Chapter Four:

"The Thing on the Hill"

To her credit, she waited a week before she finally went to see the thing on the hill.

During that week, she filled her time with work. There was plenty of it. The Farringham School for Boys was a very large institution, and as such it took quite a bit of time to clean it from top to bottom. There were other maids on staff, but not as many as it seemed were needed; though with teenage boys, Sally already knew, you could give each one his own personal maid and he'd still manage to make a mess of things faster than anyone could clean it up.

When she wasn't working, she spent a lot of time with Joan Redfern, playing croquet in the garden or bridge in the drawing room or just sitting and talking. They grew to become fast friends; their encounters with the Doctor binding them in a way that nothing else could. Sally soon learned that it was a tough job being a woman in 1913. The way that the men and the boys barked orders at her or belittled her or simply looked right through her as though she wasn't there at all never ceased to shock and offend Sally, but Joan always seemed to take it in stride in that serene, elegant way she had of doing most everything. Sally had come to admire her quite a bit, and depend on her even more. There were no maid's quarters, and Sally had no home to go to, so Joan saw to it that she be allowed to stay in John Smith's old room. Sally thought it a bit daunting, staying in the room which had, at one point, belonged to the Doctor. She was, at first, afraid to touch anything, for fear she might break some valuable part of the space-time continuum, or something. Of course, that was silly. Joan had said that nothing the Doctor had left behind had truly belonged to the Doctor; they were his human-things, she said. The props he used to play the part of a man from Earth.

When there wasn't anything to do, she went to John Smith's room and read his journal of impossible things. She had read it three times over so far, looking for clues. Anything that could help her go back to the time she came from on her own or help her find a way to summon the Doctor to come and rescue her himself. There was nothing.

Or maybe she just hadn't found it yet.

On the long sleepless nights when the journal didn't help, she went to the window and peered out of it. At night, the scarecrow was no more than a shadow; a black silhouette against the ink-blue sky. Yet she could feel it looking back at her. And the more she looked at it the more convinced she was that it knew she was looking at it. That it knew, and it was beckoning her to come near.

She tried to ignore it. For awhile, when she'd looked at it too long and it seemed to be sucking her in, she would pry herself away from the window and draw the curtains closed, and she would go to her bed and lay down and close her eyes, trying to block out the mental image of the scarecrow on the hill. But even when she succeeded in that, something stranger would happen. She would begin to hear its voice.

She knew that was ridiculous. It was a scarecrow; a man stuffed with straw whose face was nothing more than ink on a burlap sack. But she heard it all the same, in her mind, calling to her in a deep voice laced with echoes and sibilants... most times it sounded like some great serpent king. It taunted her in a half-sympathetic, half-amused tone. Come closer, little Time Girl, it would say. Poor lost little Time Girl, far from home.

If she focused very hard the voice - the voice which sometimes sounded like the voice of a boy, and sometimes a serpent king, and sometimes many voices, all in one - would sometimes go away. But sometimes it would torture her for hours. Other strange things were happening, too. Sometimes when she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she would catch something moving behind her image. Some flicker of motion, incredibly fast. So fast that most times it was only a blur. But once... once she thought she saw something specific.

Once she thought she saw a red balloon.

She didn't tell Joan of any of these things, for fear the woman might think she was starting to go mad. Sometimes she felt like she was starting to go mad, or that perhaps maybe she'd gone round the bend a long time ago. That maybe she was languishing in a rubber room at Bedlam already; that they had brought her there when she first came to 1913, ranting and raving about stone angels which had displaced her in time. And that she was there now, in her own little world where scarecrows communicated with her telepathically and red balloons floated around in the background of mirrors. It seemed entirely possible. As she had told Joan, once you meet the Doctor, anything seems possible. But she knew that it wasn't so. It couldn't be; the world felt too real. She could feel the hardwood floors under her knees, could hear the scraping sound the horsehair bristles made against them as she scrubbed them, could smell the fumes of the polish, so strong it made her eyes water.

This was no delusion. It was really happening. And she had to get to the bottom of it.

She went out early in the morning. Much earlier than she had ever left the school before; it was still half-night outside, that funny glowing place trapped between full-dark and dawn when the stars are still just slightly visible and the whole world is seen through a blue filter. She could smell the dew on the grass as she hurried through it, the long skirt of the dress that Joan had given her twisting and sashaying about her ankles. Though it was nearly summer she fancied she could see her breath in the air; in the country there was still a harsh chill in the air overnight this time of the year. No birds sang in the fields; either it was too early for them or they had abandoned this place for one less sinister. There was no real way to tell for sure.

Once she thought she heard a twig snap behind her, but when she turned around, no one was there. She kept running through the fields and the woods, and finally the terrain turned upward on her, got steeper, and she knew she had come to the hill. When she looked up she saw him; the scarecrow-man crucified on his wooden cross; tied there around his wrists and feet and waist with thick, rough twine. It was stranger, seeing him like this. There was a breeze in the air, one that made her hair and her skirt sway and levitate, one that would surely rock a man of straw from side-to-side with its strength. And yet the scarecrow-man stayed still. And when she climbed further up, got closer, she realized that it had a mass and weight unlike any scarecrow she had ever seen. And not only that, but its dimensions... it had been made to scale. It looked much smaller from the window, but once she got right up close to it, she realized it had to be at least six feet tall.

"Why would anyone make a scarecrow so large?" she murmured to herself. She was close enough now to reach out and touch it, and she did - and as soon as her hand touched its torso, she yanked it back with a gasp as though she had touched something hot. The fact was, she had touched something hot - or at least, something oddly warm.

And she had not felt any straw.

Her breath was trapped in her lungs; her heartbeat seemed so much louder than it usually did. With trembling fingers, she reached out and placed her palm in the center of the scarecrow's torso again, and pushed. It was like pushing against... well, against a man's chest. It was firm, and warm, and she fancied she could even feel...

But no. She couldn't have felt a heartbeat. Scarecrows didn't have heartbeats.

And yet...

Her hand traveled upward, to the burlap sack that was the scarecrow's head. She placed her hand upon its cheek, and again she felt no straw. And she could not deny what she did feel. She felt the bone structure of a human face.

Without even thinking, her hand curled inward and she grasped the burlap in her fist and ripped it off in one go.

She stumbled backward a step, her breath catching in her throat again, her eyebrows furrowing together.

"Oh, my God," she said, her voice a dry whisper.

Hanging there, crucified there on the wooden cross, was a boy no older than she was. He had short dark hair swept over his brow in the old-fashioned style most of the boys at Farringham wore. He had pale green eyes and his dark brows were drawn down over them in a knowing glare. But the most jarring thing about him was the smirk he wore on his lips, upturned on only one side of his mouth. It was almost a sneer. It made him handsome, but in a very dangerous way.

"Have you been out here all night?" she asked him.

He did not respond.

"Who did this to you? Was it that boy Hutchinson? I'll bet it was him, that little wanker; this is just the sort of thing he'd do."

Again, there was no response. And Sally realized that it wasn't only that he wasn't speaking. He wasn't moving, either. He wasn't...

He wasn't even blinking.

He was just staring at her. Or through her. She couldn't tell which, so she took a sudden step to the right, and sure enough, his dark eyes remained fixed straight ahead of him, at the place where she had been just a moment before. He didn't blink. His smirk, held so crookedly in place, didn't even twitch. His hair fluttered in the breeze, but other than that, every part of him remained perfectly still.

It was as if... as if he were frozen in time.

She stepped to the left so that she was standing in front of him again, and after a moment she brought her hand up, hesitated for only a moment, and then put her palm against his cheek. She hadn't imagined it. He was so... warm. He was alive. But he didn't flinch at her touch, and still, he didn't blink.

"Why aren't you moving?" she asked him. She was growing more and more anxious with each moment that passed. "Why won't you speak to me? Say something. Say anything, just talk to me!"

"He can't."

The voice came from behind her, and was so sudden that Sally jumped and whirled around, adrenaline rushing through her veins and making her arms feel prickly as gooseflesh rose on them all at once. Her hand fell from the boy's cheek and her eyes wildly focused on another boy who had been standing a ways behind her in the clearing. His place further down the hill made him seem very small, but she knew that he was also small to begin with. His name was Tim Latimer, and she knew him only because he was the most picked-on boy at the Farringham School. Everyone, it seemed, had it in for him, but most especially the boy Hutchinson, who had seemed to make it his personal mission in life to make Tim Latimer's life a living hell.

For a moment, she was as speechless as the boy on the cross. Then sudden, improbable anger flooded her cheeks, turning them bright pink. "Did you follow me out here?" she cried.

Tim Latimer shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. He had been watching Sally Sparrow very closely since she came to the Farringham School. He had at first seen her on the shooting range, when she appeared out of thin air. The others had dismissed it almost as soon as it had happened; they told themselves she had been hiding behind one of the targets and she had just popped up when no one was looking. Tim understood that they told themselves these things because denial was a part of their survival, but he also understood that they were stupid for ignoring what was right in front of their faces. Especially after what had happened with the scarecrows.

He studied Sally the entire week that she had been there. She had a strange, confident way of holding herself that was very unlike the other women at the school. And he had overheard her speaking to Nurse Redfern, and the way that she spoke was so different from the way Joan did. In fact, she sounded quite a bit like that woman Martha Jones; the one who had come with the Doctor. And Tim knew that they sounded that way because they were from the future. He knew because sometimes he just knew things, and they turned out to be correct. That's also the reason why when he looked at Sally, he knew that she had been brought here by stone angel statues. He didn't know how such a thing could be, but he supposed that if scarecrows could walk and move about and kill people, then he supposed stone angels could do the same.

"Yes," he finally answered her, and there was a note of shame in his voice. He hadn't meant to invade her privacy. But he had woken up with a start because he heard a voice inside his head; a voice calling out to someone. Not to him, but to someone in the school. Come closer, little Time Girl, it said, and he had known at once that it was meant for Sally Sparrow. He got out of bed and went into the garden, and sure enough there she was, heading for the thing on the hill.

"I don't think you ought to stand so close to him, Sally," he said. "I don't think it's safe."

Sally laughed, once. Not because anything was funny but because her life had once been normal, and sane, and now it seemed to be splitting apart at the seams, and she was beginning to feel very strongly that she was clinging to the very last scraps of her sanity.

"Why?" she asked him. "Why isn't it safe? And why is he up here? Why is he tied to this post? And why won't he answer me?" She paused for a moment, and when she spoke next, her voice was strained with fright: "Why won't he blink?"

"Because he's frozen." Tim understood that the most important part of all of this, to Sally, was that the thing on the hill could not blink. He didn't know why, exactly; only that for whatever reason, Sally had an irrational fear of blinking. It was the oddest fear Tim had ever heard of, because no one could resist blinking. Sooner or later, you had to do it. And yet, she was terrified of doing it. He knew, then, suddenly, that sometimes she counted the seconds between her blinks, to see how long she could last before her eyes dried up and she had to.

He turned his mind away from her neuroses, because to dwell on them would only lead him further and further down the rabbit hole of her mind. When someone was scared, they became particularly easy to read. Easy to get lost in. But it was not always so easy to come back out again.

"It was the Doctor," he said. "The Doctor. Your old friend. I know that you know him because I can see him very clearly in your mind." He was quiet for a moment, and then he pointed at the thing on the hill. "When the Doctor was here, not so long ago, he froze him in time. And put him up on this hill. So that he couldn't hurt anyone anymore."

Sally shook her head. "I don't understand," she said. "Couldn't hurt anyone? He's just a boy."

"He isn't a boy," Tim replied. "Not really. He used to be one. He used to be a boy just like me. But then... these things came. They came and they took him, and changed him. Made him different. Made him... bad. Evil." He took an uneasy step forward. "They took others, too. A man from town, and a little girl, and a woman who used to be a maid at the school. They changed them, too. And they called themselves a family. The Family of Blood."

"Stop it." Sally had taken a step back when Tim Latimer had taken a step forward, and now her back was almost lined up with the front of the boy on the cross. She felt a strange protectiveness of him wash over her; a protectiveness that bordered almost on the possessive. She didn't know why, but she did not want Tim Latimer to take one step closer. She realized distantly that she had a headache; a great big pulse beating inside her temples. And when she blinked - it was rare, but she did it - she saw a kind of... green. Like a gaseous green cloud with a neon pulse in the center of it, beating in time with the pulse of her headache.

"Don't... don't come any closer," she said with her eyes closed.

"Sally," Tim began, reaching out with one hand. "Sally, come away from him. It isn't safe. The Doctor froze him, but I don't know how long the spell will hold now that he isn't here anymore."

"You're a liar," Sally said, and her headache worsened. She could hear the voice inside her head again, the voice that was like many voices, the voice that was like some great serpent king. Come closer, Time Girl, it whispered in its half-soothing, half-taunting tone. Turn around and see me. See me very well. Look into my eyes. Suddenly it didn't sound like many voices anymore. It sounded like only one. The voice of a boy. The crisp, educated voice of an English boy who had spent years inside proper British boarding schools. And she knew it was the voice of the boy trapped inside the frozen guise of a scarecrow on a hill.

Look into my eyes, Sally Sparrow, and you shall see the truth.

She turned slowly; carefully; as if in a trance. She supposed that perhaps, she sort of was.

"Sally," Tim Latimer was saying from behind her. "Sally, please. Please just take my hand and we'll go back to school."

She barely heard him. She slowly lifted her eyes to the face of the boy on the hill. His strange smirk and dark brows. His knowing glare. And his eyes. Those brooding green eyes, like bottomless poisoned chasms reaching far into the earth. She felt herself getting sucked into them; felt the oddest sensation of long, elegant fingers creeping into her brain and sifting through the files she kept stored there. It was searching for something, and as it searched she saw images flash before her eyes. The video store. The DVDs with the Doctor on them. All of Larry's precious Easter eggs. And then the Drumlins. The writing on the wall. And finally, the Angels, reaching for her with stone fingers hooked into claws. And being sucked through the vortex of time itself.

Time Girl, she heard inside her head. Time Girl, Time Girl, Time Girl. The voice echoed unto infinity. And then:

Kiss me, Sally Sparrow. My Time Girl. Kiss me and set me free.

A chill shook her body like the wind shook dead leaves in the trees on a cold November night. The voice was very clear in its desire. She could not mistake its command. And a strange sensation took over her. It was as if a magnet were hidden inside her body; a very strange and powerful magnet drawn to the boy on the hill. She realized that she had been feeling the effects of that magnet ever since she landed in 1913, but it had never been stronger than it was right now. And she knew - even before she mounted to her toes and placed her hands on the shoulders of the frozen boy in the scarecrow costume - that she was helpless to resist.

The magnet inside her was life, and vitality, and the energy that the Angels had granted her that had made her able to travel through time. It was a golden glow buried deep within her; the fickle golden glow that made it so that she was dead in the future but alive in the past. Alive in a place where she should never be. It took a great amount of power to perform a transfer like that. The Doctor would know all about that power; he would know how to harness it and how to dispose of it. She supposed he would even know what it was called. Sally knew none of these things, and yet she knew that this golden glow - this spark of life - was exactly what the boy on the hill needed to become whole again. And she knew - as her lips touched his, pressing against that tireless smirk - how to give him life again.

Hands grabbed her shoulders and yanked her backward. She stumbled and tumbled down to a hard sit in the grass. She had half-fallen on top of Tim, and she was shaken hard from her trance. She had no idea what just happened, only that it seemed a great amount of energy had been sucked out of her. She had never felt so exhausted in all her life, so completely and totally spent.

"Why... why did I do that?" she asked, her voice slurred from exhaustion, her head feeling fuzzy with sleep. She imagined this must be how Dorothy felt when she woke up in the poppy fields outside of Emerald City, after the Wicked Witch had had her way.

"I tried to stop you," Tim honestly replied, but as his eyes climbed to the thing on the hill, he realized it didn't matter anyway. "But it's too late."

Energy was swirling around him, the boy whose name was once Jeremy Baines. It was a sparkling golden glow that filled his skin and made him luminescent in the rapidly rising sun. And, for a time, it was almost beautiful. But then another glow took hold. This one was a gaseous neon green, and it burst forth from his skin, corrosively eating into the golden nimbus that had formerly surrounded him, bloating itself into a great green cloud. And then, all at once, it sucked back into the body of the boy with frightening speed.

Sally looked up at him, her breath caught in her throat.

Nothing happened for a very long moment.

And then he blinked.

...To Be Continued...