==Chapter 7==

Don't Blink

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul.

– Bram Stoker, Dracula

Watson snatched up the phone on the first ring, heart in his mouth. Please be Sally, please... "Hello?" He still had to be careful how he answered – no telling who else might come looking for him...

"John?" Watson exhaled in relief at the familiar voice. "It's Sally. Ready to take down that list?"

He already had his notebook open at the old list, pencil poised. "Go ahead."

"All right. 'Citizen Kane'... 'The Great Gatsby'... 'Sleepless In Seattle'..."

Watson carefully jotted down each consecutive number next to the correct titles on the old list – he'd rewrite it after hanging up.

"...and 'Forrest Gump'."

Watson scribbled '17' next to the last title, which, oddly enough, was the very last DVD he'd purchased that afternoon. "That's perfect, Sally, thank you." Finally, they were getting close to a solution.

Sally sighed. "I'm just sorry I didn't do something smart, like listing them alphabetically."

"Sally, you mustn't blame yourself for this, you couldn't have known what was going to happen. Can you get back again all right?"

"Yeah, the cab's waiting outside – going right back to it now."

"Good, see you soon." Half an hour would hopefully be enough for David to put everything onto a single disc.

"Count on it."

Sally had to admit that it was a relief to get back to John's apartment building without any trouble. She was inside the building on her way to the lift when she heard a door open behind her and a man's voice call out, "Oi, 'scuse me! You Sally Sparrow?"

She whipped around to face him, heart hammering—was she about to find out that John had disappeared, too? "Yes."

The man looked at her strangely. "All right, take it easy!" He held out a jewel case with a disc inside. "The Doc asked if you could bring this up."

Sally exhaled deeply in relief, not caring how weird she might seem. John—it was too late to start calling him "Watson" now, even in the privacy of her thoughts—was still okay.

The man nodded down at a cast on his foot. "I would, but I ain't goin' up all those bloody steps on this ankle—lift's on the blink again."

"All right, thanks." She took the case. "Thanks very much," she said feelingly. "Goodnight." She turned and hurried down the hall to the stairwell, then took the steps at a run, feeling a sense of urgency and unsure of whether she was being watched or paranoid.

She reached John's door and rapped insistently. "John? It's Sally!"

Watson opened the door after hastily checking through the spyhole again. Thank God, a longer hour he'd never spent. "Come on in."

Sally stepped inside, handed him the case, and put her hand over her heart, sighing in relief. "Your friend nearly gave me a heart-attack..."

He looked at her quizzically. "I'm sorry if David startled you – he can be a little abrupt at times." Although the young man's lack of social graces were nothing compared to Holmes at his worst moments. "It's just that those stairs have been my nemesis from my first day here, and with the lift out of order..." Typical that it should happen again at the worst possible moment. He'd had considerable difficulty in getting back up to his own floor earlier, and the colder weather wasn't helping at all.

She nodded slowly, then frowned and tilted her head. "He called you 'the Doc'."

"Oh. No, David doesn't know who I am – but I did patch him up a bit when we first met." Poor David did seem to have more than his fair share of bad luck; that sprained ankle was his third injury since the mugging that had brought Watson to his door.

She smiled—apparently, you could take the doctor out of his practice but you couldn't take the practice out of the doctor. "All right, well..." She nodded invitingly at the disc. "Shall we?"

Watson looked down anxiously at the disc. This was it, the moment he'd been working so hard to reach. He took a deep breath, looking up at Sally, smiling back as bravely as he could. "Indeed." He faltered suddenly as the realisation hit him hard: everything was about to change – once they started down this path together, there could be no turning back. "Sally... I..." Dear heaven, there was still so much he wanted to say to her... and mere words had never seemed so inadequate before.

She frowned at him, unsure of why he was nervous, but she took his hand and squeezed it comfortingly. "Come on, Dr. Watson," she murmured. "Let's get some answers."

He squeezed back, nodding gratefully, then took one final deep breath before moving to the player and placing the new disc in the tray. "Here we go..." Please, God, let this work...

He moved back and sat down on the couch, notebook and pencil at the ready. He'd already reordered the fragments he had watched, but so far, David was the only one who'd seen all of the Doctor's half in the right order. He'd just have to jot down Sally's half for now, and write the whole thing out later – assuming there was time, of course.

The disc finally finished activating, and the Doctor appeared on the screen. He really looked like a nerdy college professor, in the suit and glasses. "Hello," said Sally. "So you're the Doctor..."

"Yep, that's me."

Her eyes narrowed. "Okay, that was scary. But... you're a time-traveller, so... Oh, God, you knew this was going to happen, didn't you? And you somehow know what I'm going to say."

The Doctor smiled as if impressed. "Yes, I do, and yes, I did—sort of, anyway. Y'know, you're good at this."

Sally didn't smile back—from what she'd already seen of the Doctor, the man seemed predisposed to chatter. Which she didn't mind under normal circumstances, but the current circumstances were far from normal. "And you're stuck in 1969, right?"

"We are stuck." Watson sagged in relief at the sound of Holmes's voice, a moment before the detective moved into the camera's view, wearing a plain Sixties-style suit, and looking decidedly fed up. Holmes turned to face the screen, expression pleading. "Please. John. You have to get me out of here. If I have to listen to the Beatles one more time, I shan't be responsible!"

Watson hastily looked down to conceal his twitching lips, before remembering sheepishly that his friend couldn't actually see him. It was a good thing Holmes didn't know that he was fast becoming addicted to Elton John...

Sally couldn't help grinning in sympathy, relieved to see Sherlock Holmes there for his own sake as much as John's. She'd always enjoyed those stories, even if she wasn't a huge fan. "Hello, Mr. Holmes," she said without thinking.

Watson frowned a little as the detective merely nodded woodenly in return, looking rather like he'd just bitten into a lemon. There was no call for Holmes to cut up so stiff, he must know how much the three of them owed to Sally. The sooner they were reunited, the better, it appeared. Watson knew only too well what it was like to be stuck in the wrong time; and having only the Doctor for company long term could hardly have been a blessing to his poor friend, he and the Time Lord were too similar in temperament.

The Doctor shooed Holmes back out of the camera. "We're working on a limited time-frame." He turned expectantly back to Sally.

"All right," said Sally, wrapping her brain around this, "so you know what I'm going to say, forty years before I say it."

"Thirty-eight."

"How?" she asked wearily.

"People don't understand time. It's not what you think it is."

"Then what is it?"

"Complicated."

"Tell me."

"Very complicated."

Sally's eyes narrowed again, her tone dropping to dead serious. "I'm clever, and I'm listening. And don't patronise me, because people have died and I'm not happy. Tell me."

Then she remembered this part, the part she'd conversed with before, as the Dotor looked like he was considering how to explain something. "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff."

"Yeah, I've seen this bit before. You said that sentence got away from you."

The Doctor frowned. "It got away from me, yeah."

"Next thing you're going to say is, 'Well, I can hear you.'"

"Well, I can hear you."

Sally sighed, already tired of this conversation—it wasn't getting them anywhere! "This is crazy."

"Welcome to our world..." Watson muttered without thinking, still scribbling busily.

Sally ignored that. "But how do you know what I'm going to say?"

"I've got a copy of the finished transcript. It's on my Autocue."

"The finished transcript..." Her voice trailed off as she realised that the Doctor was looking pointedly towards her left, where John sat scribbling notes. Scribbling dialogue. "Oh my god, the transcript came from you. And..." She blinked at the strange characters on the paper. "...in shorthand? You can do shorthand?"

Watson raised a dignified eyebrow, taking a few moments' break to flex his cramped fingers. "How else am I to take notes when I'm investigating with the Great Detective, I ask you?"

Sally raised both eyebrows in turn. "Fair point."

The Doctor cut in. "All right, look: what matters is we can communicate. We have got big problems now. They've taken the blue box, haven't they? The angels have the phone box."

Watson couldn't help smiling faintly at the familiar phrase – only now that he'd heard Sally's side of the story, the meaning had become a good deal clearer. He shivered at the memory of how he'd so innocently turned his back on that angel statue in the warehouse...

"What do you mean, 'angels'?" Sally asked, just to clarify. "You mean those statue things?"

"Creatures from another world."

"They're statues." That was the point Sally couldn't get around.

"Only when you see them."

"What does that mean?"

"Lonely assassins, they were called. No-one knows where they came from. They're as old as the universe, or very nearly. They've survived this long as they have the most perfect defence system ever evolved. They are quantum-locked. They don't exist when being observed. The moment they're seen by any other living creature they freeze into rock. No choice. It's a fact of their biology. In the sight of any living thing, they literally turn to stone. And you can't kill a stone. Course, a stone can't kill you either. But then you turn your head away, then you blink, and oh, yes it can!"

Sally glanced uneasily at John, her heart rising into her throat.

It was all Watson could do to keep his own anxiety from showing in his face. This was what they'd been up against the whole time? Dear God... It seemed a miracle now that neither of them had met the same fate as the others!

"That's why they cover their eyes. They're not weeping, they can't risk looking at each other. Their greatest asset is their greatest curse. They can never be seen. The loneliest creatures in the universe. And I'm sorry, I am very, very sorry—it's up to you now."

"What? What are we supposed to do?"

"The blue box, it's my time machine. There is a world of time energy in there they could feast on forever. The damage they can do can switch off the sun. You have got to send it back to me!"

"How?" But the Doctor did not reply. More desperately, she repeated, "How?"

"And that's it, I'm afraid," the Doctor said unexpectedly. "There's no more from you on the transcript, that's all I've got. I dunno what stopped you talking, but I can guess. They're coming. The angels are coming for you. But listen, your life could depend on this. Don't blink! Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast, faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink! Good luck!"

The screen went blank.

"No, don't, you can't!" Sally rose as if to urge the Doctor back, but she couldn't. He was stuck and so were they, now, with murderous alien predators on their tail. "John!"

Watson rose swiftly, notebook falling unheeded from his lap to the floor, and gripped her shoulders bracingly. "Stay calm, Sally," he said firmly, sternly reminding himself that if he started panicking as well, their chances would go from slim to none. "We'll be all right, we just have to keep our wits about us."

Sally grabbed his right hand in a death grip, unable to speak. In the course of one conversation, her life had gone from a murder mystery to a horror story, and she was suddenly faced with the very real fact of her own mortality for the first time. That would be enough to terrify anyone, surely.

Watson squeezed back comfortingly, then reached out with his free hand and ejected the disc from the player, forcing himself to calm down and think. "All right, now... Sally, you said the TARDIS was at the police station?" Would it be too much of a risk to phone for a cab at this point?

Sally thought back to her first encounter with Billy. "But the Angels got to Billy right after I left the station—they probably got the TARDIS right then and there."

Watson swore under his breath. "So they've taken her again... but where?" His eyes widened. "Wait. The police retrieved the ship from Wester Drumlins after the Angels stole her the first time... and if you consider all those other people going missing from there... it's almost as if that house is their main hunting ground!" Two years of preying on unsuspecting explorers...

"Even so, why would they take it—her—back there? I mean, there's no reason to..." Sally thought further through her conversation with Billy. "They need a key—the key to get in, not even the police could manage it, they need that."

Watson's lips tightened, slipping the disc into his coat pocket. He pulled his TARDIS key out from under his shirt, which he'd been wearing around his neck day and night since arriving back in London. "And I have the only one left," he said grimly, "Holmes and the Doctor have the other two." He frowned. "But if they knew that, why haven't they come after it before now?" And he was deeply thankful he hadn't known about the Angels before tonight – he might never sleep again as it was!

Sally's eyes widened at a terrible thought. "John... did you remember to lock your door?"