Chapter Eight
The murky hallway is bathed in a dim green light. Directly in front of the door is a heavily worn staircase ascending into complete darkness; extending down the side of the staircase is a narrow passageway leading to the rear of the house; half way down the passageway, on the left, is a wooden door, leading to a room at the front of the house. The Doctor surveys the surroundings, making a mental layout of the ground floor, before shuffling cautiously towards the staircase in front of him.
The whirring of the Sonic Screwdriver intermittently infects the still silence of the house. The Doctor quickly scans the staircase, eerily illuminating the peeling wallpaper; the claw of the Screwdriver clicks open and he interprets the data on the readout on the side of the device. 'Oh, hello,' he whispers: the Sonic detects traces of a foreign substance at way beyond the normal levels of concentration. The Doctor looks up into the darkness at the top of the staircase, slowly places his foot on the bottom step, and begins to climb.
Being careful not to catch his feet in the holes of the worn carpet, the Doctor tentatively ascends towards the gloom at the top of the staircase. He continues to scan the steps and the walls as he climbs: illuminating the top floor momentarily in a green glow, before quickly returning it to darkness. Nearing the top of the staircase, as his head breaks above the level of the floorboards on the first floor, the Doctor aims the Screwdriver at each door branching off from the small landing: the foreign substance leads to one door in particular. His attempt at scanning for life forms, however, remains inconclusive.
Upon reaching the top of the staircase, the Doctor winces at the sound of creaking wood. He stops: listening for any sounds of movement or presence. Whilst continuing to scan various surfaces, the Doctor slowly creeps along the landing, avoiding dirty clothes and old toys, to reach the last wooden door. He quickly scans the door with four whirs of the Screwdriver, each split-second scan illuminating the peeling name on the door, and again studies the results on the side of the device. Unsatisfied with the readout, the Doctor presses his ear against the wooden door in an attempt to discover what might be waiting for him behind it.
The door pushes open easily; the Doctor slides his head through the gap he has created and takes a quick inspection of the small room. Satisfied that there is no immediate visible threat, he elbows the door open further and enters over the threshold. The room, although small, appears larger by the lack of furniture. Aside from the unmade bed in the centre of the dingy room, a single small chest of drawers, upon which a clock and two plastic figurines stand, is the only other furnishing. Littering the floor are an assortment of objects: crumpled items of clothing, tattered books, colourful plastic toys, and shredded paper. The brown, patterned curtains, though blocking out the majority of the light from the small window, allow a thin stream of murky light to illuminate the dark walls of the small room.
With his arm fully extended, the Doctor whirs the Screwdriver around the small room, scanning almost every item in an attempt to get a decent reading. Not entirely satisfied with the weak results of his scan, he tries multiple settings, lighting the room with a green glow for short bursts. The unsatisfactory outcome of the scans causes the Doctor to rethink his method: he decides to follow the trail of the foreign substance in reverse in an attempt to find its source. He squeezes through the gap in the door and resumes scanning the staircase as he descends.
At the foot of the staircase, the trail leads the Doctor down the narrow passageway, towards the rear of the house. Undeterred by the gloom, and focusing entirely on following the trail being picked up by the Screwdriver, he creeps along the narrow passage, the glow of his Screwdriver partially illuminating the path. Upon approaching the doorway half way down the passageway, the Doctor quickly scans it before poking his head inside. Sitting inside the room is a badly worn sofa and a small table; dirty brown curtains restrict most of the light entering through the small windows. With an upwards movement and a burst of green light, the Doctor concludes that he should continue further along the passageway.
The Doctor inches slowly along the narrow passageway, towards an old, heavy wooden door. After aiming a quick burst from the Sonic Screwdriver at the metal doorknob, the door unlatches with a metallic clunk and swings open slowly on its hinges. Lowering his outstretched arm, the Doctor cautiously steps into the darkened room.
The Doctor steps onto the stone floor of a kitchen: a dirty worktop runs along the back wall, the sink is overflowing with used plates, pans and utensils, and a wooden table sits in the very centre of the room. Stepping around the table, the Doctor begins to scan the worktop and the floor; the whirring noise of the Sonic Screwdriver echoes off the exposed brick walls of the small, cold room. As if following a trail, the Doctor spins on the spot, nearing in on the source of the foreign substance that can be traced throughout the house. Guided by his device, the Doctor moves his outstretched arm towards the wooden table in the centre of the dark room. He quickly buzzes the device three times over the surface of the table, the claw at the end of the Screwdriver flicks open, and the Doctor checks the readout.
'Whatever it was, it definitely started here...' mumbles the Doctor. He illuminates the surface of the table with another burst of green light, attempting to force a stronger reading. 'It's left a trace – but why can't I identify it?' He holds the Sonic in front of his face and gives it a harsh shake. Still unable to identify the mysterious substance, he clasps the claw of the Screwdriver shut, returns it to the inside of his jacket, and stalks around the wooden table. Squatting down next to the table, he closely studies the worn surface of the wood. The Doctor reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and retrieves a pair of flimsy cardboard glasses with one red lens, and one blue: he looks at the surface of the table through the coloured lenses for a moment before returning them to his inside pocket.
Annoyed by not being able to identify the substance in the house, the Doctor turns on his heel and exits the small, stone floored kitchen. He marches back along the narrow passageway towards the front of the house. The Doctor rubs his hands together whilst he walks; his mind still turning, trying to fathom a logical solution to the situation – a boy falls out of his window and dies; okay, but why? And then mother his jumps in front of a moving bus; of course it might not have been his mother, it could have been anybody. But there are traces of an alien substance all over the house, and the Sonic can't identify it. Why? What's going on here? What connects it all up? Frustrated at not being able to solve the situation, the Doctor slips out of the house and back onto the street. He checks to ensure that the crowd of people are still preoccupied at the front of the bus further down the road, and strides hastily in the opposite direction towards the TARDIS.