Chapter Six: I Close my Eyes
The hot wind panted salted breath at his neck. Then it decided that huffing on him was not enough, and it gave his back a malicious shove. He dug the soles of his Converses into the serrated rock. Whatever he did, he must not fall in.
In what? The Doctor opened his eyes and looked. He was stood on an outcrop of rock that pronged into a sheltered bay, unevenly spaced stepping stones leading back to the shore. Shore, interestingly, did not look particularly inviting under the moody rust sky. His foot took a back step, and his arms fired out to throw his balance back as his heel discovered the limiting boundary of his diesis-like rock.
And that's when he looked down.
The water was completely flat. "It'll make the 'bergs hard out to sea, Mr Murdock." He flinched when the lonely words burnt to a cinder in the wind's hot smirk, and the silence shoved any further remarks back down his throat. It was so utterly quiet. No birds. The wind, so keen to push him in the back and breathe sweat-hot down his neck, made absolutely no sound. The water did not even move against his rocky plinth to offer a soft slap. The unnatural still made his hair bristle.
And what was wrong with the water? It was dark, very dark, but the depth was constantly shallow, never varying from his point out in the bay to the shoreline. From what little he could see of the bottom, he could keep sixty percent of his body dry if he were to go in there – which he absolutely did not want to do. The rock bed was wreathed in kelp and various seaweeds, predominantly red. The redness of this place disturbed him. There was no clear stretch of water, not anywhere, and he knew that that ever-reaching kelp was keeping something from him...
And then there was that slap he had missed earlier.
The sound rippled across his skin, further raising the hair on his arms and neck. The Doctor stopped breathing, and looked around him again. In the near distance, something moved through the water, slicing through the glassy mirror with surgical precision. He recognised the shape instantly. "So," the Doctor told himself, no longer caring about the pressing silence and rather liking the sound of his own voice. It offered him company that was not the thing presently gliding through the water. "Rosie-Rose has an irrational fear of sharks."
The shark was coming closer, but running parallel to him. All he saw of it was the fin, but that was enough: he deduced in a nanosecond that the dorsal fin in question belonged to a Great White, about twelve feet in length…
"Okay," the Doctor said slowly. "Rosie-Rose has an irrational fear of sharks that are not governed by dimensional laws…"
He watched as the impossibly large animal disappeared under the water of the shallows. Moments later, the water bloomed red in the shark's wake, the gentle 'V'-shaped imprint it momentarily created in the calmness bleeding. He knew it was blood. It had got something large that he had not seen, no fuss, no thrashing, no chase, no resistance.
He absolutely did not want to be stood where he was any more. The Doctor swung his attention to the stepping stones - that were not there any more. Panic gripped his stomach as he stared at the empty expanse of water winking red back at him. Even as he watched, the water parted for more and more fins, until there were dozens of them ghosting around him, meandering through the kelp without ever making it so much as twitch.
The Doctor twisted to look out of the bay – and nearly died of double cardiac arrest.
Rose was stood ten feet from him, thigh deep in water and frozen in sheer terror, watching the grey shapes slip towards her…
"Rose!"
She blinked in confusion at hearing his voice. Her eyes finally settled on him, and her forehead wrinkled in puzzlement at the sight of him. "Doctor? What are you doing here?"
"Never mind that right now, get out of the water!"
The triangles were getting closer. Rose's voice tightened. "I can't move."
"Right. I'm coming to get you."
"No, don't! They'll get you! It's a dream, I'll wake up, I always do!"
The Doctor ignored her, slipping into the water. It didn't feel like water: there was no wetness for a start, and it was impossibly warm and moving through it was like trying to drag a spoon through cold treacle. "This dream," the Doctor explained hurriedly, wading to her position and only too aware of the sharks taking an interest in his activities, "is not a real dream."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the Incubus has set this - air-quotes" he conducted the motion with his fingers "'dream' up to kill you, and I've entered your head to try and get you back. I am real, you are real, and so are they." He gestured to the shapes now sinking out of sight and making that ripple that would soon be coloured by his lifeblood. "Don't think that you'll wake up in bed just before they get you, Rose, because you won't."
The sharks were drawing closer now, angling themselves at him.
The Doctor was still three feet from Rose. He extended his hand to her –
Something slipped by his leg.
"Doctor, they're comin'!"
"Rose, give me your hand!"
She reached for him, but those few inches between them seemed impossibly far.
"They're comin'!"
The Doctor made a decision. If he was right about the games the Incubus was playing with them, this would work. If not, at least they would die together. He lunged the gap, barely leaving the sluggish water, grabbing her outstretched fingers –
And everything changed.
His feet were on solid, dry ground, and the sudden coldness of the air stabbed his warm skin like an ice bath. He knew the smell of it only too well as it filled his nostrils with sickeningly certain knowledge before he opened his eyes. He only hoped he was wrong. His eyes opened.
No colour, only grey. Grey fog, grey road.
Grey ruins.
The cold launched a whole new and more vicious assault as visual imagery matched his sense of smell and memory and came up with an all too complete answer. The Doctor shivered, and realised that he was back in the shredded pale blue shirt. "Oh no..."
But there was Rose, standing right beside him. Healthy, radiant Rose, confused, but unhurt. Not like before.
She gyrated, trying to take in her surroundings. It felt, to her, like the fog was seeping into her eyes and draining her senses of every perception. All she could sense of their new environment was the murky veil. It smelled of age and damp and death, somewhat like that collapsed tunnel near the Powell estate. The council had been 'getting round' to sorting it out for years, and it had remained ruined and forgotten, save by the local kids and the tramps. She had gone there once, on a dare, and could smell the same putrid decay in this strange place. That tunnel had scared her as a child, but this place, she knew, was much, much worse.
Where are we? The sharks were a recurring dream she had been having since she was twelve, but this? This was not one of her dreams, she had never had anything like this before. It felt somehow worse – far worse – than the sharks, and nothing had happened yet. But if the Incubus was playing with her nightmares and trying to destroy her through her own dreams, what was this place?
And then she realised whose nightmare this really was.
When she turned to look at him, Rose was appalled to see the Doctor shaking, not through cold, but fear. Every frightened dart of his eyes over their surroundings was wide and searching, but Rose had the distinct feeling that he really did not want to see.
Rose entwined her fingers with his. The Doctor started at the contact, but returned the pressure – a little tighter than was comfortable for Rose – and kept his eyes turned reluctantly to the fog. She could feel his double pulse thundering through his palm.
"Doctor," Rose urged softly, "Doctor, where are we? Doctor?"
The Doctor did not reply, just standing and staring into the fog, like a deer that has caught something dangerous on the wind. Rose understood that he was afraid, but she also thought she understood the way this little game of the Incubus worked. She needed to know what to expect and what this fog held back from them. If she knew, then the Incubus would not get what it desired from this situation. The Doctor obviously expected something awful to come from the grey, and she did not fancy meeting whatever was capable of scarring the Doctor without being forewarned.
"Doctor, what comes out of the fog?" Rose pushed firmness into her tone. "Doctor! Come on, talk to me! You have to tell me what's comin'!"
Finally, he responded. He turned to her for the first time since they arrived in his personal hell. He settled his eyes on her, and the expression was … strange. Fear and dread soaked her in his gaze, and Rose was hit by the horrible sensation that he was somehow frightened of her. When he eventually spoke, his voice was strangled. "You, Rose."
A cold trail flitted over her neck and made her hair rise. Before she had the chance to question him further, Rose saw something move. The tumbling walls of the ruins lining the road like a procession of eerie sentinels were falling. She jerked her head round for a proper look, and instantly wished she hadn't. They weren't falling at all. Her free hand grabbed his arm. Ghosts. Those buildings are leaking ghosts!
Shadows of hundreds upon hundreds of people were emerging from the stone, simply stepping as though they were walking a high street. Rose tightened her hold on him as his shaking worsened. The Doctor pulled her into a staggering run, but there was nowhere for them to go. The ruins repelled Rose with a sense of fear so strong it made her nauseous as they bled more spectres to the wide dirt track.
Moving only served to deepen the Doctor's fear as the ghosts kept coming from every direction. With every new addition to the crowd of dimmed figures, Rose saw his eyes shimmer with recognition. These were not just imagined faces, she realised, but people he knew. Rose steeled herself and looked at the faces properly herself. The greater majority of them, she had never seen in her life: men in robes, various women, aliens she had never heard of … and then she laid her eyes on others that she recognised. Captain Jack Harkness blinked her way, a shadow of his old grin dragging at his face. She couldn't stay looking at him. Jack was not the only one Rose knew. Scootie, her expression fixed as it had been when the black hole dragged her through space to its maw. Ood watched her serenely, wide amber eyes dulled out. There were more, but she could not stand to see them.
There was no escape for them from the shadows of his past. His mind wanted nothing more than to run, run as fast as he could and take Rose with him, right out of this Hell ... but his legs could not oblige his desire any more than the wasted shirt could keep him warm. Regardless of his own fear, the Doctor pulled Rose into his arms in a vain attempt to shield her. Rose managed to maintain a clear head as she held him in return, hoping that he was able to take some comfort from her. She remained steady in the face of his torment, her body perfectly solid. Their situation was frightening, yes, but she controlled her fear, forcing it down and facing it head on. This was not how she had envisioned dying, and she certainly had no intention of allowing a spiteful neurological wave scavenger to be the end of either of them.
Still, Rose found it difficult to keep her head when the expected vision of herself stepped forward through the throngs of the dead of the Doctor's life. The spectral Rose coming towards them was the only colourful element of her drained fellows. She looked very much alive from a distance, and she did not move in a gliding manner like the others, but stumbled, practically tripping over what the real Rose swiftly recognised as the Doctor's trench coat. She saw her own hair darkly plastered to her skull, her face pale and greying. She had a distinct feeling that this was the dream she had pulled the Doctor out of last night. No wonder he had screamed.
She felt him swallow dryly, his trembling increasing and a small strangled sound escaping the trap of his throat. His attention was not hers, but totally riveted on the wailing shade that cried and pleaded at him, blood dripping down her face. Rose twisted to face him, placing her hands on either side of his face and dragging his eyes down with sheer authoritative force. "Doctor, I am right here," she stated firmly. "Not over there. I'm here, in your arms."
He blinked at her, registering the solidness of her body and the very real scent of her, but his eyes acted independently of his mind and hauled themselves to the greying Rose. "I promised Jackie I'd keep you safe."
Rose felt despair run a nail down her resolve. "But I am safe, I'm with you! Here – see?" Rose's fingers whispered over his cheek. "I could never be safer."
When his eyes returned to her, they donned a mahogany veneer. "And look where we are, Rose! Look where I've brought you!" His jaw clenched. "This is not where you should be, this is not your nightmare!"
Rose smiled softly at him. The false Rose called his name out to the fog, a piteous, agonised wail shoving the cold aside and aiming at his soul. The real Rose completely blanked her doppelganger, shifting her body round to block his view of her false self. Rose gave her head the tiniest of shakes. No. "Our demons, Doctor."
Something broke in him. He blinked, reeling as the words barged their way through and knocked the imprint of spectral-Rose to dust. He could see the young woman standing before him, so very much alive and with him. She was all he could see. No marred and bloodied reality stumbled towards them for a moment, and the Doctor relished the sensation of wholeness looking up at him. A slow smile blinked into existence.
Rose smiled back.
The cold lost its edge, just a bit. And then the Doctor noticed something else when he dared himself to look back at the wraiths. The spirits staggered like the pairs' smiles were throwing bricks at them, seemingly lumbering against the new wall their union slowly built up as an unseen shield. The false Rose stopped completely. She wailed morosely, but the sound seemed dimmed and forgotten, the fog becoming a thick blanket and smothering the words against her lips.
"It's us," the Doctor said, realisation lighting each shadowed face. He didn't want to offer the depth of his knowledge: the idea was too fresh and untested, and presenting it to the stale air would be like exposing a child to a deadly virus. The best thing to do was keep the child locked indoors…
"D'you know what I love about your mother, Rose?"
Rose blinked. Her eyes flitted to the dead faces surrounding them, and she came to the very firm conclusion that the Doctor had evidently dropped his marbles and lost most of them under the sofa. Seeing as indulging him was generally the best way to push him towards making sense, Rose offered an uncertain: "No..."
"She has a very black-and-white view of the world, does your mother – oh, and she makes a good cuppa. I mean, she's relatively alright at making tea. Well, more mediocre, actually. Anyway…" His tone was brightening up as he talked and built up speed like a freight train: "the thing about your mother that I really love – apart from the fact that she gave birth to you, Rose, and that's always a plus for her in my book – is that if she were standing where we are, right now, looking at this lot, d'you know what she'd do? She'd turn around and say -"
The Doctor turned on the bloodied Rose, staring deadpan into her face, all joviality gone.
"'You are a fragment of my imagination. You don't exist, and you don't frighten me anymore.'"
Everything turned completely still.
Then she felt it.
It was not in the air, as such, or in the ground. The staggered mortally wounded walls did not even offer so much as a shudder in the damp. It ran far, far deeper than that. The push penetrated her like a rush of heat and blushed through her…
And then the change happened.
Gold strands snapped at her eyes as the wind rushed hot at their backs, so strong Rose grabbed out for the Doctor's arm. He pulled her in, enveloping her tightly. Passed his chest and her whipping hair, Rose watched the false echo of herself go wide-eyed with surprise, then vanish in a backward shower of black dust. The same happened to all of the others, all of them disintegrating and bleeding back into the fog and diseasing it with their darkness.
Only, everything went dark for Rose as well, and her arms were as empty as the new cloak of night.
9