It didn't take the Doctor long to notice a place where time was strange. Behind the pub there were overflowing bins, and the shadows they cast were wild and wrong.
As the Doctor watched she saw something orange dart between the stuffed bin bags, the colour of sunlight just before night starts to begin. It was shadow, but inverted— light picked out against dark. The outline of a rat, which might have been made out of hands.
She watched as it sliced at the tight skin of a bin bag. Rubbish spilled out from it, disappearing as it hit the rat. That was how they fed, then. Even here, life had found a way.
"Beautiful," she said to herself. "And disgusting. Those things do come together, don't they?"
She scratched the air in front of her with one of her nails. Reality here, was thin as a bin bag, too. This planet was the centre of something huge, timelines rubbing against each other like pigs in a tiny cage.
"I was right to be worried," said the Doctor with a sigh. "They learned about the book from there. The place that they should never be able to see."
The world was pale as tracing paper. She could see clear beyond it, though only for a moment. The Land of Fiction and the Land of Fact. Another place, which she'd tried very hard to avoid. It would be Very Bad Indeed, if she messed up what she was about to do.
She fished around in a pocket to draw out her SCALP(EL)—a Space Cutter and Laser Pointer (Extra Light). It looked exactly like an ordinary scalpel would, but she'd always pretended that was a coincidence.
Cutting an incision in space was tricky, she knew, even for a Time Lord with medical training. Get it wrong, reality started to bleed. That was the last thing she needed, with everything else going on.
She didn't have to worry, though. In the end, it was true what she said— she was a very clever person. She just didn't remember the last time she'd really believed it.
The hole she'd cut in space and time flapped open. Cleanly, bloodlessly. She did good work, when there was no one around to look impressed.
"People always say I jump around the timestream," she said to herself. "Still hate when I have to do it literally."
She sized up the hole she'd made, then ran towards it and leapt. There was a sound like a slurp, and she was gone from the world.
Unseen, the shadows flickered and bulged around the bin. The rat made of light wobbled and distorted, shifting into the shape of a human hand. It flexed its fingers tentatively for a moment, light shifting its way through the dark.
And then it was snaking through the hole in space as well, and there was nothing alive at the back of the pub at all.