THE GIRL
Armed with a permanent marker, wallpaper and some glue, our heroes went underground once more to Canada Water station, and then made the jaunt over to Wester Drumlins. Once more, they entered the grounds of the old house from the back, but when they arrived, the scene was completely different. The garden was absolutely swarmed with people, seemingly from all walks of life. Children, adults, the elderly. Black, white, Asian. English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, Lingala-speaking. There must have been two hundred people milling about the grounds of Wester Drumlins.
And presiding over the crowd were, from the Doctor and Martha's vantage point, two stone angels, weeping and unmoving. The Doctor smiled at Martha, and she rolled her eyes in response. "I can't believe you did this."
"It's going to work, trust me."
They were blindsided by a nun, maybe fifty years old, and spongy. "Hello, Mr. Smith," she said.
What is it with us and nuns? Martha asked herself.
"Hello, sister," the Doctor said, shaking her hand. "This is Martha, my er... wife."
"Hello, Martha," the kindly lady said. She smiled warmly at Martha, then said, "We have much to thank your husband for."
"So I've heard," Martha said to her, with barely-contained irritation.
She looked around the garden. People with rosaries around their hands were kneeling at the feet of the Weeping Angels, some of them praying silently, some sobbing openly. She saw a group kneeling similarly near the house, a priest standing by, preaching the Gospel of Matthew. She looked up at the house, and an angel stood in the window, looking down upon the prey that it could not yet access. The fourth angel was standing stoically near the opposite side of the grounds, near the sculpture. All around, people were taking photographs, praying, crying, preaching, trying to touch the angels.
"Hello sister," a woman said, sidling up to where the Doctor, Martha and the nun stood.
"Good afternoon, Madeline," the nun said. "I'm so glad to see you here."
Extracting a rosary from her pocket, the woman known as Madeline asked, "Now tell me, what exactly happened?"
"Well," the nun said, smiling brightly. "This is the man who brought us the news. John Smith, meet Madeline Pritchard."
The Doctor and Ms. Pritchard exchanged greetings.
"Mr. Smith told us that he was here, exploring this old house for a photography spread, and he witnessed the angels weeping. Not just hiding their faces, as you can see... right, Mr. Smith?"
The Doctor nodded emphatically. "That's right. I was up close with them and they were actually weeping tears! Can you imagine that! Real tears!"
Madeline and the nun both crossed themselves. "Well it must be a sign from God, sister!"
"Indeed, Madeline."
Martha looked around once more. "Boy, news sure travels fast."
"Well, I felt it was my duty to inform the Diocese. The faithful are never out of touch with their parish. Will you please excuse me? I've just seen some parishioners whom I must greet." The little nun hurried away.
Martha shook her head in disbelief and stared at the Doctor. "Toying with people's deepest beliefs? For shame!"
He sighed, hands in pockets, rolling back on heels. "It's in the interest of saving the universe, all right? How else was I going to get two hundred people to come and stare at stone? Come on, let's get this done before this lot gets tired and goes home."
The two of them snuck into the house through a side entrance which was not covered by angels and/or their followers. They found the front parlour with its chandelier still intact, and its wall depressingly bare.
The Doctor extracted Sally Sparrow's narrative from his pocket and asked Martha to read to him exactly what he was supposed to write on the wall. It took all of perhaps five minutes, what with re-tracing to make the thin Sharpie lines legible. Then they set about adhering the wallpaper over the message. This message would be uncovered thirty-eight years from now, and the girl who finds it will set a course of events in motion that would bring them back to their time travel vehicle. Martha still had trouble getting her mind around the abstractness coupled with the concreteness of time travel and its cause-to-effect properties, but it was exciting all the same. She supposed that someday, she would understand how it all worked out, what with Sally's obsessively-assembled packet and the out-of-order fashion in which she and the Doctor had become privy to the information, but at the moment, it just made her brain hurt. At the moment, she would just stick to wallpapering.
When finished, both of them took a few steps backward to take stock of the job they had done. They stared at the blue paisley wall, and both sighed. Finally the Doctor asked, "Is it wrong that I'm aroused by this?"
"I was just thinking the same thing," she said, looking sideways at him, smiling impishly.
They might have taken this opportunity to get distracted again, but they heard the sound of children screeching, and both of their eyes were drawn to the folks outside, still milling about the Weeping Angels. Too dangerous here anyhow.
When they went back outside, it was over an hour later, and the crowd had thinned considerably. The Doctor wasn't surprised. It hadn't been a statue of the Virgin crying blood, just some run-of-the-mill stone angels and their run-of-the-mill tears. And it hadn't even been true. The impatient had largely left. Perhaps thirty people remained. The Doctor became nervous seeing how few people were actually looking at the statue near the figure-eight sculpture. He realised that as the crowd got smaller, the last few stragglers were in danger of being attacked by the angels. He expressed this fear to Martha.
"So what do we do?" she asked.
"Go outside the grounds and look back in through the trees. Try to get the best vantage point you can of the two angels on this side of the house. Keep looking at them, try not to blink. I'll start trying to get people out of here, and I'll try to draw the other two into your line of sight as well. Give me the psychic paper."
Martha exited through the opening by the sculpture and settled herself between two medium-sized trees. She called out, "Okay," hoping the Doctor could hear.
He could. He began circulating to all the people nearby, flashing his fake badge. "All right folks, there's nothing to see here. I'm from the Agency Committed to Verifying Miracles, and this ain't no miracle, so please move along."
People began to sweep, little by little, off the grounds, tittering about the so-called miracle, complaining about being disgracefully herded like cattle. But as the Doctor, and most everyone else headed toward the exit of Wester Drumlins, Martha stole a clandestine glance at the second floor window. The angel that had been there, looking down, had gone. When she resumed looking at the two nearest, they had moved. Her heart was now in her throat. She had seen this before, but now that she knew what they could do, she found that she was terrified of them.
And then she heard voices.
Four girls came out from the opposite side of the house, apparently having never heard the Doctor or his plea that everyone should move along. They were, Martha guessed, of varying ages between ten and fourteen years old. The tallest girl and the shortest girl were black, the other two were white, one blonde, one ginger. They were giggling and making their way leisurely across the space, from the house, perhaps to the back gate, totally unaware of the danger.
The tallest girl exclaimed, "Oh, I do love old things. I think this house is beautiful." She seemed passionate and emphatic. Her voice, it seemed, had just found its lower pitch and was shaping up to be a lovely, throaty rasp. "I just love everything about it. Especially of the angels."
"Don't tell me you believe in that stuff," the red-haired girl said.
"No, of course not," the tallest girl answered. "But it doesn't mean they're not lovely. They make me feel... melancholy."
"What does that mean?" the littlest girl asked.
"It means my little sister smells," the older answered, her passionate, velvety voice having crawled up a notch in order to ridicule her younger sibling.
"Shut up," the little one spat. "I'm going to tell mummy."
Suddenly, behind them, outside of their peripheral vision, an angel appeared from behind the house. It was clearly after them, but because it was suddenly being observed by Martha, it had stopped in its tracks. It was a strange phenomenon. Clearly, the thing had appeared, clearly it had to have moved. But Martha had never seen it move – suddenly, it was just there. She wanted to shout at the girls, and more than anything, she wanted to run around the fence and usher them hurriedly out of the line of fire, but she knew if she did that, she'd have to take her eyes off that angel, and that the girls wouldn't stand a chance. Instead, she stood patiently and stared at that particular angel, waiting for the girls to make their way off the grounds of Wester Drumlins.
"What are you doing?" the Doctor asked, coming up next to her. "We can leave now."
"There's a group of girls in there. There was an angel after them, but I'm going to stare at it until they leave."
"Okay," he said. "I'll help, just in case you blink." He settled in next to her, staring at the same angel.
When the girls were safely in the line of vision of others on the street, the Doctor and Martha quickly moved away from the grounds. The Doctor sensed something. Martha's gaze was straying into nowhere – she appeared contemplative.
"What's wrong?" he asked, waving a hand in front of her face.
She shuddered a bit and looked at him squarely. "Sorry, I guess I zoned out. It's just... there's something about that tallest girl."
"Like, something hypnotic?"
Martha thought. "Maybe," she said. "More like... never mind. Let's get some lunch."