Of Towns and Toasters, Chapter Four
"If you really are getting attacked, why don't we just leave?"
"We can't leave until we get that part."
"So... what happens if there isn't one around here?"
"...It'd be better if we didn't go anywhere until we got that part."
"So we don't actually need it to move the TARDIS? So we could go somewhere a bit more normal and look for it there?"
"There's no way of knowing where we'd end up. We could end up in some dimension where all the planets have been eaten by space midges. Then the space midges would probably go for the TARDIS, and nobody wants that."
"...okay, you've got a point."
They hadn't gone far along the street before Rose's phone began screeching static again. She winced and pulled it out of her pocket. "That's it, I'm turning this off."
Remembering what had happened the last time the phone did that, the Doctor looked rapidly around. Behind him, Rose pushed a button and the static cut out.
Something large and worryingly wolf-shaped was coming towards them through the fog.
"Rose -" he began, but she looked up at that moment. She stared at it for a second, frozen, and then turned and bolted down the road. He cursed and set off after her, trying desperately not to lose her in the fog. They came to a stop, eventually.
"That was a Reaper," she hissed as soon as she'd got her breath back. "What was one of those doing here? Oh god, did I do something stupid again? Will it be like when -" She cut herself off, but he understood her - to an extent, at least.
"What d'you mean, a Reaper? That was one of the wolves. The ones you didn't believe in."
She laughed a little too loudly, stopped a little too abruptly. "Oh, yes. Wolves. Flying wolves. You didn't mention the wings, or the screeching, or the fact that they looked exactly like Reapers."
He frowned. "Rose... it wasn't flying."
"Of course it was flying! What else could it have been doing?"
"I never took my eyes off that wolf, and I can tell you, it remained completely earthbound." He paused. "Are you feeling all right?"
"I've just been chased all over this stupid town by a Reaper. What do you think?" She looked around, panicked. "...Maybe we should just leave."
"We can't. I told you." He went quickly through all the streets they had gone down in his head, trying to work out the best route back. "If you want, you can wait in the TARDIS."
"What, and leave you alone?" She was beginning to calm down, to breathe at a more normal rate, and now she found it in herself to grin at him. "You wouldn't last five seconds without me, you know that."
He laughed. "If you say so. Come on, then, let's find these 'Woodside Apartments'."
It turned out that their fleeing from the Reaper, or the wolf, or whatever-it-had-been had resulted in their coming very close to the Woodside Apartments; they had been walking away from them before.
Rose was the one who spotted the sign. The Doctor was very surprised, and slightly put out - he couldn't make out a thing through the fog, how was she able to? - but he was grateful to her all the same, although he didn't say it.
The block of flats was as intimidating as the hospital had been from the outside, and just as decaying within. He had hardly expected a thriving community, but the smell of rot was beginning to irritate him. The only floor they could access was the first - the stairs to the second floor had collapsed, the door to the ground floor flats was locked - and most of the doors were unopenable; the first one that opened led into a small flat, full of broken furniture and shattered glass. A small booklet was lying open on a moth-eaten sofa. He picked it up.
"What's that?" Rose asked.
"Some kind of travel brochure. It's for somewhere called Silent Hill." The photograph on the front showed a street he remembered passing through, but busy, full of people. "Must be the place we're in." He flipped it open, read some of the introduction, and snorted.
Silent Hill will move you and fill you with a feeling of deep peace. I hope your time here will be pleasant and your memories will last forever.
The Doctor smirked and closed the brochure. Despite the situation, just finding out that the town had a sense of humour was enough to cheer him up considerably.
It occurred to him that he was beginning to think of Silent Hill as an entity, rather than merely a town; more like the TARDIS than anything else. Something about that bothered him, somehow.
They had to try several doors before finding another that would open. The flat seemed empty, but the Doctor didn't want to leave until he had made certain that there was nothing useful there. He was picking his way carefully among the broken glass from a shattered table in the corner when something caught his eye. He started and looked up.
There was a row of portraits along the wall. Thirteen of them. The first eight were familiar to him, although the final four were strangers. The ninth... he couldn't be sure, although he felt he could probably guess what it had been. The painting had been ripped to shreds, scraps of paper littering the floor. Two words had been scored into the backing of it, which was visible now that the portrait had gone.
Rose moved to stand next to him, looking at the paintings with her head on one side. "Anyone you know?"
The Doctor looked sharply at her. "Why d'you say that?"
She shrugged. "Just the way you jumped like that." She mimicked the movement, much to the Doctor's half-amused irritation. "It was like you'd seen something you recognised."
He looked up at them. Thirteen portraits, the ninth ripped apart and unrecognisable.
"No, it's nothing. C'mon, let's look for the toaster."
The second-to-last door on the floor seemed subtly different, and the Doctor realised as he was turning the handle what it was. All the other doors had been rotting, usually coming off their hinges. This door was in perfect condition; from the gleam of the torch off it, it looked as if it had even been recently polished. He opened the door, and Rose went in.
"...okay, this is weird."
"Really? Something weird? Here?" the Doctor asked, mock-incredulous, as he entered the room. Then he paused, looking around. "...see your point, though."
The room was completely normal. There were warm lights on in the corners, a bed, a wooden desk. None of it rotting or dusty, which the Doctor had come to accept as the norm in this town. Just a regular room.
"How can there be lights on? Why would this town have electricity?" He knelt, followed the power cord of one of the lights with his eyes. Not completely normal, then. "Scratch that, how can there be lights on if they're not even plugged in?"
"Maybe it's something t'do with this version of Earth," Rose suggested.
"The only real changes were in this place, though. And why would they have cords if they don't need to be plugged in?" He stood, staring at the lamp. "This is a very, very weird town."
Rose collapsed onto the bed. "Whatever this room is, I'm glad it's here."
The Doctor wasn't sure about that; he'd become used to every room in Silent Hill being derelict and damaged, and so a relatively normal room seemed stranger than anything he'd seen so far.
When he turned, there was a gas mask in the centre of the floor.
He picked it up, smiling. A normal room, with a reminder of the last time he'd really won in it. If the town had suddenly decided to be nice to him, he certainly wasn't going to complain.
They stayed in the normal room for some time - Rose had wanted a rest - but the Doctor eventually became impatient, and so they tried the last door. It wasn't locked. Doors that weren't locked rarely seemed to lead to anything good, but the previous room had encouraged him, and after all he had to find a stabiliser.
He pushed open the door and froze, unable to believe what he was seeing.
It was a Dalek.
His immediate reaction was to push Rose aside, so that she would be out of danger - she would be able to run, at least for a while (how far away was the TARDIS? In the shock of the situation, he couldn't remember). She landed heavily on the floor, and the Doctor, who had been hoping to save her by leading the Dalek the other way, instinctively helped her up instead.
"Run!" Why wasn't she running, the stupid girl, just because she'd survived one encounter with a Dalek - that was different, it had been warped by her DNA and it had emotion and why the hell wasn't she running?
"I don't think it's alive," she whispered, her whole body tense.
The Doctor stared at the Dalek. It didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't burn the flesh from his (Rose's) bones, shrieking that the Doctor had to be exterminated. Didn't even glow.
"...No." He moved cautiously forwards. "We're still alive, so it can't be." He pulled out the sonic screwdriver and waved it over the not-Dalek, careful not to touch it - he wanted to be absolutely certain before making any kind of contact with it. "...It's made of wax."
"What?"
"Wax!" The Doctor threw back his head and laughed like a maniac. It echoed unnervingly in the narrow corridor, but he seemed not to care. "A wax Dalek! And I was scared of this!" He pulled the lighter out of his pocket and flicked it on.
"What are you doing?"
The Doctor didn't answer, and he didn't really need to - Rose could see perfectly well that he was entirely engaged in melting the Dalek. She glanced away - his behaviour towards the first Dalek that she had met had disturbed her, and although he didn't seem as furious here, there was still something about it that made her uncomfortable. She moved past him into the room, still averting her eyes, but then she stopped and stared around her.
"Not planning on doing that to all of these, are you?"
The Doctor looked up, and seemed startled for a moment before laughing again. "A whole room of wax Daleks. Fantastic." There was a gleam in his eye that Rose wasn't certain she liked, but perhaps it was just the reflection of the lighter flame. He flicked it off and began tossing it from hand to hand as he walked around the room, inspecting the Daleks. In one corner he paused and reignited the flame in order to see more clearly. Rose glanced over her shoulder at him.
"Want the torch? Or are you just going to commit waxicide again?"
"Torch. This one isn't a Dalek. Looks sort of familiar, though."
Rose tossed the torch to him and he caught it deftly. Curious, she walked over to look at the waxwork.
Familiar, yes. Far too familiar. She stared at it in disbelief.
"Doctor - it's you." It was an obvious statement, and she realised that half a second later and waited for him to make some sort of sarcastic comment.
Instead he looked perplexed. "Is it?" He frowned, apparently trying to remember something. "Oh, yes, I suppose it is."
The initial moment of surprise began to wear off, and she found it in herself to laugh. "What, nine hundred years and you never looked in a mirror?"
The Doctor looked affronted. "It's not that! It's just that I haven't -" He caught himself. I haven't had much time to get used to this body, he had been about to say, and now wasn't the time to bring up regeneration.
Rose seemed not to notice the slip. "Anyway, it's weird, but I don't think we'll find anything in here. Let's go." In truth she found the wax sculpture of the Doctor amongst all the Daleks to be somehow frightening, but she wasn't about to say that. "C'mon."
"You really hate those Dalek things, don't you?"
"What tipped you off?"
Silence.
"When I shut you in with that Dalek... I thought that I had killed you." A pause. "And then I let it out. There was a city nearby, and I let it out."
Uncomfortable. "But it worked out, didn't it?"
"A million people could have died. You could have died. All because of me."
And millions of people had died, hadn't they? Billions. He'd watched their planets burn.
"I'm still alive, aren't I? And so are they. So there's nothing to worry about, really."
No answer.
"Let's go back to that room, okay? The normal one. You can get some sleep."
"I don't sleep."
"You need it anyway. Come on."
Rose raised her eyebrows, looking around the room. "I'm pretty sure it wasn't like this ten minutes ago."
The room looked as if it had perished in a fire some time before. The walls were blackened; there were some charred pieces of wood that might once have been part of the desk. Rose shone the torch around, trying to work out whether they might have somehow got into the wrong room, and then uncertainly touched the half-melted metal of the bedstead. It was cold. There was no way the room could have burnt down in the few minutes they had been gone without leaving a trace of fire or heat.
The Doctor stood in the doorway, staring at the room. He was silent for some time before saying, quietly, "I'm sorry I dragged you into all of this."
"What, this town? Don't worry about it. It's been interesting." She paused, considering. "Weird and scary, but I kind of expected that, 'cause you're like a weirdness-and-scariness magnet."
"You had nothing to do with it, though. It's me this town is trying to punish. You shouldn't be here."
She turned, stared at him. "What d'you mean, 'punish'?"
"Margaret said I'd have to be a killer to know how they thought." He was staring fixedly at a random point on the wall.
Rose frowned. "But you wouldn't do something like that. You've always been trying to save people. What, are you going to listen to a Slitheen? She lied to you about everything else."
He turned to look at her at last. "Rose, I destroyed the Daleks. I destroyed other planets - innocent planets - just to get to them."
"The Nestene Consciousness," she realised. "Was that -"
"I forced a sun into nova. Right where I knew they would be. Burned their ships. Burned an entire solar system. Watched it happen." He shook his head. "I'm like the Big Bad Wolf, destroying homes. Worse. When the wolf couldn't blow down the house of bricks, he didn't try to set it on fire."
Rose swallowed. She didn't like to look at the Doctor, not when he was like this.
"But that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to wipe them from history, make it so they never existed. So I went back in time. I killed their creator."
"You killed -"
"I had no choice!" He almost shouted it, and Rose instinctively moved backward, pressed herself against the charred wall.
"But what about - what about the Reapers?"
The Doctor laughed humourlessly. "Yeah, that's right. I changed the timeline, so the Reapers would come to fix it. Heal the wound in time. Restore the balance." He was facing her, but he seemed to be staring into nothing. Rose felt increasingly uneasy. "If they did that, the Daleks would come back." A pause. "So I had to restore the balance first."
There was a very long silence, during which he seemed unwilling to look at her. Rose wanted to say something, to ask him what he did, but she wasn't sure whether she would like the answer.
Eventually he spoke again, very quietly.
"The Time Lords. My people. They opposed the Daleks."
He turned, still not looking at Rose. The dimension stabiliser was sitting on the remains of the desk. In a way, he had expected it. He had seen it with Nancy. Tell the truth, and the answer will appear.
He picked it up and left.
Rose stayed in the room for a long time before she followed him.