Requiem
By
Russ Flinn
It could feel their anger, felt it as if it was its own, brighter still than The Chattering that had made them beholden to it, louder than the heartbeats it had felt in the earth.
Their leader, the one who had spared its life and forbade its death at the hands of his terrified, ignorant charges, now joined the throng, shrieking in their mongrel tongue, a language it could speak without comprehending. It merely felt the feelings behind the sounds, had translated The Chattering into sensation and image, understanding what it was able to speak without hearing a word of it. It knew they had revered it, presented it with tokens and slain lowly creatures to its honour.
They had not known the true price of its gift, but sought only to listen to their lost, old ones. It had seen them shed tears and roar in laughter at its ability, felt them gain comfort and strength. Children had listened to the teachings of their fathers, wives had heard words of love and devotion from husbands, and all the time they had not questioned.
Now they knew, they had seen it eat, knew how it carried their cherished dead within it. They had guile, had waited until good health and long-life within their band had starved and weakened it. The voices were growing few, The Chattering fainter and fainter until tonight they had taken arms against it.
It fell beneath their frenzied, fearful blows. It would take too long to die, tasting faint wisps of their dread and hate, brief sips of each emotional flavour sustaining it one more dying breath at a time. Only when they had trampled it into the earth, felt it break and burst beneath their bare feet, satisfied it would feast no more, only then would they leave it. And in that absence, isolated from them, with nothing of them left to grant it meagre sustenance, their fears and hostilities taken back to their camp, only then would it finally die.
But they would be alone.
Sarah was loading her things back into her dad's old Rover, an arduous task made all the worse for her heavy weather gear, when she first noticed the figure.
At first, she wasn't even sure it was a figure. It was more like the dark silhouette of some ancient monolith, impassive and unmoved by the winds that rushed down the valley slopes and set the surrounding trees muttering. Only the fluttering of whatever material was covering it gave her the idea it was someone rather than something, but even then it might just be an old tarpaulin tied close about it. Just one more standing stone among many.
It certainly wasn't the ideal conditions for someone to be standing out in the open like that, and not just because of the wind. It had been threatening to rain all day, and the heavens had finally made good on their threat over the last two hours. Which was fine by her, and had been why she had set off in the downpour. After all, it helped loosen up the soil and made her job a lot easier than toiling away on a sunny day.
But at least she had an excuse to be out here, even if most people might have thought no excuse was good enough, least of all hers. Whatever possessed anyone to choose a time like this to come out and find themselves drenched, cold and jostled by the gales - it would have to be a bloody good reason, or at least feel like a bloody good reason to the person concerned.
Try as she might, she wasn't about to let it go. She had long since realised that she had a hard-wired inherited inquisitiveness. Thanks to her dad for that. You'll never find anything out unless you ask, he had always told her. Even if you have to look stupid in the process.
Oh well, she thought, kicking the worst of the mud from her boots off against the back tire and setting off down into the vale, let's see how stupid I can look today.
"Did you know him?"
The figure didn't move.
Sarah trudged into what she assumed would be it's line of sight.
"Excuse me, hello?"
The figure started, throwing back the hood of the long grey cloak it was wearing. He looked exactly how she had expected anyone wearing such an item to look – like someone from a Bronte novel, sort of baroque, long tresses of dark hair flowing from a pale, sensitive face. It was like stepping back in time, to the days of those wild, gothic romances – the mysterious, cloaked, Byronic figure, the howling winds and beating rain on a blasted heath. And here she was in knee-high DM's and an anorak. Great!
"I beg your pardon," he said, in a voice pitched higher than she had expected. "Wasn't meaning to be rude. I was miles away."
"Well, you're here now," she replied, giving him what she hoped was a winning smile. "For a minute I thought you might be a nutter."
The stranger smiled. "No, not really."
"Bugger. We nutters have to stick together, you know." She motioned to the white marble headstone that she had been trying hard not to acknowledge. "I was just wondering, since you picked this spot in the whole cemetery, did you know him?"
The man nodded. "Just paying my respects to someone who probably deserved it a lot sooner than now from me. How about you?"
"You could say that. He was my dad."
"Isn't he still?"
"Yeah, well, yeah, he is, yeah."
"I always think it's odd the way we talk as if they're not still around, the dead. They always are. Somewhere. Even if it's only in our memories of our past, and even that's alive somewhere."
"That's what I tell myself. Still miss the old sod, though."
"Me too, Sarah."
She tried to remember if she had mentioned her name. She had been so busy with half-hearted and probably dreadfully inappropriate graveside flirting that she wasn't sure she had.
"I'm sorry. I didn't remember telling you my name...?"
"You didn't have to. Of course, you'd be Sarah. What other name could your father have picked for you but that!" He grinned. "My name's John, by the way."
"Ah, we're equal now. Pleased to meet you, John".
"Likewise," John nodded. "It's raining."
"Yes, it is. You look soaked."
"The Victorians used to favour days like these for funerals. Enhanced their sense of propriety. You can't distinguish tears in the rain."
"I'd have needed a flood."
He returned her fascinated gaze with startlingly blue eyes. She would have found it hard not to be attracted to him – eyes being her first judge of a man, and blue ones placing him decisively in the suitor stakes – were it not that the over-riding emotion in them seemed to be a combination of sadness and regret. She almost felt guilty that a complete stranger seemed more moved by the presence of her dad's grave than she.
What would dad have done in this situation, she wondered.
Certainly, he wouldn't have forgotten his manners, especially since this was obviously an old and close friend of his.
She cleared her throat and waited until his unsettling stare had left her, in favour of looking thoughtfully at the sooty clouds above them, before speaking. "You look like you could use a cup of tea."
Clearly, he liked his tea, breaking from his reverie to give her a friendly look. "You have a flask with you?"
"Well, no, not with me," she stuttered. God, had she spent so long without male company that she had actually forgotten how awkward it was to be polite without sounding forward? "I just wondered if you fancied a cup, that's all. Our house, I mean, my house is just a little over that hill. It doesn't matter if you don't," she said hurriedly, trying to look flippant, "But since you're a friend of my dad's and you're soaked to the skin -"
Graciously, sensing her obvious discomfort, John agreed, smiling in gratitude.
"Always better to be wet within than without," he beamed, adding, "Yes, Sarah, that would be lovely, thank you."
"Interesting collection," he observed, tracing his fingers along the spines of the hundreds of volumes in the bookcase. "Your father's?"
She placed a cup of tea on the table for him and sat down with her own, warming her precious fingers.
"He was a great reader. Not just medical books like you'd expect. Science, science-fiction, adventure stories. I always thought he'd write one himself one day. He was a great storyteller."
John settled down in the opposing armchair, flicking the last drops of rain from his hair and taking a sip of his tea. "Mmm, that's a good one," he muttered appreciatively, glancing up at her. "I expect a man with his history could tell a few good army stories."
"You'd think so, but he had a much broader imagination than any experience he could have had. Used to tell me the most amazing bedtime ones. He invented this character – he was a doctor, of course. Bit of professional vanity shining through, I expect. Anyway, he was like a kind of swashbuckling adventurer who could take you anywhere you wanted. The kind of hero I think my dad wanted to be."
"I never realised."
"Kept nagging him to put them on paper when I got older but he was much too modest for his own good. Said that he didn't have the necessary artistic arrogance and ego for the job. Don't know what that says about me." She finished her drink and let the cup rest on the arm of the chair. "You're a doctor too, aren't you?"
"What makes you say that?"
"Ah well," she grinned knowingly, "You don't always have to be carrying a black bag and smelling of disinfectant, you know. I've met enough of dad's old colleagues to spot a physician at a thousand yards now. Comes in handy if you catch yourself having a hot flush in Tesco."
"Yes, well, we were colleagues of a kind, but that was a long time ago."
"In a galaxy far, far away," she teased. "Come off it, you look my age."
"You've caught me on a good day, that's all. Did Sarah-Jane come to the funeral?"
His host shifted uneasily in her seat, her eyes clouding as if focussing on something too distant to be entirely distinct.
"She's an odd one," she said at last, looking back at her guest. "You've met her then? Gave up journalism and started a self-help group for these so-called alien abductees a few years back. Dad wasn't impressed." She hesitated, her eyes twinkling in the firelight. "So that's how you knew my name was Sarah!"
"I always thought she'd made a big impression on him. Chalk and cheese, really, but they'd have made a lovely couple."
"Thank God they never. I'd have been handing out leaflets in Piccadilly Circus and having to listen to anal probe stories."
"I'm sure your father took the occasional temperature in his time, too, Sarah," he grinned, helping himself to a biscuit from the packet. "Those ornaments," he said suddenly, indicating the small parade of abstract shapes on the mantle piece, "They're very unusual. Your own work?"
"Meant to be my work. More of a hobby now. I've got a workshop full of the stuff and nowhere to shift it."
"I'd love to take a look."
Trying to determine whether it was a genuine interest or the oldest chat-up line in the book, Sarah decided that she really didn't care. If she was lucky, it might even be both.
"These are a series of pieces I did after dad passed," she said, switching on the light in the back-room so that John could see the row of busts more clearly. "It was a sort of therapy really."
"They're astonishing." He glanced at her, as much in a kind of nervous awe as in admiration. "What was your reference point. Photographs?"
"Imagination. I'm not sure what to call them. Thought of The Seven Faces Of Man, or even The Seven Faces Of Adam, because there's a movie called The Seven Faces Of Eve. Felt like the fellas deserved a look in, too. You see how they get older as you go along?"
"I suppose they make more sense like that to the casual observer, yes."
"It was weird. They felt sort of familiar, but they're not based on anyone so far as I'm aware."
"They're very life-like. The detail…" He was positively ashen-faced now. "Extraordinary."
"You're carrying on like you've seen these people before?"
The Doctor hesitated, his face pale, resting his sensitive fingers upon each face in turn, a strange smile playing about his lips. She had seen that smile before. It was the smile of one who looked through old photographs and mementos, coming across faces they were never again to see. That strange sensation of loss, when even bitter arguments and petty annoyances softened into something to be cherished.
"I've been these people before."
Before she could make sense of the remark, he recovered, taking in breath and pirouetted neatly to face her.
"That's quite a talent you have, you know," he said, brightly.
"I'm just a sculptress. You train hard and this is what you get. If you're lucky you make a living." She shrugged. "If you're not, you get to live out your life in some quiet village somewhere, playing in the mud like a child again."
"According to your culture, that's one of the oldest professions going."
She laughed. "I hope you're not thinking of prostitution? I'd be selling my bed to the Tate Modern if that were the case."
He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating.
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground," he recited, gazing at her with something like wonder. "Or words to that effect."
"That's a pretty pretentious claim, even for an artist, don't you think?"
"If you can do it, it's not boasting."
"Wow, from the Bible to Mohammed Ali in one breath. You certainly know your classics. Well, since you're being such an appreciative audience, do you want to see what I'm working on at the moment?"
"Et voila!"
The sculptress could scarcely conceal her excitement as she swept the clay-stained bed sheet from her latest project. She beamed with pride, letting John look on with awe, his head cocked to one side in rapt fascination.
"And what do you intend to call this?" he asked, standing on tiptoe so that he was practically nose to nose with the hulking statue.
"John," she answered, tongue in cheek. "No, I'm not sure, really. He's turned out a lot mightier than I'd intended."
"Fearsome," John agreed, taking in the thick limbs, broad chest and simian face. "The Nightmare Man?" he suggested.
"I thought he looked more noble than scary, actually."
"Semi-evolved chimera, limbs that could break your back without so much as a 'how do you do.' Not my idea of nobility."
Sarah stuck out her bottom lip, contemplating her work. "Well, once upon a time, maybe.."
"Where did you get the raw materials for something like this?" John asked. He appeared to be almost scenting it like a dog.
Sarah stepped closer to the statue, pointing out the component parts with obvious pride at her ingenuity. "You've got dried long-grass for the hair here, you see. The eyes are simple, just round stones I found. See how they have a slight imperfection in the colouring that doubles for irises."
He pointed to the long, ragged nails. "Atrina bivalves?"
"If you mean pen shells then, yes. They're the only part I didn't find locally."
"Often found on beaches after a violent storm," he muttered, "Fascinating."
John bit his lip thoughtfully, turning his head to her.
"And the body-mass?"
"Oh, that's just a clay you can find round here. It has a very distinctive colouring, much darker than common potter's clay."
Still he looked at her.
"What?" she asked nervously, blinking to break his gaze.
"Come on, Sarah," he finally responded, a ghost of a smile forming on his lips. "That's not clay of any kind is it? Playing in the mud like a child, you called it." He rose to his full height. She hadn't quite realised he was so tall until then.
"I don't know what you're driving at."
"Ah, there's the thing, isn't it," he grinned, knowingly. "Driving. I noticed the shovel and plastic bags in the back of your car. I imagine you wouldn't be happy with everyone knowing where you got this soil from. It's not exactly grave-robbing, but people would still have a great deal to say about you helping yourself to cemetery earth, wouldn't they?"
She sighed, blushing. He made her feel like a little girl again, like her father giving her one of his mild, eternally understanding admonishments after she had spilled flour all over the kitchen floor.
"It was going to be a statue of dad, okay? I wanted a more oblique style so I went back to basics, a sort of metaphorical representation of him."
John nodded thoughtfully, somehow growing more serious with every word of her answer.
"Salt of the earth," he whispered, his lips pursing. Then he looked right at her, unblinking and authoritative, despite the gentle coaxing of his voice.
"But it grew into something else, didn't it? The more you worked on it, the less it was of your father and the more this," he regarded the statue with some strange emotion, "This creature."
Sarah couldn't contain a nervous laugh at his sudden air of dark earnest.
"This isn't funny, Sarah. I don't know much about art, but I know what I don't like."
"Oh, cheers for the encouragement," she mumbled, disconsolate.
Sharply, he turned and reached to grab her by the hands, hesitating and gripping her shoulders instead, forcing her to look directly into his eyes. They weren't soft and beautiful anymore. They blazed on the edges of a furious panic.
"Listen to me," he snapped, words suddenly pouring out of him as if he were suddenly so full of ideas that there could be no holding them back anymore. "I think we should return this soil to the cemetery right away. It's important you don't keep it here like this. People will die."
Sarah pulled away from him, suddenly aware that this man was a total stranger to her, that she had merely taken him at his word that he knew her father, letting her pathetic romantic heart and far more pragmatic hormones dictate that a man was trustworthy because he was attractive to her. He had told her nothing to prove he knew her dad. He had asked all the questions.
"Asking questions is what I do," he said without giving her time to open her mouth.
The intense demeanour that had sharply come over him alarmed her. No, it scared her.
"How did you know I was thinking that?"
"I told you," he replied, darkly. "I'm an old friend."
He reached out a hand to her, his expression unreadable.
She felt herself growing light-headed, her face cold from fear. She edged back from him, hands reaching behind her for anything to fend him off in case he grew violent. But most of all reaching for anything solid that might support her, reassure her.
Frowning, he took back his hand and took up position between her and the statue.
Unaware or unafraid of what her panic might cause her to do, John carried on, gabbling his words, some growing anxiety palpable in his body language.
"You see, I think your father passed on more to you than just some bedtime stories, Sarah. You've somehow become an outlet for his memories. Those things on your mantlepiece might look like pieces of abstract art to you, but they're far from that. They're artifacts, facsimiles of things I've seen before. Things you're never likely to have come across in your lifetime, but which your father certainly had in his. That strange organic flower, for example. Zygon technology. The vase that you poked eyes and a mouth into, as near to a Cyberman helmet as you could get from clay. Guessing and coincidence just don't allow for things like that. There's something more going on here."
Consciously, he stepped away from the looming statue. He was actually wary of it, for all it was mud and pebbles.
"It's a rare talent, but not unheard of," he went on. "You've probably heard of psychic artists doing sketches for misguided intelligence agencies, trying to envision locations of spies and missiles and whatever other follies this planet gets so wrapped up in. Or mediums who help fashion the faces of the dead from ectoplasm."
Retreating from him inch by inch, Sarah finally found something solid. As if the connection with the real world suddenly granted her a voice again, she blurted out: "I thought you promised me you weren't a nutter. Doctor? Patient more like! You're sounding like that bloody journalist woman and her alien conspiracy theories now."
He gasped, thrusting a hand through his chestnut-brown locks in frustration.
"I'm serious, Sarah. Your father never had Sarah-Jane's ability to express himself. Military man of honour, official secrets and plain old decency. He found the only outlet he could, by telling you stories. The only problem is, somehow he went beyond just giving you tales of outer space derring-do dumbed-down for a child to understand. Somehow he has passed it all on to you. I've never encountered it before, but it makes perfect sense that it would happen one day. The changes the TARDIS made that gave him certain psychic connections and abilities never got reprogrammed over time like they should have done. Instead, they got passed on to you."
She shook her head, his words losing her utterly. Worse, his agitation had made him step closer. Trying hard not to show the fear that was growing in her like some new and alien nervous system, threading her whole body with terror, she felt behind her, trying to find the one thing her father had left her that might actually have some use at last. She felt only the cold stone wall against which it had once been leaning.
"I think you should just go," she managed, fighting for control. Tears were welling up in her eyes, but she blinked them away quickly, the idea of losing sight of this madman in a room full of chisels and hammers keeping her focussed. "Please, just leave. You're messing with my head."
She noticed him slump slightly, exhausted by his own energy, perhaps. He spoke more slowly this time, almost apologetic.
"That damage has already been done, Sarah. I'm just trying to make sense of it for you, because if you understand where it's coming from and how dangerous this can be, then you might forgive me for what I've done."
"It's a bit late for forgiveness now, isn't it, Doctor?"
John whirled round, ignoring Sarah completely. He was facing the statue, blocking her view of it. She saw his hands fall to his sides. They were trembling.
Sarah suddenly became aware of so many things. She saw the intricate stitching of his frock coat, saw the way the light caught each fibre of the material. She could hear the sounds of her body, the busy rush of the blood in her veins, the soft hush of her hair as she moved her head, the moist sounds of saliva running around her paralysed tongue. She could smell everything, the stink of clay thick as dung, the strange steely tang of her workroom tools, the fragrant tea in her belly, an odd, bitter-sweet smell from the stranger, like opening one of her father's old tins of pear drops.
She wanted to notice all of it, every single thing that the world could throw at her in that moment.
Anything that would distract her from the impossible idea that there had come a new voice in the room, from somewhere deep within that form of soil and stone and shell.
The voice of her father.
"Oh my God," she whimpered in disbelief, her eyes as wide as those of the child that she had suddenly been made to feel. John was looking from one to the other now, his mouth working silently as if in prayer. She recognised now that what she had thought was some violent mania coming upon him was far from dangerous. It was a terror worse than her own, the angst of a man who had seen too much, knew too much, and felt the inevitability of every single passing second.
"Oh, Harry," John said at last, his voice breaking with emotion.
Impossibly, the statue shifted, one foot stepping from the dais. It left a little of itself behind, no more than a muddy footprint, and settled upon the floor with a heavy thud. Sarah could hear the soil of its structure creak and grind, minute particles of time-worn stone and sand working together, holding together, moulding and reforming constantly. The blind, albino eyes of pebble swivelled in the odd-sized sockets, the pale imperfections performing just like the irises her imagination had dictated.
The shotgun she had hoped to find at her back, her dad's gift of security for a daughter left behind in a troubled world, was in its hands.
John was frozen to the spot. He looked as though is knees might buckle under the strain of it all.
"Dad?" she whispered, hearing how stupid it sounded and yet unable to resist.
The smooth white eyes regarded her, expressing nothing.
"Leave us, Sarah," her father's voice said. The lips did not move, the voice passing through the set lips, coming from deep within the structure she had worked so hard to build. "This doesn't involve you yet. When I need you I know you will be there. Your loving fingers caressing me, making me whole again. Then I can look into your face with my own eyes again, not these cold fragments."
She did not move a single muscle. She simply could not.
"I said go, child," it intoned.
"Sarah?" That had been John's voice, so quiet, so broken that it seemed a million miles from her, faltering but fighting to be heard. "Sarah, don't listen to the voice," it whispered. "Listen to the words. Not the voice, only the words."
The moulded figure lurched towards them both. She could hear the shells of its makeshift nails scraping at the cast-steel of the shotgun, fumbling for purchase on the trigger.
"Both barrels, Doctor. One for each heart."
John's voice was there again, just as he began to step between Sarah and the approaching thing of earth. "Listen to it, Sarah," he hissed urgently, "Your father was a man of peace, he fought to save lives. Would he kill me?" Then to the statue itself, "Would you kill me, Harry?"
"You ask me that, Doctor? After all the rebukes and petty slights you heaped upon me? The definite article, you called yourself."
The twin barrels of the gun rose to stare with hungry black eyes at the young man's chest.
"I know what you want," John said, a sudden defiance in his words. "And it's not revenge. It's life."
Sarah had walked falteringly up to the stranger's side. It was an instinct that she didn't question. She just knew without knowing why that she was safer there.
"Dad, is that really you in there?" she asked, ashamed of how feeble her voice sounded in her ears.
"No," John breathed, taking her hand and squeezing it hard. It was slick with perspiration, still trembling, but firm and real. "This thing isn't a vehicle for your father, reconstructed from the soil that swallowed him up that day in February, Sarah. He's the vehicle, isn't he," he said boldly, addressing the towering, swaying statue directly. "Poor Harry's memories carried within his daughter and passed to you through her own hands. You'd like her to think that he somehow passed into the soil that holds you together right now, wouldn't you? That her father is alive in the very earth that carries you". There was an anger rising in him. "You're an abomination."
"And yet I live, Doctor," it rumbled. "Harry Sullivan is alive in me, reaching out to his daughter. He wants me to pull this trigger. To end your misbegotten life and all the misery you bring to those too weak to stand up to you."
"That's between Harry and myself," John said solemnly. "It's you I'm talking to now. I've seen what you can do, seen what you will do. Leeching off the living, stuffing their mouths with soil, killing the poor lost souls whose memories you drink up. And yet you never stop, never question the pointlessness of your situation."
He looked genuinely sad, letting go of Sarah's hand and stepping up to the mammoth figure, stopping only when the barrels of the gun rested upon his chest. Sarah closed her eyes, wishing it all away. As much as she had longed for her father, wanted to feel the warmth of his voice in her head once more, she did not want it to be like this. She wanted things to be as they had been.
"If you kill me, you'll be just as dead," John challenged. "Harry knows all about regeneration. Ask him. Read his memories. My body can resist many things, but if you burst both my hearts then you've lost your chance. Then I'll truly be dead and you, you'll just have to skulk about avoiding the sun and the rain. You'll crumble. You'll die!"
"It looks like you're the one falling apart, Doctor."
It squeezed the trigger. In the silence, the tiny mechanical sounds of the gun readying itself for a kill were acute.
"Please don't," Sarah wished aloud, waiting for the blast, hearing in her imagination how the percussion would be muffled as it ate it's way through the young man's chest in a blazing instant, tearing the life out of him.
"Don't worry, Sarah," John said calmly. "He won't." His eyes engaged the cold, lifeless stone of the thing's eyes. "Will you? You daren't take that chance. Too many questions unanswered and not enough of Harry's memories to be sure you won't be damning yourself along with me. What was the plan? Kill me? Bury me, and let the soil absorb me like it did with you? Coaxing Sarah to rebuild you, hoping my tissue structure might be able to regenerate dead soil into new flesh. That's quite an imagination you've got!" He addressed Sarah directly, trying to break through the self-imposed wall of denial she was using to hang on to herself. "Sarah, I need your help. I can't do this alone. It wants me dead, buried in that soil until my regenerative tissue and memories are there for you to mould into a new life for it. You can't let it happen. Please," he begged, "If you carry anything of your father in you, then you won't let it happen!"
Sarah was silent, rocking faintly on her heels.
The creature with the voice of her father gave out a low, humourless laugh.
It let the gun drop, hanging impotently by its side.
"Here's mud in your eye, old boy," it said, lunging out with it's free hand and swiping John hard across his face. He hung in the air for an instant, the smear of soil like an abstract bloodied scab upon his face, then crumpled to the floor without a sound.
"Chin-chin," it said, the dark, cracking lips finally curling into a proximate smile. "Lights out, Doctor."
It turned to regard Sarah, her eyes closed, her lips trembling.
"Sarah," it purred, her father's voice stronger than ever. "Dear sweet Sarah. My daughter. I need your help, old thing."
She opened her eyes slowly, fighting back her tears, wanting her father to be there. He would have known what to do. Instead, she saw only filth and dirt, lifeless yet moving. Even if this were her father, this was no life for him.
"Help me come back to you, Sarah," it pleaded. "The Doctor was right. He can't die like this". It shook its head sadly, particles of mud flaking and falling.
"We need to bury him alive," it instructed.
She put her hands over her ears, but still she could hear her father's voice, quietly insistent, teasing her to comply.
"Bury him in my grave, Sarah. Let the soil have him. Then I can live again, just like before."
Sarah sank to the floor, sobs wracking her body.
It moved to her, reaching down to touch her face.
"Get away from her!"
The living statue staggered around. Sarah looked up, roused by the passionate fury in her saviour's cry.
John was up on his feet again and standing fast, the soil like war-paint across his face, emphasising the aggression of his stance, Sarah's shovel raised high above his head, ready to strike deep into the hulking body.
"Or you'll what..?" it growled. "Kill me?"
"You're already dead," John yelled angrily. "Nothing has the right to live again. You get your turn and then you're gone, back to the nothing you were before." He hefted the shovel, his jaw set, eyes ablaze.
"I was a god before," it proclaimed, "And I will be again. Talking with the tongues of the dead. Giving poor lost souls on both planes the chance to feel close again. Who but a god could do that?"
"An abomination," the young man spat. "The product of a cul-de-sac of evolution. You're a cannibal, living off the dead and the living alike. You have no place in this world or the next."
It raised the gun once more.
"You know nothing of me, Doctor."
"I know that you're alone," John continued. "You can never feel the affinities that you siphon off from others. You can speak of love and bonds all you like, but you'll never know what they mean. You'll feel nothing that hasn't been felt before. You're unique in never being able to feel unique. That's not life, it's a curse."
"You'd know all about that," came the steady response. "Wouldn't you, Time Lord? Lonely wanderer, picking up the flotsam of companionship, professing to feel for them and yet abandoning them when they no longer amuse you. Patronising and humiliating them. Is that what it takes for you to be a god too, Doctor?"
"Both of you just get out," Sarah whimpered. "Neither of you belong here. Just get out".
"Sarah?" The figure turned to her, stony eyes meeting hers. "This is my house", it whispered, confused.
She snarled, saliva running down her chin.
"You're not my dad. My dad is dead and he is never, never, never coming back. Get out of my house!" She shuffled to her feet. "Get out of my head!"
A scream of anguish rose from within the solid mass, a siren of anger and defeat combined.
It thrust the gun in her face.
"Then join him!" it shrieked.
She saw the blade of the shovel hit it from behind, squarely cutting into it's back. She heard John's cry of effort as he thrust it harder, the shovel passing through it, splitting the chest in a shower of earth and stone.
It had no effect. The gun did not falter. The thing simply stood there, glowering down upon her with empty eyes, letting her hear the sounds of the mechanism of her death priming itself. It was torturing her.
Suddenly, Sarah heard John's voice rising above the mayhem, pleading.
"Harry. I'm addressing Harry Sullivan now, not the thing that's piggy-backing on your memories. Harry, if you're in there, I'm so sorry."
John had slumped to his knees, hands clasped together as if in prayer or supplication.
Almost imperceptibly, the gun slipped in its grip, the trigger loosened.
Still John talked.
"Harry Sullivan was not an imbecile. Harry was a doctor, he served a noble cause and he did it with pride and honour. Harry saved lives, he did not take them. If Harry were here now he would be standing between us and that gun, but most of all he wouldn't be the one holding it!"
The thing gripped the gun with resolve again.
Sarah could hardly hear her cry of horror over John's own.
The gun screamed death.
Sarah stood looking at her father's grave, wondering if it might have all been a dream. Some kind of repressed guilt that had manifested itself into a weird fugue state, or just a nightmare to show her to be careful what she wished for at times like this, when all she wanted was to turn around and see him standing there, smiling his wonderful, warm smile and opening his arms to her for a hug that had felt it would last a lifetime.
Only lifetimes weren't forever, that was what John had said, and as much as she had wanted to hear her father's voice one more time, she preferred to remember it as it had been. Not spouting hatred and fury at the world, but those beautiful times when it had felt like a kiss upon her soul.
John had done what he could to reassure her that things would be back as they had been now, that perhaps even her gift would pass and that the only memories that would be of comfort to her now would be her own.
"That wasn't your father, Sarah," he had softly whispered, cradling her in his arms as she wept over a scattering of soil and grit. "Only at the end. He did the noble thing to save a friend. An unworthy friend. He's told his last story, and this time he was the hero."
She had vented so much anger at John in the aftermath and he had stood by and dutifully taken it all Even when she had ordered him to leave and never return, he had vowed that he would do so, walking out of the house and out of her life for good.
Only he wasn't.
He was always going to be there, at the back of her mind, the way her father was. At least now she knew that it wasn't memories that hurt, but how she chose to use them. Now, she could begin to make something of herself, rather than of dead soil and other people's lives.
But for now, she would just stand there, praying for the rain.