FAIR WARNING: THIS IS DARK. IF YOU'RE READING THIS HOPING TO FEEL COMFY IN YOUR LOVE OF THE DOCTOR, THEN... WELL, READ ANOTHER STORY! IT WILL BE A WHILE BEFORE THIS STORY GETS COMFY AGAIN.
THREE
"What is that thing?" Francine asked. She and Jack were in Martha's room, and he was extracting a funny-looking contraption from his briefcase.
Martha herself was on the bed where they had left her, sitting up, now with her knees pulled inside her oversized shirt, arms around them, rocking back and forth. She seemed not to register Jack's presence after the first ten seconds he was in the room with her. The light had startled her as before, but then they had shut the door, and she seemed to draw back into herself. Whatever was going on inside her head now had her full attention once more.
A few minutes before, as he had crossed the threshold into the room, he had been half hoping that she would sense him, somehow assosicate him with some painful memory about aliens and death, and have an adverse reaction to him. Perhaps then, they could all stop worrying that the Doctor had done something horrible to her. But no such luck. The Time Lord remained the only being who could not come near Martha.
"This," he said to Francine to answer her question, "Is, well... it's a mind-reader. It's got some fancy-schmancy name that I can't remember because it's in Nevolish Sral, which is the native language of a planet on the edge of the Lefftok Galaxy. I introduced the daughter of the planet's High Priest to her husband, so the High Priest owed me a favor, and he gave me this..."
She stared at him with frustrated inquisitiveness.
He waved off his own words. "You know what? Never mind. The point is, it's alien technology, and it's going to help me see what's going on inside Martha's pretty head."
As he fitted parts of it together, and metal pieces made clicking sounds as they locked into place, Martha seemed to flinch. She reacted to them as though they were shotgun blasts, and by the time Jack had assembled the contraption, she had her hands over her ears and was making a high-pitched, low-volume wailing sound. Her mother tried to comfort her, but Martha's mental state was extremely, and inconveniently, selective about what sorts of external stimuli it chose to heed. It took about five minutes to calm her completely.
"Are we ready?" he asked Francine after a pause.
"I suppose so," she said, standing up from her daughter's bed. "What are you hoping to see?"
"Best case scenario? I'll see the attack, possibly be able to identify the perpetrating alien, and from there be able to figure out how to reverse its effects. Worse case scenario, I see a bunch of jumbled-up rock-video images from random times in her life, both real and imaginary, so fragmented and individually meaningless that I won't be able to decipher any of it."
"Oh, lovely," Francine said, sighing heavily.
"Here goes nothing," he said. He took a seat on a small stool at the foot of Martha's bed. He was met with some resistance when he tried to fit the receiver over Martha's head, ears and eyes, so Francine held her arms. Once the equipment was in place, Martha didn't fight anymore. A small helmet covered the top of her head, and a pair of ocular scanners fitted over her eyes. They were each connected by a metal casing to earbuds, and finally a strap held the whole thing on by cutting across the back of her head. It didn't look comfortable at all, and Jack had never tried it on a human, but he figured if it didn't work, they were no worse off than when they had started.
He fitted a similar device on himself, minus the helmet. Once his eyes and ears were covered, he had a strange sensation of falling...
Martha lay on the floor. She was trembling. All around her there was screaming and cold and stone. The pungent stench of foul humanity weighed heavily in the air. She felt nothing but hardness and some straw.
And then she saw the bars. It was mostly dark, but she could see bars. She was in a cell, trapped among the screaming and wretched. Panic surged through her. How the hell did she get here? Perhaps if she could work that out, she could work out how to escape.
She remembered being in a tight space... she'd been inside a box for some time. How long, she had no idea. She had been a prisoner then, too, she knew that much. When she arrived here, she had run, tried to get help, tried to explain, but no one listened, no one cared. Instead, the men had declared her mad and hit her over the head... and now she was here.
She tried to touch her head to examine the bruise, but found that her hands were shackled to her feet with rusty old chains. Hands together and feet together, she couldn't move. The pain in her head felt bad enough to be a mild concussion, and a new panic shot through her. And then she realised that her bladder was full. Once she realised it, she couldn't think of anything else. Powerless and trapped, she had no choice but to relieve herself as she lay there, and then begin to whimper. She'd never felt so alone, so confused or so humiliated. Except for maybe once...
Hours it seemed, she lay there, wet and cold, unsure of anything. And then, a large man came into her cell. He did not speak to her at first, but doused the entire space with frigid cold water that stank of fish and excrement, and then doused Martha herself. She twitched on the floor in reaction to the shock, and gasped for the breath it had taken from her. When her voice found leverage, she cried out, "Oi, where the hell am I?"
"You best keep silent, Miss," the large man growled. "Or you'll find your mouth wired shut as well."
"What?"
"Hush!" He stepped outside the gate for a moment, and when he came back, he had a chunk of dry bread the size of a small child's fist. He shoved it in her mouth and said, "Eat."
She struggled to chew it and swallow before he shoved it down her throat, and then he seemed to splash wine over her face. She supposed that he was trying to get her to drink it, so she instictively opened her mouth, though not much wine succeeded in getting in.
"There now," he said. "See you tomorrow."
He left her on the floor in the dark, sputtering, choking a bit, face splashed with wine.
She found that time meant nothing in this place. No windows or doors nearby assured that she had no clue what time of day it was. All she knew was that her joints were growing stiff, the shackles were rubbing her skin raw, and the large man came in to douse her with frigid water three more times before anything different happened. In that time, she became dirty, bloody, smelly, increasingly weak and more humiliated by the hour. Her only human contact, other than the screaming from elsewhere in the building, was with the water man, and the only food she got was one chunk of dry bread per day, and a few ounces of wine splashed on her face. She spent her time crying, struggling, then crying some more. Occasionally, she would be able to sleep, but the screams pretty much prevented that. No hope, no will... but she could not die.
And then she heard the familiar voice.
"Do you honestly think this place is any good?" it asked.
"I've been mad, I've lost my mind," a second voice answered. "Fear of this place set me right again. Serves its purpose."
"You lost your son," the familiar voice said.
"My only boy, the Black Death took him. I wasn't even there. It made me question everything. The futility of this fleeting existence... to be or not to be..." then the second voice paused. "Oh, that's quite good."
"You should write that down."
To be or not to be? Someone in this place is quoting Shakespeare? And then a realisation came. Oh, my God, it was Shakespeare! This was the year 1599, she remembered now coming here! She was in the right city at the wrong time. Now all she had to do was wait four hundred years for her time to come.
Shakespeare, yes. But the other voice, the really familiar one... it weighed heavily on her mind. She didn't hear it for a while, but it echoed inside her head. She closed her eyes tight, either in an effort to concentrate harder or to push it out entirely. She wasn't sure which.
The voice rose up again from a nearby cell. "No!" it screamed. It resonated loudly in Martha's consciousness like a rush of thunder. "Ah fourteen! That's it! Fourteen! The fourteen stars of the Rexel Planet Configuration! Creature, I name you Carrionite!"
And then a piercing female scream. And then nothing.
The voice gave her chills, made her excited and furious at the same time. Who was it? What had he done? Why was she here?
And then she saw them. Shakespeare and the owner of The Voice, passing by her cell, being escorted by the jailer.
They stopped. Her eyes met with his.
The Doctor. That was it. The voice.
And every muscle in her body tensed. Every fibre of her existence recoiled from his face as a sinister grin spread over his features, and his dark eyes penetrated hers. She began to struggle once more against the chains, and began to cry out for help. Useless in this place filled with screams for help and loud, obscene cries to be set free.
"Does my Lord Doctor wish some entertainment before he leaves?" asked the jailer. "I'll whip her if you like. She'll put on a good show for you."
The Doctor never took his eyes off her, and his lips seem to move in slow motion as he formed the words, "Yes, I do."
She struggled harder, tried to move away from the bars, take herself out of his deadly gaze, pull her body out of the line of fire. But of course it did no good... the jailer was inside her cell along with the Doctor before she knew what was happening.
The jailer hauled her to her feet. Her stiff, aching joints meant that she was in serious pain before the flogging even began, and the shackles meant that she was bent at the waist with her hands at her shins. She was turned sideways, her bum facing the west wall, her face the east, and the Doctor was on her left side. She heard the whip a split second before she felt it, and when it cracked across her backside, resonated against her soaking-wet jeans, she felt as though she would break in half. She glanced at the Doctor, and his maniacal smile was growing by the moment.
Another crack across her backside. This one caused her to give in to her tears. Her humiliation and pain was complete, and look on the Doctor's face grew more and more greedy as she wept and begged them to stop, more and more..
That was enough. Captain Jack tore the contraption from his head. He found that he was panting and sweating. His heart was racing. He looked at Francine with desperate eyes. Martha looked exactly as she had when he had lost himself in her nightmare: semi-comatose, jumpy, completely mad. He hastily took the device from her head as well, as if it could save her from those thoughts.
He sat for a moment with his head down and his elbows resting on his knees. He caught his breath, and then turned his head to face Francine. "How long was I in there?"
"Two or three minutes is all," she said, fondling her necklace again. "What did you see?"
He sat up straight and looked at her earnestly. "You'd better sit down."
