Martha... well, at least that part was true.
"Hi, yourself," the man said. He planted his bum in the sand next, and began putting on his shoes. "So... do you have anything you want to tell me?"
"Like what?"
"You're meandering about these parts awfully early." He was smirking up at the Doctor.
"Yeah, well, you know..."
"I do know! Things are going well for you, it would seem," He got to his feet and slapped the Doctor on the back. "You dog!"
"Oh. That. Yeah."
The two men began walking again, in the same direction the Doctor had been going.
"So what was it like?" the man asked, after a long pause.
"What was what like?"
"Oh, come on! Being with Martha! I mean, you're just leaving now too, yeah? Were you two at it all night, or did you collapse from exhaustion and lose track of the time?"
"Erm, the first one."
The fisherman cackled with glee, and again, slapped the Doctor on the back. "That's amazing! I had a feeling she'd be a firecracker!"
"That, she is," the Doctor replied with a smile, in spite of himself.
"So is my Ana. Now, we collapsed into a heap around midnight," the man informed him. "But she woke me up about an hour ago and wanted to have another go-round."
"Yes, we heard you," the Doctor reported flatly.
The man laughed. "Sorry, amigo. That girl, she just can't get enough Miguel, you know?"
Just then, the Doctor felt that frisson once more, that non-voice, that message upon the wind. "You vulgar fool. You are unworthy!"
"Did you hear that?" the Doctor asked, stopping in his tracks.
"Hear what?" the fisherman asked, listening for what, he did not know.
The Doctor stood still and tried to hear once more, but the sound, the thought, the message, had gone.
"Never mind."