Episode Two: The Goblin in the Stovepipe
The Doctor finds himself alone on the streets of 1930s Spain. Voices whisper in the shadows and out of stovepipes in the town of Zaragoza. The newspapers dismiss it as a servant's prank, a way to sell more gossip rags, but when the Doctor learns that half a dozen children have gone missing, he begins to suspect a more sinister motive and must seek help from a familiar stranger who has secrets of her own.
This story takes place between Episode 1 and 2, Season Three. Tenth Doctor.
A little boy, six years old, walked down the deserted street, kicking his rock from one circle of lamplight to the next. He had found the rock, smooth and round and white, more than a week ago and carried it in his pocket just for kicking. As he walked along, he adjusted his hat, cocking it to one side first and then the other before settling it down over one eye. He hooked his thumb through his belt loop, proud that he had finally kicked the sucking habit. He wanted to look as tough as the older boys, and so he put a bit of swagger in his step. It looked more like a waddle with his stubby legs and ill-fitting knee-britches, but it made him feel safer to walk the lonely nighttime streets with a scowl on his face. If any of the older boys had appeared, he would have run the other way.
The boy arrived at a narrow alleyway cut behind a wall of brick, row-houses. He looked both ways to make sure no one was watching, and then darted down the muddy path. There were no lights down that way, not even an old gas lantern or the square of light from a window high up. The bright light bulbs of the street were far away.
He hurried forward, counting the doors until he came to the high wooden fence that blocked off one house's kitchen garden from the rodents and scavengers that lived in the alley. The boy knocked at the back door and waited, anxiously, bouncing on the heels of his well-worn shoes. He only had one hole in the heel of his sock, and he was proud of that, too.
Eventually, a woman opened the door. She was round-faced, full-bodied and strong and her fingers were worn down from working with them. Her long, black hair was pulled back in a knot and there was flour on her cheek and on her hands. She looked out into the alley, and then – feeling the tug on her apron – looked down. "Válgame Dios! Antonio! What are you doing here?" the woman cried.
"Tengo hambre," he said, the swagger gone from his step. He was just a large eyed, hollow cheeked child with scuffed knees and a dirty jacket. "I'm hungry, Miss Karena. Please?"
"Where's your mother? She should be feeding you, not me."
"She went with Mr. Carmichael again. Last time she didn't come home for three days."
"And she didn't leave you anything, not a crumb in the cupboard," the woman said with a sigh. It wasn't a question. She knew Maria Lucia, and the woman was as reliable as rain - never there when you wanted it but always ready to ruin a fine day. Karena looked out into the alley again, her dark eyes searching the shadows until she was satisfied that there were no more hungry children waiting to beg scraps from her if she fed this one. She tried to be kind-hearted, but street children were as bad as rats sometimes.
"Alright," she said, finally, "just this once. Wait here, and not one toe over the threshold, you hear!" She stepped back into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a thick slice of bread, a wedge of cheese and an only slightly bruised apple. She had wrapped the food in a piece of coffee-stained newspaper and handed it to the boy.
"Now, off with you," she said, "y tan cuidado! Mind the shadows. The streets aren't safe this time of night."
"Gracias, Karena!" The boy ran off down the alleyway clutching his treasure. The woman shook her head, shut the door, making sure to turn the key in the heavy iron lock.
Antonio ran to the other end of the alley and sat down in the shadows of a deep doorway. He tore open the newspaper and ate hungrily, swallowing the food as fast as he could chew it. There were other boys, bigger boys, who lived on these streets, and they would readily steal this feast off of him and beat him until he'd told who'd given it to him.
Someone laughed nearby, and Antonio froze. He'd eaten all his cheese and nearly all the bread, but the apple was as yet untouched. It was too loud a fruit to eat out in the open, and if one of the bigger boys found him with it – bitten or no – he would have to give it up. He listened carefully for the sound of footsteps or voices, but the night was silent. Antonio looked out from his doorway, up and down the alley, but he couldn't see anyone. An automobile rumbled past on the road nearby. Had the laughter come from the auto? Antonio wondered. The echoes off a high, brick wall could sometimes play tricks on you...
His racing heartbeat slowed, and he settled back into his doorway. He had his teeth on the apple but hadn't yet bitten into it when a voice crept out of darkness and sat down beside him.
Tengo hambre, it whispered in his ear. Tengo hambre, Antonio.
Antonio jumped up and ran as fast as he could toward the mouth of the alley. His heart raced and his feet pounded on the hard-packed gravel but the light of the street seemed to stretch farther and farther away. He felt something long and strong and thick with hair wrap around his neck and lift him up. The last thing he saw before his vision went dark was the round, red apple that Karena had given him bouncing away from his limp hand and rolling into the gutter.
Tengo hambre...
.
The lot had been empty for ten years at least. Only cats and the rats they fed on came there. Manolo and Sons had been shut down for years, ever since the old horse-and-carriage companies had been displaced by carriages without horses. A high, wooden wall encircled the lot and had been baked and frozen alternately while the seasons passed. Bales of rotten straw were still stacked against the old fence, and the remains of the animal stalls - what hadn't been broken apart and sold off for new buildings - were scattered around. In one corner, a couple of optimistic street urchins had tried to build a clubhouse. On the muddy ground, grass had been choked out by weeds which had in turn been choked out by ice and then washed away by rain.
Not a sound had been heard in that lot for ten years, and the mice in the hay bales didn't know what to make of whirring rush of engines as the Tardis materialized atop a stack of old pallets. It stood for a moment, like an ominous, blue monolith while the engines shrieked and the light flashed. One, brave rodent crept out slowly to have a sniff, but raced off again as the Tardis shifted and crunched down through the brittle wood pallets with a boom.
The engines fell silent and a moment later the door opened, and the Doctor stumbled out backwards, holding his tie over his mouth and waving away a billow of green smoke.
"Temperamental old pile of rubbish!" he coughed. He looked around at the empty lot and then up at the air. The sky overhead was brightening with the new day, but the air was still cold and in the distance he could hear automobile engines, shouting voices and the bark of unchained dogs: all the sounds of early industrial urban decay.
"Definitely not Fiji," the Doctor muttered. "The circuit coordinators are on the fritz again..." He took a deep breath and charged back into the Tardis, slamming the door behind him.
A mangy, black cat hopped up onto the fence, licked its paws and cocked an ear toward the blue box, listening to the muffled cursing of the Doctor and the grinding of the Tardis engines. there was another loud boom, and the box shuddered. The cat twitched its tail and leaped down again, running off as the Doctor emerged once more, with his coat over his arm. It was cold outside and he was stuck here for awhile. The Tardis refused to budge from this empty lot.
The Doctor locked the doors behind him and looked around. He was alone, but that was alright. He'd travelled alone before, and it had turned out alright. Whatever Donna might say, she was wrong. He didn't need anyone else. And anyway, his life wasn't just one death-defying adventure after another. He could relax when he wanted to. He'd meant to be relaxing in Fiji by now, but this place would do just fine. It was Earth, after all, he knew it by sight and by smell and by the gravity under his feet.
There was a door cut into the wooden wall around the lot, and it only took a few quick pulses from the sonic screwdriver to undo the padlock and let himself out.
The alley outside was as dank and depressing as the old, empty lot. To his left, the old wooden walls stretched forward and back, and to his right, the back of a factory took up the whole next block. Even the sky above was grey and full of smoke. The Doctor was tempted to head back into the Tardis and start making some of those repairs that he kept promising himself he would make...
"Still, it's Earth..." he said, tasting the air. "Early nineteenth century, Europe. Not England, though." He shrugged his shoulders and forced a smile, but there was no one there to see it. Only silence answered him, and he missed the sound of unceasing, silly questions. Where are we? When are we? What are we going to do?
He missed the chatter, and he missed... His trouser pocket pinged at him.
The Doctor frowned and fished the sonic screwdriver out. He must have accidentally turned on the auto-scan function when he unlocked the padlock on the fence door. The device had been scanning the local area's radiation readings and must have found something unusual enough to set off the alarm. Unusual enough to peak the Doctor's curiosity as well.
"Well, let's have a look, then," he said with undisguised enthusiasm. He swung the sonic around, homed in on the signal's location and set off. He'd meant to relax, but this was only a small adventure, he thought to himself, and there was nothing wrong with having a small adventure. He could quit anytime he wanted.
The sonic led him out of the alley and onto the street, down three blocks north and to the left. He stopped just long enough to buy a newspaper off a passing paperboy with a Zaruvian khol - an iron coin that looked just enough like a Spanish peseta. The Doctor scanned the headlines of the Zaragoza Herald. He'd been right about Spain. And the day was September 23, 1934.
He folded up the paper again with a frown. "Have I been to Spain before?" he wondered aloud. "Zaragoza? Why do I know that name?" A woman passing him on the street glanced at him and gave him wide berth. "You're talking to yourself, Doctor," the Doctor muttered. Zaragoza? Oh, well. It would come back to him sooner or later.
A quarter mile from the factory district where he'd left the Tardis, the sonic pinged again and led him down an alley that was even narrower than the one he'd been in before. There was hardly more than a footpath between the back of the row houses on either side. The ground sloped down on either side to a deep gutter full of several inches of muddy water and floating garbage, the refuse of a dozen families thrown out the back door.
The Doctor picked his way down the alley until the sonic flashed red in front of a doorway to his right. On the ground, a tattered newspaper lay half-frozen in a puddle of mud not far from a rat-gnawed apple core and what might once have been a crust of moldy bread. The whole pile stank, but the sonic pinged in earnest and, pinching his nose, the Doctor lifted up the soggy newspaper. The corner tore off in a jagged line where it had been frozen, and underneath was a child-sized cap, just the right size for a child.
The cap seemed to be the source of the erratic readings that the sonic had picked up, but he couldn't see why. The readings were alien to this time and place, but the cap was not. It was a plain, brown beret, nothing special or alien about it. The Doctor carried the cap and scrap of newspaper out of the dark alley into the not-much-brighter daylight of the street. Most of it was smudged out, the ink running, but the headline was large and dark and had survived.
BOY (6) VANISHES FROM SENORA PEREZ GARCIA'S BOARDING HOUSE
He squinted at the smeared text under the headline, but he could only make out a few words here and there. The boy had been playing with friends when he'd vanished. There had been other disappearances, but the police were not concerned. Children ran away all the time. Servants were lazy, etc, etc, etc.
The Doctor sighed and looked around. Children did go missing all the time. It was sad, but true, and yet... the strange energy readings on the child-sized beret couldn't be a coincidence, could it? Rose wouldn't think so. She would be sure that the cap, the newspaper article, the Tardis's landing here on its own, all of it was connected, and she would have told him to investigate. She would have insisted on it!
The Doctor winced. It was mid-morning, and the streets around him were bustling with traffic. Boxy automobiles and rusty motorbuses rattled past on the uneven, paved road. Women in home sewn dresses walked out on the day's shopping while men wore ready-made clothes to work and stepped out with their sleeves rolled up at the elbow in spite of the cold, autumn air. He tried to stop one of the men, to ask him about the missing children, but all he got was a curse and a heavy lunch pail swung at him. He wasn't about to try his luck with one of the housewives.
He was about to give up and head back into the alley for another scan when a small, leather-sewn ball bounced off a wall near him and struck a pile of feedbags outside a shop before rolling to a halt at his feet. He turned and saw three young boys in knee-britches chasing each other up the sidewalk after the ball.
The Doctor picked it up, and the boys skidded to a halt in front of him. "Hey, that's mine!" the littlest boy pointed at the ball. Two women walking the other way looked up and quickly crossed the street. A group of working men nearby laughed at the scene, but the Doctor had always fancied himself good with children.
He tossed the ball from hand to hand. "Morning, lads. What's the news?" he asked cheerfully and, he hoped, encouragingly.
The first boy, the biggest of the three wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked the Doctor over. "Give it back, Pendejo."
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. Time for a different tactic, he decided. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a small, rubber ball (good for gravity testing) and a piece of hexagonal circuitry from an old image translator. He tried to juggle the three while the boys stared at him as if he were mad.
"There now," he said, struggling to catch and throw the balls without dropping the circuit or the cap in his hand. "I just wanted to ask if you knew anything about these children going miss-"
"That's Tonio's hat!" The smallest boy shouted, pointing at the beret in the Doctor's hands. "I ain't seen him in three days."
"What you doing with Tonio's hat?" the bigger boy demanded.
The Doctor fumbled and dropped the two balls. He tucked the circuit into his pocket. "Now, I can explain that..."
"He took 'im!" the middle boy shouted. "He took 'im like he took Pal!"
"Pal? Is that a friend of yours? Is he missing, too?" The Doctor could feel his grip on the situation slipping. "I'm here to help. I want to help you find your friend!"
But the boys weren't listening to him. The smallest boy had chased after his ball, but the biggest had picked up a sharp-looking stone from the pavement and was looking less than friendly. The Doctor had faced down Daleks and Cybermen, but he didn't know what to do faced with three dirty street-children with rocks in their hands.
"I'll be on my way, then." The Doctor took off down the street, running as fast as he could. Like puppies, the children saw a moving target and gave chase.
The Doctor ran to the end of the block and turned left, launching himself into a crowd of early-morning shoppers. Bumping into tables and knocking over baskets, he could hear the children shouting after him, and other voices, too. Outraged shopkeepers and women shouting. One of the boys threw a rock that went whizzing past his shoulder and shattered a shop window nearby.
The shouting grew even louder, but the Doctor kept running. He turned left and then left again and pressed himself up against the wall. He was back in the alley where he'd started from. The children had scattered when the window was broken, but two members of the local Guardia Civil had taken up the chase. The Doctor could hear the police whistles coming closer and the sound of running boots. He stepped into the nearest doorway and held his breath as the officers ran past.
He waited a moment longer and was about to step out again when the door that he had been leaning against opened up behind him and he tumbled backwards into a dark kitchen.
"Enseñeme las manos!" a woman's voice ordered him, and he heard the click of a revolver barrel being set. The dim light from an overhead window played over the grey metal held by two shaking hands.
Slowly, the Doctor raised his hands. "Why is no one ever glad to see me," he muttered, and began to stand up - no easy feat in a cramped kitchen with his hands in the air.
"No se mueva," the woman said, but he heard the catch in her voice. He'd had enough guns aimed at him that he knew pretty well who would and wouldn't shoot an unarmed man.
"I'm just going to stand up," he said, moving slowly until he was on his feet. The woman backed away from him. He could make out the shape of her body and the shadows of her face. She wouldn't be able to see him any better. "I'm not armed," he said, waving his empty fingers to prove it. "I don't have any weapons. I'm not here to hurt you. I-"
"You broke into my home, sir," the woman said. "That is a criminal act, and I will call the Guardia Civil!"
"You opened the door for me!" he said. The woman tightened her grip on the gun. "Alright, look, I've got no weapons. Search me if you like. Go on." He held open his coat and turned around. Even in the dim light, he could see the woman's confusion. Keep 'em guessing, that was his motto. Don't give 'em any time to think.
"Hey, how about a bit more like," he said. "I like to see the woman holding a gun on me, and you don't want me making any sudden moves, do you?"
She hesitated and then nodded. Still careful to keep the gun trained on him, she stepped back and reached out to switch on the single, yellow bulb overhead.
The Doctor blinked in the sudden light and raised his arm to shield his eyes. He had a glimpse of black hair, a white face and a brown dress. She must have been nearly forty, he thought, but she had the sort of face that only hinted at wrinkles.
"There. That's better. Now, why don't we just..."
"You again!" the woman gasped.
And then the gun went off.
Roll opening theme and credits...
I'm really excited about this one, but I have to admit, I know next to nothing about 1930s Spain, and my high school Spanish is rusted almost to unrecognition, so if you find any mistakes PLEASE let me know! I'm researching as fast as I can, but Wikipedia and Google can only get you so far.
*Please Review*
-Paint
