Nowhere Girl

4

Mattie had only ever been teleported by Rose Tyler before. And one other time, supposedly, when she had been kidnapped by Daleks, but it wasn't an event she remembered an awful lot about. Suffice it to say, being sucked with very little warning through an inter-dimensional portal was significantly more uncomfortable. It felt a bit like her entire body had been stretched and pulled through a tiny cable, and then spat out somewhere eerily inhospitable, and for all she knew that had been exactly what had happened. Less than twelve hours had passed since her care had switched from her parents to their friends, and already she'd seen a gruesome corpse and travelled to a completely different universe. She was counting down the seconds until her brain exploded.

The musty cave transformed itself around them into a dreary cellar, which stank of something awful she couldn't pinpoint. It made her want to vomit – or perhaps that was the teleport. Or maybe the grief, or the worry, or-

"Matts, sweetheart?" she heard Clara ask her, "Are you-" Matilda did vomit, right into a corner. Very little came up since she hadn't really eaten anything since early the previous day, but the retching was visceral and painful. She was dumbly aware of Clara holding her hair back a second later. "Yeah, I know," Clara said quietly, "That was a rough one." Mattie leant against the cold, unpleasant wall, trembling slightly. She suddenly felt tears coming up again.

"Yeah," said the Doctor uneasily, "It's, um… it's not swell here. Sometimes you can't even tell you're in a different universe, but others…? Well."

"It's gonna be alright," Clara cooed to Matilda, rubbing her back. Was that why the Doctor called her 'Coo'? Mattie didn't even know if she believed her. She desperately wanted to go to bed and slip into a dreamless sleep where she could forget about all the tragedies that had befallen her in the last twenty-four hours. Why couldn't she have stayed at home? It wasn't like she offered anything useful, she didn't have any expertise.

She heaved again and heard Clara sigh pitifully.

"Get me your handkerchief," Clara bade the Doctor, who came over, fumbling in the pockets of her jacket. She drew out a hanky, which Clara scoffed slightly at the sight of, "You're such an old man sometimes."

"I was an old man for quite a long time, I may remind you. It's clean, Matts, don't worry. Just… hang onto it for now, yeah?" It was a bizarre handkerchief, embroidered with odd, circular symbols.

"What's the pattern?" she asked quietly, looking at it.

"It's Gallifreyan."

"What's it say?"

"Gesundheit." Matilda sniffed and then wiped the corners of her mouth. "Well, not literally 'gesundheit,' but the same sentiment. Doesn't really translate to English. Or German, relatively speaking. Any Earth-language, in fact."

"This is your first language?" she squinted at all the circles.

"Yeah-huh," said the Doctor, smiling a little, the three of them clustered together in the corner, "I'll teach you it someday, if you want. I'd have loved to teach it to Jenny, but she's got a natural affinity for languages. Doesn't need my help."

"You could teach it to me," Clara said.

"But I don't like you," the Doctor told her curtly. Matilda could have laughed, on any other day. Finally, she began to feel slightly better, less like she was going to throw up. "For your first time crossing into another universe without warning, I'd say you're holding up okay. Considering I can't even remember where I live right now."

"We live in Brighton," Clara told her. The Doctor nodded slowly, trying to comprehend this. Had she really forgotten something like that? Where she lived? Then she clicked her fingers and smiled.

"Brighton. Seaside. Gays. Gotcha. Now, then… this is, uh…" The Doctor stepped away from them into the centre of the room, "Ooh… interesting, interesting…" They were still underground as far as Matilda could tell, in a squalid little cellar full of dirt and books. More strange instruments, and a large circle of metal shapes in the centre of the room. "This is the generator!" Thirteen exclaimed, "Couldn't really see it from where we were because it's buried, but now, it's all out in the open…" It reminded Mattie of a gyroscope because of the strange way the pieces moved. They also looked to be suspended in mid-air, and were still moving, in fact, floating around slowly. Thirteen stooped to look at the large pieces closely. In the centre, all the solid objects were gone, and in their place was an odd, glowing shape – half gaseous, half liquid, hovering – of the strangest colour Matilda had ever seen, so bizarre that she could hardly even comprehend or describe it.

"Did you say it's a kinetic generator?" Clara pressed her.

"Mattie nudging it was all it needed to take us here," she said.

"How does it float like that?" Mattie asked.

The Doctor grinned, "Beats me! I'd guess there's some incongruity between the laws of physics here and the laws of physics the three of us are used to. I doubt they'd be fully reversed, that'd be chaos, but…" She paced around the outside of the 'generator.' "I think if we can get this machine to stop moving, the portal here will close and take us back with it. So long as we're inside. But starting again from this side, would, uh… well. Let's not think about that."

"You mean, we might get trapped?"

"Yeah. This must be what they needed Mrs Ward for," the Doctor theorised, "If they can come through but only when somebody opens the portal from the other side… and Mrs Ward is the most susceptible, grief-stricken widow out there, well. We know from Oc'thubha that they can psychically influence people from their other dimension. Which we should probably name…"

"I've got the best name," Clara said.

"What's that?"

"We'll call it, 'the Unnameable.'"

"That is so Lovecraftian, I hate it. And I hate you. 'The Unnameable' it is."

"How can you name something 'Unnameable'?" Mattie questioned.

"It's a joke," said Clara.

"A joke," she repeated, muttering. But then she thought of something else. "You said loads of people have, like, died tragically here, right?"

"Yeah," Clara nodded.

"So… were they other 'agents'? Of these things?"

"Maybe…" the Doctor said, thinking, "If they were, that brings up a lot of interesting questions. Namely, what is it they want? If they can already influence people to open that portal so they can come through whenever they need to, then what is it they're actually after? If they've had access for so long, why is it only now that they've decided they want to 'take over the world', or whatever?" Nobody had an answer for the question she posed. Mattie hadn't a clue, unless the monsters in this 'Unnameable' (which she still thought was a stupid name) had been waiting specifically for her parents to die. Or Mrs Ward to die.

"Could be an answer in one of these books?" Clara suggested, "It sort of looks like a library down here. A shadow library."

"Shadow library? Do you hear yourself?" the Doctor mocked her, but Clara was already sliding a book off a shelf next to Matilda. Thirteen continued to pace around the large, rotating pieces of the generator. How much would it take to make it stop, she wondered? And did they have any chance of getting home if it did? The book was a dusty, leather tome, which Clara held very awkwardly as she tried to open it. When she did, however, the result wasn't good; Mattie saw her face fall.

"Oh, that's not… hmm…"

"What is it?" Thirteen asked. Mattie didn't ask, instead going directly to stand by Clara's side. The book was written in a completely foreign language, one even stranger than the circular symbols of the Gallifreyan embroidered on the Doctor's old handkerchief. The characters were criss-crossing, spiralling scribbles made up of bizarre characters, words and sentences – if they could even be described as such – knotting together. Even if the patterns were to be 'untangled', as it were, they were still utterly illegible. The Doctor scoffed when she saw this, annoyed. "I hate how this always happens with things from this stupid dimension… can never read the language! Happened on Krop-Tor, happens in Hollowmire, and now it's happening here."

"What's Krop-Tor?" Mattie asked.

"A planet in orbit around a black hole."

"Is it possible to orbit a black hole? Doesn't that defeat the point of a black hole?"

"It does. It had the devil inside it."

"It… what?"

"Well. Turns out it wasn't the devil, it was Oc'thubha's cousin Vh'ozuth. Monster from before the universe, wrote in an incomprehensible language."

"Alright, well, maybe the books won't be totally useless…" Clara said, putting this large tome away and going to ransack the other shelves.

"What d'you mean, Coo?"

"Well – words aren't the only way to convey a story or information… Centuries ago, when everyone was illiterate, people used to learn scripture from pictures. You would have fully-illustrated Bibles. It's just an idea," she said, searching through books as quickly as she could, flicking through their illegible pages and then dropping them in a stack on the floor. "They obviously have some literary sense to compile a library in the first place."

They were desperate, it was plain to see that much. The Doctor had done her bit in working out how they had gotten there, and how to get back, and now Clara was trying to match her by making even further progress. It wasn't panning out for her, however. Matilda did not help search through the books. Instead, she very carefully began to explore the rest of the room, ignoring their fruitless efforts. She wasn't convinced about the logic of keeping books down in a cellar where they'd get mouldy, but also doubted that the creatures living there cared. It was chilly, even colder than it had been at home, on the Isle of Wight – or, were they technically still on the Isle of Wight…? She had no idea. Maybe it was an entire parallel Earth, populated by nightmarish beasts she could only imagine.

She didn't want to imagine them.

She had enough nightmares of her own without adding to them. Maybe she could leave, go wait on the other side and re-open the portal after a certain amount of time, hope that the Doctor and Clara – who were now arguing over whether something was an illustration or just even weirder writing – would be able to just wrap everything up without her. And she could go wait, on her own, out in the woods, which suddenly seemed safe and welcoming. She still had so much to take in, to attempt to understand… It wasn't like she was going to be of much use, anyway. What could she do to help rescue Jack and Rose? Even on a good day, she couldn't…

Mattie spied something out of the corner of her eye. Partially hidden behind one of the shelves and wedged against the muddy wall, it appeared to be an enormous canvas. Forgetting everything she had just learnt from the mishap with the generator about not touching things, Mattie took it upon herself to go drag the thing out from its obscuration. It scraped along the dirty floor, scratching its base, and only once it was fully out and propped up – standing at just over six feet tall and another six feet wide – she was consumed by an incredibly feeling of dread. She nearly staggered into the generator again, potentially ceasing its slow rotations, but she was steadied by the Doctor. They must have heard what she was doing and left the books alone.

"Careful there," the Doctor said, "Don't want you knocking out our way home."

"Oh, sh…" Clara trailed off the swear she had been about to let slip, eyes fixed on the canvas. It was difficult to say if the image could really described as a 'painting.' Whatever the picture was painted with was thick, dark and coagulated, and appeared to be coloured in a way much different to typical paint. She was also not convinced by the material it was printed on, but it had been very hard when she'd moved the thing. It was Clara who approached and carefully ran her fingers across its surface, then she flinched. "It's vellum. Uh, sort of…"

"'Sort of'?" Mattie questioned.

"Well, 'vellum' derives from Latin," Clara explained, "From, uh…"

"Vitulinum," the Doctor supplied.

"Right. Which means 'made of calf.' When monks used to write all the books, the pages were made of vellum, not paper. Like, skin."

"But this is only 'sort of' skin?"

"No. It's only 'sort of' calf skin. It, um… well… there's a belly-button… and up there I can see a, uh, nipple…"

"What!? It's – it's made of people? Of humans!?"

"I think it's painted with blood, too," said Clara. Mattie was seriously regretting touching it, that was far worse than the dead cat. At least she knew Church; whatever corpses this thing was made of were strangers. Or she hoped they were strangers… come to think of it, it would probably worse if she did know their identities. "Half the stuff in the Gutkeled Archive looks like this – when Sally actually lets me look at the Gutkeled Archive…"

"You mean the vampires? They write on skin?"

"Sally and Ravenwood don't," Clara continued, "But old vampire books are all written on skin. They're theatrical like that."

"Hey, Coo," the Doctor said quietly, her eyes widening as she took in the painting, "Could'ya scoot over that way, a little?" she motioned with her hand for Clara to stand aside, which Clara did. "Holy… that's Jack and Rose."

"It's – what?" Mattie had barely even taken in the actual contents of the picture.

"Look – two people, hanging by their wrists from these ropes or chains or whatever," she animatedly approached the picture to point out everything she was talking about, "One of them's wearing a long, blue coat and the other's got this gold, yellowy aura. Suspended over ah, uh… oh." What they were 'suspended over' really defied description, but was an unidentifiable mass covered in hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of tiny fang-like teeth and eyeballs. It was a writhing, sickness-inducing lump of eyes and teeth. The Doctor produced her sonic screwdriver again and began examining the picture closely.

"They only went missing, like, two hours ago – how could this be here already? And painted?"

"Well," the Doctor began, semi-distracted by her scanning, "Like I said, there might be different laws of physics here. As in, the progression of time might be totally different. It could be faster, slower, backwards – totally disconnected and not even linear at all – who's to say these 'agents' are being accessed from here in the same chronological pattern that we see the 'curse' take effect in reality? Determining the age of this thing should help us a lot, though…" They paused and waited until the Doctor drew back the sonic screwdriver, holding it aloft and looking at it like it was going to tell her something. She slumped. "Just what I was afraid of. This picture is at least five-hundred years old."

"Meaning what?" Mattie asked.

"Meaning we're in a prophecy-fulfilling situation," she stepped back and put her hands on her hips.

"What!? So they're going to die!?"

"Die? Where do you get that idea?"

"From the picture!"

"Are they dead in the picture?"

"They're about to be!"

"Exactly. About to be. This picture predicts Jack and Rose being here and suspended by chains over some Elder God hooligan, it doesn't predict anything more," Thirteen explained, "It's not a comic strip. Although, that would be surreal, huh? Vellum comics. Kooky. But, on the bright side, at least we know what we're looking for now: a giant, underground pit with a monster inside it. And I doubt it's too far. Plus – this explain the whole mystery of why they threw a dead cat at your house; must have been to lure Jack and Rose somewhere isolated where they could snatch them."

"Mm… sweetheart," Clara stopped the Doctor when she made to walk off and investigate somewhere else, "Maybe you should go. You and Mattie."

"Maybe – what?"

"Back through the portal. I'll go after Jack and Rose."

"Alone?" The Doctor clearly wasn't happy about this, and as Clara lowered her voice the conversation became more and more private. Mattie felt decidedly like an intruder.

"It'll be safer for her if-"

"Coo, I'm not leaving you alone here," the Doctor whispered to her firmly, "Why would you even bring that up?"

"Because of… because you know why!" Clara hissed.

"I could go back on my own," Matilda interjected. She didn't want them to start fighting, especially not with her in the room.

"We're safer all three of us together," the Doctor continued to argue, "I can't even believe you would suggest – this place is a living nightmare!"

"I can handle it," Clara persisted, "At least stay here, let me go on alone. This room seems safe enough."

"Out of the question! We need each other! We can't work this stuff out with just one of us – I'm not the master, literary occultist and you're not the genius, alien scientist!"

"You know I'm right here," Matilda said loudly, "Don't talk about me like I'm not." They stopped, and Clara let go of the Doctor's arms.

"Matts," she began, trying to be tender and sympathetic, walking over to address her directly, "It's not good for you to be here. It's not good for anyone to be here. It might be traumatic, especially after everything that's happened already. You're the most grief-stricken of all of us, so you're the most susceptible to any influence they might try and exert. It would be wrong of us not to give you a choice of if you want to stay or go."

Matilda was torn. What were her options? Let Clara venture off on her own? Leave and go back to Earth with nobody to watch over her? Stay, and face the monsters of 'the Unnameable'?

What would her parents do? Surely, they'd do whatever it took to help Jack and Rose. They'd do whatever it took to help any of their friends and family. But she also knew that if the situation were different, if she were there with her parents and not with Clara and the Doctor, they wouldn't let her come with them. They would want her to be safe, but would she be safer away from that place altogether, or in the company of Clara and the Doctor, who were in the best position to understand what was going on?

"…If they really trusted you that much to write you in their Wills, then… I'm probably better off with you both looking out for me." Clara obviously did not think this was the right call, but Mattie wasn't sure there was a right call at all. Because of the ambiguity, she didn't argue. It was Mattie's choice to say, and who was to say she wouldn't be able to cope with whatever they saw? With the eyeball-teeth monster? "And they're my godparents. Maybe I'll be able to do something to help them. Anything."

"Okay," Clara relented, "But you do exactly as we say, alright? And some things here, looking at them might… people have been known to be driven to madness. So if I tell you not to look at something, you close your eyes and look away, alright?" Mattie nodded. "You promise?"

"I'm not seven."

"Matilda."

"Yeah, I promise. I'll look away."

"And you," Clara turned to the Doctor, "Be careful. And if we run into any monsters, you let me take the lead. Rose's powers might not work in other dimensions, but mine do." The Doctor said nothing, just crossed her arms and looked grumpy. Unlike with Mattie, Clara didn't make the Doctor promise anything. "Let's go find this monster pit, then. Before Jack and Rose get eaten." Clara seemed more irritated at the intrusion of these cross-dimensional creatures rather than actually worried about Jack and Rose. Was she just that confident in her abilities, or was she putting on a brave face? Maybe it was a little of both…

Nevertheless, they finally deigned to leave the decrepit, muddy cellar, heading upstairs into the ghostly ruins of Knighton Gorges Manor.

It certainly was a nightmare realm they had travelled to, and just being there was making Matilda sick to her stomach. Everything was unpleasantly wet to the touch, strange condensation and mould across every surface. It didn't get any less dank once they reached the ground floor, emerging from a small door in the side of a rather grand staircase into a twisted parody of a National Trust building. She wondered if there was an evil equivalent of a gift shop selling freakish, Cthulhoid figurines. An anomalous, dark fluid dripped from the cracks in the wallpaper and the wooden boards behind. Following Clara closely, she instinctively lowered her voice when she talked.

"So, like, who built this?"

"How do you mean?" Clara whispered back. All three of them were tiptoeing.

"Well, if it exists in both universes, obviously it was built by actual people back home, but who built it here?"

"Thinks slip through," said the Doctor, "Especially here, where cognition is important. It's an imprint in the memories of the people who live in this area of the Isle of Wight."

"So it exists because it exists?"

"Well… in a way. I guess because these creatures inhabit and utilise it so readily. Not everywhere in this universe is a dark mirror of ours, just useful areas. The kinds they can exploit. People's awareness of it, historically, is probably what makes it rematerialise every so often – like in Mrs Ward's photographs. Like, you've never seen it, but maybe that's because you're totally oblivious to the fact it was ever even there. Or here. Y'know? I gotta admit, I'm no expert. I'd never willingly explore this place if people weren't in danger; keeping the worlds separate is in everybody's best interest." A grotesque chandelier hung above them, dripping with more stringy, black fluid that looked almost like it had been secreted from somewhere. Secreted by the house itself?

"The house was built in the 12th Century," Clara reminded her, "And that painting was done in the 16th Century. So they definitely exist separately. Who knows – all the tragedies might just be coincidences building and building until these terrors have the ability to bleed through the rupture they've made; they might not have caused anything themselves."

"Although this hell-hole is certainly enough to drive somebody to suicide, like our ghostly Sir Tristram. Can't say that I'd much like if we had a cellar with a gateway to hell inside of it," the Doctor continued.

"No, that is a fair point…" Clara mused.

They passed from the large entranceway to a side-room, very tentatively and with Clara going first, but far from being the dining room or study Mattie had been assuming, she was met with quite possibly the most fantastically horrifying scene she had yet witnessed. Knighton Gorges Manor, even as it had looked in Mrs Ward's photo, did not exist in its full state. Instead, half of it had been ripped completely away as though by a tremendous disaster. The exterior wall was completely gone, leaving behind just splinters and a decaying fireplace stood eerily on the edge of the collapsing floor. It allowed them their first look at the outside, where it was impossible to state whether it was night or day; everything was grey and gloomy, and the moon in the sky was a terrible, glowing black – like a negative image, or an eclipse. But what it illuminated was a sea of shiny, shadowy spires, distinctly gothic but also what she would describe as 'alien.' Like someone had set fire to Manhattan and left its smouldering, ash-covered corpse to be rebuilt in the style of H.R. Giger.

"Jesus," said Clara, "This place is John Ruskin's wet dream."

"You are so inappropriate sometimes," the Doctor snapped at her. Large, bat-like creatures flew in swarms high above – the 'night-gaunts' she kept hearing about? Was it those who had picked up Jack and Rose? Who had thrown Church's corpse at her house? "You doing okay, Matts? This is, uh… y'know, it sorta looks like Blade Runner. Only, less depressing."

"Less depressing than Blade Runner?" Clara questioned her.

"Well, what is there to like about Blade Runner?" the Doctor challenged.

"You're saying you'd rather be here than in Blade Runner's Los Angeles?"

"Depends on if they have any good ramen here. If they have good ramen here, then yeah. Good ramen is, like, literally the only thing Blade Runner LA has going for it."

"And young Harrison Ford."

"Can't say I ever think about young Harrison Ford."

"That makes one of us."

"You two are so jaded," Matilda interrupted, "You're both, like, basically indifferent to this."

"Yeah…" Clara sighed, "That's why everybody tries to keep you away from all this, sweetheart. Your parents don't want you to get like any of us."

"I don't see a monster pit out there. Y'know – I'll tell you what we should've done," the Doctor began, "Should've tied a rope around ourselves and then left it attached to a tree out there. Like Poltergeist."

"This place is huge, and those bat-things can fly," Mattie pointed out, "They could have carried Jack and Rose anywhere."

"She's right," said Clara, "They could be miles away."

"No, no. If they've been waiting here for centuries just for Jack and Rose to show up so they can, I guess, absorb their power or whatever – well, why would they set up shop far away?" Thirteen asked.

"Because they can fly," Matilda reiterated.

"The big eyeball thingy can't fly. Probably. And it looked like it was underground."

"So what?" Clara said, "We were just underground, in the cellar, and there was no big pit."

The Doctor paused and crossed her arms, perplexed. Could they afford to systematically investigate the area?

"Okay, maybe if we trick one of those things, they'll totally take us to it?"

"Ex-cuse me!?" Clara exclaimed, "You want to use us to bait the night-gaunts!? What's to say they won't just drop us like dead weights!?"

"It's just an idea."

"It's the worst idea I've ever heard," Mattie grumbled.

"I'm spit-balling, jeez. Gimme some leeway. I'm sure if we hang around for long enough, an idea will just-"

A blood-curdling roar sounded from somewhere above them. All Matilda saw above was the ceiling of the ruins of Knighton Gorges though, no source of the sickening sound. It didn't sound like any animal or human she recognised, but she should hardly be surprised about that. It would probably be stranger if she did recognise it, quite frankly.

Without hesitation, the Doctor left the building. She jumped from the edge of the splintered floorboards into the outside of the Unnameable – much to Clara's chagrin. Mattie followed Clara to the edge to see where the Doctor had gone, but the drop wasn't very far. She'd simply descended onto the unpleasant landscape below, which looked like it was made of granite or a similar stone yet sank slightly beneath the Doctor's feet; what kind of stone was soft like that? Clara did not descend, instead shouted at the Doctor, which the latter ignored; Mattie stayed by Clara, as instructed, as the Doctor began to walk away from the house, glancing over her shoulder at the sky every few seconds. The creatures in the sky didn't pay them any notice in the slightest.

Finally, the Doctor stopped, entranced by whatever she saw above the house.

"This is so whack!" she shouted, "You gotta come see! I've, like, totally found them!"

"Oh, for – that woman is incorrigible…" Clara grumbled, following in the Doctor's footsteps and dropping down carefully onto the bizarre, rocky terrain below. She wobbled upon landing, visibly dismayed by the strange texture of the ground. "Come on, I'll catch you if you slip," she beckoned Mattie to follow.

"Are you sure I can't just go back in the portal…?"

"She said she found them – we'll be gone soon, I'm sure. And you'll get to say you conquered the evils of a dark dimension, or something," Clara said, waiting beneath the craggy floors for Mattie to follow.

"Who am I going to say that to?" she grumbled. Clara didn't say anything else, only waited for Matilda to follow her instructions, which inevitably Matilda did. She carefully lowered herself down from the edge of the floorboards, trying not to get splinters in her hand, and jumped. Upon landing she staggered and nearly fell over, but Clara made good on her promise to catch her.

"Steady," she said, "It's a bit like walking on a bouncy castle out here." That did describe what it was like quite well, as they hobbled over the weird material to join the Doctor in the distance. What Thirteen had seen, however, was almost completely indescribable. Behind the Manor, the landscape began to curve, arcing steeply upwards and curling. It was almost like standing beneath an enormous tsunami, only a frozen one made of black, soft stone. There, high above them and suspended in the air, was the eyeball-teeth-creature in the painting, and two very small figures dangling from a wooden structure. Only, they were dangling upwards, towards the thing. It was like gravity twisted along with the surface, so everything above them was completely upside-down.

"That's topsy-turvy for you, huh?" the Doctor quipped, putting her hands on her hips. "Insane in the membrane. Toldja they wouldn't be too far."

"But how do we get up there…?" Mattie asked.

"Just walk," said the Doctor, "C'mon, let's get going."

"Hang on – we don't even have a plan," Clara grabbed her arm and stopped her, "That thing is huge, and Jack and Rose aren't even awake. Plus, if nobody's alerted to our presence now, they definitely will be after we let them go because they'll start kicking up a fuss."

"The plan is grab them and go."

"That's not a plan."

"It usually works. What's your bright idea if you think we need a plan so badly?"

"…Try and call them again?" Clara suggested, "Maybe phones work here. If we're in the same dimension now…"

"I wouldn't bank on it, and what good would it do? It'll just bug that thing. If it's gonna see us, it'll already have done so; it has like, a bajillion eyes, Clara." The creature loomed perilously above them, almost directly overhead. "Do you think it's more than twenty metres away?"

"Yes," said Clara stiffly. Mattie wasn't sure she had all the necessary information to understand this exchange.

"Right, but, if you get halfway – the gravity will shift and-"

"This is a pointless discussion. You know I can't just teleport whenever I feel like it," Clara said.

"Wait – you can only teleport twenty metres at a time?" Mattie asked, "While Rose can go literally anywhere in all of time and space?"

"Rose is totally OP," Thirteen said, "But if we can get them and then teleport right down here-"

"We can't rely on that," Clara argued with her.

"But Rose can't teleport in different universes. If you're worried about us being able to make a quick getaway, then this is a solid idea."

"But-"

"But nothing," the Doctor cut across her surprisingly coldly. Clara was taken aback as well. "What do you want to do? Leave them here? Say we tried our best, but decided we'd go on our way? We have no TARDIS, no other allies, and no way to contact them, unless we get lucky and Donna steps out of thin air and portals them away." For a moment, Mattie half expected Donna to actually materialise out of one of her fuzzy, black-and-white portals. Unfortunately, this didn't happen; they really were on their own, with Jack and Rose's lives dangling perilously in the upside-down sky. "No one else is coming to help. It's just us." Clara clenched her jaw and mulled this over.

Bitterly, she finally relented. "You are so bloody headstrong sometimes… fine. Fine. Let's just walk right up to that thing. But if we die, I will be very disappointed in you." The Doctor rolled her eyes as they began to walk towards the curving landscape.

"Wait, what do you mean, 'if we die'?" Mattie asked urgently.

"…Just a bad joke," Clara said. Clara lied, more like. Did she really think they were in that much danger? That the thing with all the eyes would kill them?

"Besides, what's it even gonna do? Stare us to death? Lemme tell you – wish I knew that guy when I was fighting the Weeping Angels. There's no way they'd be able to escape his gaze; permanently stoned." Clara clearly didn't think much of this remark.

It was hard to describe what it was like to walk and have the world behind you curl around and around while, to your own perception, you remained perfectly upright. The ruined Knighton Gorges Manor sank into the horizon, set against the distant, nightmarish city of neo-gothic spires, while they dragged their feet over the sludgy stones. It didn't feel as though there was much point in talking as they advanced, Mattie getting increasingly worried about what would happen when they drew close enough to the monstrous mass of eyes for it to truly perceive them – if it hadn't already. Jack and Rose, too, swam into view, Mattie squinting to make them out properly. The structure they were hanging from looked a little like gallows, only one large enough that it reached out its beam over the edge of the pit below – and there was the fact that they were strung up by their feet, not their necks.

"Why d'you think they're unconscious?" Mattie whispered.

"No idea," said the Doctor, "I guess maybe it's something to do with the way they can exert power over the human psyche. If they can communicate with people through their dreams and nightmares, I'm sure they can cause people to faint."

"People faint constantly in Lovecraft," Clara said, "Right before something pivotal happens. It's totally lazy."

"But I thought you like him?" Mattie questioned.

"It's complicated. Especially if he's mining this parallel dimension for all his ideas… and he was a racist and anti-Semite."

"What, really?"

"Oh, yeah. That's why I've never gone to meet him."

"Good ol' Howie and his white supremacy," the Doctor muttered sarcastically, "What a gent."

"How long ago did he live?"

"He died in 1937," Clara answered. Mattie was left to mull over this revelation as they continued their approach. There were none of the bat creatures hovering around, they were all still in their clouds in the sky, but the eyeball-thing writhed around grotesquely in its pit.

It was hard to comprehend how a creature made entirely of eyes and teeth could really exist, and even harder to explain the way it moved – it reminded her of a pit full of snakes or worms, insects constantly crawling over each other, its surface bristling. The freakiest thing was that none of the eyes had eyelids, they perpetually stared off in a million different directions. On top of that was the sheer scale, it was like somebody had filled an Olympic swimming pool with offal. But if it had noticed them, it gave no indicator of this. They drew up sickeningly close, only a few metres away from the rim of the pit – which was very nearly overflowing with its mass – and everything remained as it was.

Clara went ahead first, skirting the edge of the hole, inching towards Jack and Rose's device of imprisonment. Now, hanging perilously above them, was the derelict mansion where they had just been minutes ago. Gravity clearly did not work according to the laws of physics, not unless there was some invisible, imperceivable centrifuge in the air nearby. Once Clara reached the wooden gallows, which were also coated in the same grisly, dark grey fluid that leaked from the pores of the house beneath, she began to examine them.

"C'mon," Thirteen whispered to Mattie, following Clara. Not wanting to be stranded out there, Mattie did just that. There did not appear to be any kind of helpful release mechanism, nor was there a way to rotate the arm away from the monster to their relative safety. The flying night-gaunts must have tied them out there, she assumed. So what were they to do? "Could you, like, float out there?"

"Maybe…" Clara said, "But I'd, um… rather not." She glanced worryingly at the creature.

"Could climb up?" Mattie suggested.

"That's only slightly better than the floating idea."

"But if you quit hesitating, we could just get them and go. It's not like your telekinesis can't manage it, Coo; they're not that heavy, I don't think," said the Doctor.

"Why don't you climb up then?" Clara snapped.

"If you really think I-"

"No."

"Couldn't they untie themselves?" Matilda began, "If they were awake?"

"I'm not sure that it would be very productive for us to wake them up have them see the situation they're in," Clara hypothesised, "If they start freaking out, they'll draw attention."

"We're going to draw attention when we get them anyway," the Doctor said, looking around at her feet for something, "Y'know, this is the problem with you academic-types."

"In what world are you not also an 'academic-type'?" Clara quipped, but the Doctor ignored her and carried on what she had been saying as she now stooped down and picked up a fist-sized rock, soft like wet clay.

"You spend all your time thinking, but never doing!" She hurled the rock, to Clara's utter horror. Mattie didn't know if it was lucky or not that Thirteen had good aim in this instance, when the slimy rock hit Rose Tyler square in the face. It was enough to wake her up, but the rock fell and landed in the nest of eyeballs somewhere, which the creature surely didn't enjoy any more than Rose had. She blinked, then opened her eyes wide upon seeing the monster.

"Oh my god!" Rose shrieked, then launched into a tirade of screamed swear-words while she wrestled with the ropes keeping her attached to the gallows.

"Rose," Clara hissed, "Rose."

"HEY!" the Doctor shouted. Clara elbowed her for that. "Ow! What'd I do?"

"What did you do!?" Clara asked her, furious.

"What the fuck is going on!?" Rose shouted at them.

"Could you keep the noise down?" Clara asked as quietly as she could.

"What!?" Rose called.

"Could you-"

"I can't hear you! Why aren't you helping us!? Jack! JACK!"

The groaning, gut-churning growl they had heard from the house sounded again. Only this time they could see the source of it was, quite obviously, the eyeball-thing they had been trying so carefully not to disturb. Clara was about as angry as Mattie was scared by this development, as the Doctor began shouting panicked directions for Rose to try and untie herself (despite Rose asking what good it would do to untie herself when she would just plummet directly into the monster's belly – if it had one.) Like they were all attached to unseen tentacles, the eyes and fangs began to twist much faster, more chaotically, clearly agitated. Was it going to summon the bat-things? Tie them up as well? Devour all five of them?

But then, when Mattie was beginning to steel herself for what she was sure was her inevitable death, thinking that at least it may give her a chance to see her parents once again, the creature began to speak:

mY…LiTtLe… bOy…?