Chapter Three:

"Best Not To"

Sally followed Joan dutifully down the hall to another room within the dormitory. It was a boy's room, or perhaps more appropriately, a man's room. It smelled of the lingering ghost of a man's aftershave. There was a shoe polishing kit in a wooden box on the floor by the bureau, and on the bed was a freshly laid-out suit, pressed and folded neatly. And yet, Sally got the impression that it had been some time since any man had set foot in this room.

Joan strode confidently into the room, not bothering to take in the surroundings. She had seen them all before; had held his pillow to her face to breathe in the smell of him. The smell that was fading so very fast. She had no interest in his smell today. Today she only wanted what was in the top desk drawer. She went to it, unlocking it with a small key she kept around her neck, and she slid it open. Inside was a small, leather-bound book. She smiled when she saw it; small, sad. She took it in her hands and undid the strap, then turned to look at Sally.

"A man once lived in this room," she said. "A man I thought I knew. His name was John Smith. He was a teacher here, for a little while. All too short a while, I should think." She looked down at the book in her hands. "Every night he dreamed. Dreamed vividly, of impossible things. Things that could never be. He wrote all of those dreams down in this journal, and one day, he showed them to me. He said it was as if, in his dreams, he had lived another man's life."

She handed the book over then, giving it to Sally, who took it reverently and carefully opened it up. She skimmed past handwritten notes, some words underlined. She skimmed past an ink sketch of a beautiful, modern-looking woman and another of a sort of tin robot-dog. Sketches depicting things which should not have existed in the mind of a man from 1913.

"I don't understand," she said, still flipping through the pages, but more slowly now. Catching snippets of words and phrases here and there. "The Slitheen from Raxacoricofallapatorius," she recited as carefully as a girl in the finals of a spelling bee, and then she shook her head, a slight scoffing laugh escaping her lips. "It's all... nonsense," she proclaimed.

That small, sad smile lit Joan's face once more. "That's what I told him, too," she said. "That it was all nonsense. Dreams of a man with a big imagination, that's all. The stuff of children's books and lunatic's diaries all twined together in some fantastic waltz." She shook her head. "Except it wasn't. I found that out much later. It wasn't nonsense. None of it was. It was all true. It was all... real. He had been living another man's life, my John. He had been another man for hundreds and hundreds of years before he ever became the John Smith I knew. In fact, it was the life he was living then that was a dream. The life he was living with me."

Joan took two steps, closing the distance between herself and Sally, and she turned the pages, then stopped on a sketch of a large police box with a blinking red light on top.

"He wasn't even a proper man," she explained. "Not really. He was something else entirely. He came from very far away. And this," she said, tapping the drawing. "This was his vessel. His... star-ship. It's how he came to me. And it's what took him away."

As she looked upon the drawing, Sally's heart stilled in her chest and her eyes grew wide.

"The Doctor," she whispered, unaware that she had even said it aloud.

Startled, Joan looked up from the drawing and at the younger woman's face. "Yes," she whispered, her eyes becoming very serious, her wheaten brows drawing together. "That's what he called himself. It's who he was in his dreams, and it's who he became when..." She thought of the fobwatch, of the terrible golden glow that drifted from it when it was opened. Of the words... Time Lord. Gallifrey. Her breath hitched and her throat closed up, emotion taking over.

"...It's who he was all along, I suppose," she said, and nodded curtly. "I suppose that there never really was a John Smith. He was always the Doctor, underneath. A strange, silly man in a brown pinstriped suit with odd red canvas shoes on his feet. A man with a tool he called a screwdriver... but like no screwdriver I had ever seen. A man who spoke with a commoner's voice, a man who could never seem to keep his hair neat. A man with two hearts," she said, and a wry smile twisted her lips. "Two hearts, or so he said. But even between the two of them he still never would have been able to love me the way that John Smith did."

Shaking her head, she came out of her reverie, looking down at Sally Sparrow once more.

"You said his name," she gently probed. "Do you know of him?"

Sally just laughed, softly, once, and she looked up at Joan Redfern and smiled. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I know him. I met him. He helped me... helped me defeat the things I told you about. The statues. The Angels. They came for me once before and he saved me from them. And he was just exactly the same man you described, right down to the red sneakers." She laughed again at the puzzled look on Joan Redfern's face, and it hit her all over again how far away from her own time she was. "The shoes," she explained, and shook her head. "It doesn't matter. What matters is he was the same. The very same. No wonder you believed me about the Angels," she marveled. "Once you've met the Doctor, you'll believe anything."

"It's both a blessing and a curse," Joan replied, then took the book gently from Sally's hands and closed it, securing the leather strap and bringing it back to the desk. She set it in the top drawer and slid the drawer closed, then locked it with the key around her neck.

Sally watched as the older woman went through what must be a sort of ritual for her, and she wondered how long the Doctor had been gone. "Was it very long ago?" she gently asked. "When he left? I only ask because... the room is still..."

"I couldn't bear to clear his things away," Joan explained, moving to the tall window and parting the curtains to look out at the rolling green fields below. "Naturally he didn't take them with him. They were his human-things. He had no use for them anymore, not wherever he was going. They didn't belong to him, you see. They belonged to John." A tight, pained smile stretched her lips for just a moment, and her eyes fixed on the focal point of the fields, the thing you could see no matter what window you looked out of on the west wing of the school.

"I suppose in time I'll have to make up the room for a new teacher," she said. "But for now, things can stay the way they are. It was only six weeks ago that he left, after all. And summer is approaching. There'll be no need to find a replacement for John until September. Until then, the room can stay just as it is. Not that I think he'll come back, mind you," she hastily explained, her eyes drawing away from the thing on the hill for a moment as she looked over her shoulder at Sally.

"Men never do, of course. But I've got the funniest feeling that it's especially true of the Doctor. I don't think he ever comes back for those he left behind."

Sally's heart sunk. "He didn't leave you any way of getting in touch with him, then?"

Joan shook her head, slowly and sadly. "Though he did ask me to go away with him," she recalled. "To travel with him. Across the stars." Her eyes returned to the window; to the thing on the hill. "I didn't see the point," she explained. "He wasn't John anymore, and John was the man I loved. From where I stood, the Doctor was just someone wearing a dead man's face. I couldn't stand to be in the same room as him, much less travel with him - across the stars or anyplace else."

Sally slowly and carefully crossed the room to the window. The two women stood quietly next to one another for awhile, looking out at the lush green hills. There was a scarecrow on one of the hilltops, Sally noticed. And something about it gave her a chill. She shivered, her shoulders trembling for one brief moment. Joan noticed it from the corner of her eye.

"He does that to you," she said. She wasn't talking about the Doctor anymore. "If you look at him for too long. Best not to."

"He does?" Sally echoed, unable to drag her eyes away from the scarecrow. "Who does?"

Joan pursed her lips together. "Nevermind," she said, and turned sharply away from the window. "Well, Sally," she announced as she walked across the room, heading for the door. "Since it appears that you'll be staying at the school for the time being, I suppose I had better find you a uniform. We're short two maids at the moment, so I hope you can keep a clean house. If you can't, you had better learn how, and quickly. It's the only excuse I've got to keep you around without the Headmaster getting suspicious."

"I can clean," Sally replied, but her voice seemed very distant, as if she were hearing it from the other end of a long tunnel. Her eyes were glued to the scarecrow. She didn't even blink. She raised a hand slowly, pressing her fingers to the glass.

"Sally!" Joan sharply called out to the girl. "Come along, now!"

Sally jumped, finally tearing her gaze from the scarecrow on the hill and then away from the window altogether. "Yes, ma'am," she replied, and gave the older woman a slight curtsy. If she intended to fit in around here, then she guessed she'd better start getting into character as quickly as possible.

She followed Joan out of the room and into the hallway, but before she closed the door behind them, she stole one last glance at the window. Best not to, Joan's voice echoed inside her head, and she shivered again, because she knew that however strong the warning had been, her curiosity would undoubtedly prove stronger.

To Be Continued...