THE PLAN
"17 November, 2007, London
"This is a narrative that is never meant to see the light of day. If you are coming across this accidentally because both Larry Nightingale and I are dead, please read no further and burn this packet and all of its contents. It is the story of an experience that I would never trade for anything, but that will seem completely insane to anyone other than Larry or me. I still do not have all of the answers, and I'm beginning to think I may never. My collection of memorabilia relating to a man who calls himself The Doctor has been bordering upon obsession, but the more I reflect, the less I understand.
"It began just before dawn on a Tuesday in September – perhaps eight weeks ago. A classmate had put me onto an old house near Surrey Water called Wester Drumlins. It's in an oddball part of the city – there are hardly any other houses nearby, but plenty of trees and winding roads. He told me that he had been thinking of going there to take some photos for our project on Emotional Spaces, but that the place gave him the creeps, so he decided not to go inside. But fearless me, I crawled over the gate in the wee hours of the morning and found a melancholy mansion, chock full of memories and beautifully dissheveled rooms.
"And then, in the parlour, something caught my eye. The letter 'B' was peeking out from behind a torn patch of wallpaper. In curiosity, I tore the paper away, and the word 'Beware' appeared. This startled me, as I was alone in a deserted house, and a random warning of 'beware' is decidedly unsettling. But it didn't stop me from uncovering the rest of the message, little by little. The message was strange. It warned me to 'duck' several times, and to my utter shock, it contained my name. In its entirety, the message read, 'Beware the Weeping Angel. Oh, and duck. No really, duck! Sally Sparrow, duck now! Love from the Doctor (1969).'
"When the message said 'duck now,' I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and I ducked. A large rock broke a window to my left and flew through the space once occupied by my head. I should have been brained. When I shined my torch in that direction, a stone angel, who appeared to be weeping, stood outside the window. It was the only thing nearby, and at the time, it seemed impossible (though thoroughly disturbing) that a statue could have attacked me with a rock. The Doctor's message called it the Weeping Angel.
"My resolve was so shaken, I went to see my best, most trusted friend Kathy, even though it was ludicrously early. When I arrived at her flat, several televisions were playing the same clip of a man..."
"Okay, one thing at a time," Martha interrupted the Doctor's flow. "Maybe you can see the big picture with all the details in it, but I can't. Can we just start with this message on the wall?"
They were on a late-night train from Brighton (where they had landed) to London (where they needed to be). He had been reading to her aloud from the top page of Sally Sparrow's packet as they watched the darkened countryside fly by in the night. They had both, upon separate occasions, perused the conents of the packet, but neither had read in-depth. They had remembered the year in which they were to become stuck, they figured it would happen around 2007 or so, since that's when they ran into Sally outside that DVD shop, and so the Doctor had made sure that the packet was in his coat pocket whenever they left the TARDIS in the early 21st century on Earth. These precautions had proved enough, and both were confident that they would eventually be transported home. Though, as Sally's narrative said, they had no idea how long they would be stuck here.
"A very good idea," the Doctor agreed, closing the packet. "We'll go back to that house tomorrow and write the message, and then we'll just take it one step at a time from there."
"What about tonight?" she asked.
"I suppose we'll just get a room," he shrugged. "Soho's full of little hotels."
Upon arriving in London, to save Martha from any further brain damage, the Doctor obtained a room himself on the ground floor and then let Martha in through a rear door. They slept side-by-side, each brain racing with the events of the day, and a mental list of what needed to happen tomorrow. Martha wanted some new clothes – if nothing else, she'd lost track of her knickers. The Doctor thought that copies should be made of all of the pages of Sally's packet – perhaps they could take photos of the documents, just in case. Martha figured they would need to find a way to make money. The Doctor wondered whether they would have, here in 1969, the Weeping Angels to contend with, and if so, how could they guarantee safe passage into and out of Wester Drumlins, especially if they were to accomplish a distracting task? The last time they'd gone in distracted, they'd wound up zapped.
But underlying it all, it was the idea of the angels themselves keeping them both clawing at sleep. Neither was sure when they finally yielded, but the morning sun woke them both with unpleasant slowness. The room had heated up like an oven, and when Martha sat up in bed, her hair was sticking to her forehead.
"Ugh, it's like Death Valley," she groaned. She moved to stand, but realised that she was nude. "Can you open the window, please?"
"Yeah," he groaned back, scratching his eyes. He stumbled across the room and cranked open the squeaky window. "Sleep all right?"
"I suppose, considering the spring stuck in my back. You?"
"Same."
Martha's green strapless dress was slung over a rickety chair. She looked at it with disdain. This did not escape the Doctor.
"Maybe you should go get us both some clothes, while I check out Wester Drumlins," he suggested, picking up his own shirt from its spread-out position over the vanity. "We might be here a while, and might fancy changing our clothes at some point."
She watched him dress. His suit was only slightly wrinkled, and frankly, he looked as fresh as he ever did in it. For her part, when she finally climbed back into the green chiffon, she felt flat and sweaty. The few times when she'd spent the night with someone and had to walk home in dress clothes the following morning, she had felt this way. But she never thought she'd be taking the walk of shame after a night with the Doctor.
"While you're out, we'll need a permanent marker and some wallpaper," the Doctor told her. "Would you mind?"
"No, I don't mind," she answered. She walked over and checked his collar tags for sizes, then asked him for a shoe size.
"Chuck Taylors and Sharpies exist this year," he said.
She looked him up and down amusedly. "Well, then, what more do we need?"
They stepped out through the back door of the hotel. He gave her a bit of money and the psychic paper, which he always kept handy in his trenchcoat. "Meet you back here?" she asked.
"Noon," he said.
This time, he took the Tube. Tottenham Court Road to Canada Water, and then he walked the rest of the way to Wester Drumlins. He pulled his coat around him against the crisp February morning air, and as he walked past 140 Newington Butts, the future site of Brasserie Toulouse-Lautrec, he sighed. What a night that had been. The food, the wine, the dancing, the company... the time-shattering sex. He made a mental note that he'd have to do more things like that, have more romantic ideas, make an effort to keep her happy, since she was bound to fall into a kind of depression now that they were stuck here. He was experienced at being stranded, but she, he knew, would slowly begin to lose hope and gain panic.
The house was in a bit better shape than in 2007, but it still looked clearly deserted. He entered the grounds the same way as he and Martha had entered before, thirty-eight years later, from the back, barely able to see the brick. Slowly, the shape of the mansion came into focus. He stood for a moment and looked up at it, feeling almost bitterly toward the house itself for causing this mess. If we hadn't come here... he thought. But then, in the last 900 years of seeing time as a nonlinear spiral of cause to effect to sideways tangent back to effect, he had had a similar thought nigh on a billion times. He'd learned to shove it away whenever it popped into his head. '
We came here and now we're trapped. It is what it is.
Something caught his eye across the grounds. It was a rather funny-looking silver sculpture that resembled a large figure-eight with a moth crawling up the side. It was a piece entitled The Cycle of Life, by an artist called Raymond Bean. He knew this because he had seen it in 2007 when he'd parked the TARDIS. He'd glanced at it briefly and noted the title and sculptor, just after Martha had disappeared into the restaurant across the street with her mum. In thirty-eight years, that area would be wooded over and crowded with trees, making the house invisible from the vantage point of the sculpture. Here in 1969, it was clear that they were on the same grounds. A realisation hit him and caused a frisson of dread to shoot through him.
The TARDIS is on the grounds of Wester Drumlins. The Weeping Angels will have access to it.
The angels feed on potential time energy. What could be more of a smorgasbord for them than a time machine which carries a piece of the vortex in its heart? They would be sure to home in on it immediately and they would undoubtedly stop at nothing to get it in their possession. And if they did, they could absorb the entire vortex by extension, but they wouldn't just harbour it, they would devour it, destroying all time in the process. The future and past would cease to exist, consumed by the silent assassins.
He desperately hoped that, as always, he had locked the door when he'd left. The TARDIS might be movable by any average forklift from the outside, but its lock was not of any world that existed now, and would be impenetrable to anyone other than a Time Lord.
Good. No worries there, then. Assuming it's locked.
Again, he pushed the thought away. Insert 'what ifs' into the brain of a time traveller, shake until insane. No good here.
As he stood, staring, contemplating the sculpture and the implications of the end of time itself, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Something in the house was moving. He looked up at a bedroom window on the second level, and there stood a stone angel, gazing down upon him. Another wave of impending doom fell over him as he looked into its blank face. Something so stoic, so hard, so seemingly unfeeling... but it was looking at him. It could see him. It could hear him. It knew he was there.
A rustling in the dry leaves behind him. He turned. Another angel was there, not fifty feet away. He wondered if the angels could sense what a tasty treat a Time Lord would be to them. A creature who fed on the wasted timeline of another being would be positively gorging itself on a being set to live another hundred, five hundred, a thousand years...
But he did not allow himself time to contemplate this for too long, because another angel appeared on his right while he was looking at the second. The fourth, he guessed, was on its way, and the first one from the house was probably hitting the front door of the mansion right about now. He had to get the hell out of there.
He ran at top-speed toward the sculpture and off the property of Wester Drumlins, into the clear line of vision of some passers-by. He had known full well that the angels could travel at incredible speeds, but he hadn't seen any other option. No matter – he was safe for now. As long as there were people looking, he was safe from the angels. He was glad to have answered the question of whether or not he'd have them to contend with here in 1969 (questions were always better when answered, weren't they?), but it didn't solve the problem of how to accomplish writing on the walls of the house without getting thrown back in time again. Just like before, he'd be facing the wall, and Martha couldn't look in four directions at once. Even if she could, they were likely to become surrounded. He needed a plan.
He looked back toward the grounds and caught a glimpse of the Weeping Angels through the trees. They had gone back, more or less, to their original positions, poised to pounce upon the next passer-by. From this distance, through the greenery, weeping, they looked almost serene... like angels.
Oh-ho-ho... Doctor, you are a devil, you are.
An idea was forming. He could feel the wheels catching and turning in his mind, and he smiled to himself. It wasn't the most brilliant idea he had ever had, but it might be one of the most entertaining. He ran back to Canada Water and took the Tube back to Tottingham Court Road, and disappeared between two heavy wooden doors of the nearest church.
Her trip to the hardware store had been a singularly disturbing experience. First, she had been looked at with disgust when she'd entered the shop, she thought, mostly because she was a woman wearing a chiffon dress in a hardware store. Most men would probably think she had no business being there, and she thought they might be right. Next, she was fairly certain she'd bought the first Sharpie that had ever been made, yet they looked exactly the same as in her time. Third, she recognised the wallpaper she needed to buy because she had seen it in Wester Drumlins in 2007. She shivered at the thought that while being pushed up against that wall by the Doctor, all the time, she had been the one to choose and perhaps eventually hang that paper.
Time travel is just weird.
She bought several pairs of halfway-bearable trousers and jeans, a few tops, a couple of shift dresses, a coat and three pairs of shoes at a thrift shop. At a department store, she purchased several packages of pants and socks for herself and the Doctor, and also a brassiere, vowing to go out again the next day to search for a change of duds for him. She briefly wondered if he'd wear anything that wasn't pinstriped.
It was well near one o'clock by the time she made it back to the hotel. She rapped on the open window of their room, and the Doctor went around to the back door to let her in. He helped her with her bags, but asked, "Where have you been? It's nearly one."
"I couldn't go another day without knickers, and I wasn't going to come back without a marker and wallpaper," she protested, throwing her share of the bags on the bed as she entered the room. "So sorry if I didn't move fast enough for you."
"Sorry," he conceded, catching her tone. "It's just... I've got everything set, and I was counting on seeing you an hour ago. We have to get back to Wester Drumlins ASAP!"
"All right, just let me change."
As she got out of the chiffon and into decent underwear, denim hip-huggers, an orange and red striped v-neck top and boots, the Doctor told her the whole story. He told her about the angels closing in, seeing the sculpture, what the angels could do if they got their hands on the TARDIS in 2007, and he finished with what he'd done to solve the problem of holding the angels at bay long enough to write Sally's message on the wall. This part, he told her with a mighty, self-satisfied grin.
"You didn't," she scolded. "That's a bit mean."
"Nah, it's harmless, people have been doing it for ages. And it's funny!"
"Let's hope it's also effective," she sighed, grabbing her new coat and the bag from the hardware store, and following the Doctor out the door.
