"Where did they go?" Aria panicked, staring at the spot where Spencer and Clara had just disappeared.
"Look at the Angel! And don't blink!" the Doctor shouted, pointing, before dashing off. Aria and Emily stared at the Weeping Angel, it's back to them. The Doctor soniced the phone in the back ground. He stalked around the box, quickly, rapping it with his knuckles, pointing his screwdriver at it, the sound a constant buzz in the air. Aria's eyes watered. She blinked. The Angel didn't move.
"Hey, did you just blink?" she whispered to Emily.
"No! Are you crazy? That thing'll kill us if we blink!" came back the reply, strained and anxious. "What do you think happened to Spencer?"
"Shh. I think we can keep the Angel rooted to its spot if we blink at different times. I'll count to three, and I'll blink on three. So you don't blink on three, blink on two. Like harmonising."
"Aria, I don't know anything about music!" Emily exclaimed.
"Well, pretend!"
The Doctor muttered to himself as they did this, ignoring everything except the phone booth and the fact that Clara disappeared, that she could, at that moment, be anywhere in the universe. She could be dead. The thought killed him. He wasn't ready to lose another companion. Not so soon. Not ever.
"C'mon Clara, you Impossible Girl. Where are you? Talk to me."
The phone rang.
The ground beneath Clara's feet trembled. There was almost no light, except what was leaking through the window of the room, from the moon. As her eyes adjusted, she recognised the room. Disorientation dissipated as she took in the lush carpet, the tables, the phone booth. A woman was curled on her knees in front of the phone, weeping into her hands.
"Are you alright?" Clara whispered to Spencer who was struggling to her feet beside her.
"Yeah, I think so. Are you?"
"Nothing broken, so yeah, I'd say I'm fine. Plus, I know where we are," Clara said, looking at the woman on the floor. The house groaned as it shook.
"It worked?" Spencer wondered in amazement. "I can't believe it worked. Not that I'm complaining."
The two of them crept closer to the woman. Her shoulders shook as she cried. The phone hung in empty space, moving backwards and forwards as the tremors rocked the building. She was muttering something.
"Come back, please, come back. I don't want to die alone. I need help. I wish I'd never ended up here."
"Hello? Hello, we're here to help. I'm Clara and this is Spencer," Clara said soothingly, adopting the Doctor's tone of voice when he came across a distressed person. The woman lowered her hands and turned around. Spencer had a hand on Clara's shoulder, and leaning forward, murmured in her ear.
"I think this is the woman we were just talking to on the phone."
Clara shot her a look of surprise, but didn't back down. She extended a hand to the woman.
"Miranda?" Spencer asked quietly, cautiously. The woman frowned at them and dropped her hand.
"Do I know you? What are you doing in my house?"
"You won't believe this," Spencer said, "but we were talking on the phone a minute ago."
"You! You hung up on me! I can't believe you hung up on me!" Miranda yelled. Clara and Spencer backed away.
"You know, maybe this isn't the best time to talk about this," Clara intervened.
"I had to! There was a Weeping Angel threatening to kill us. I had to hang up to get out of there. It was a stalemate. Eventually one of us would lose, and I didn't want it to be us," Spencer growled back. Miranda looked bewildered. Clara had the realisation that the poor woman had no idea what they were talking about. She'd never seen a Weeping Angel. Probably had never heard of them either. And Clara couldn't explain the whole situation to her. The woman glowered at her and Spencer.
"I have no idea who you are or what you're doing here, but I have to find my husband and get out of this house before this earthquake, or whatever it is brings everything down around us. I don't know why I hung around so long, except that I thought I should come to the phone. I don't know what came over me. And if I'd known that you were what I'd get in return, I wouldn't have bothered," she spat. She began to stride out of the room, shoulders hunched in anger, and, Clara guessed, disappointment. She and Spencer weren't exactly the cavalry that Miranda was obviously expecting.
She and Spencer turned on their heels to follow her, but then a sound cracked through the darkness and the three of them stopped in their tracks.
Ring.
The Doctor looked at the phone. Stared at it. Reached out to grab it. Didn't. He pulled out his screwdriver and pointed it at the device. The readings were off the scale. He picked it up.
"Geronimo?"
"Doctor? I'm glad to hear your voice," Clara's voice came through from the other end. "Do you really answer the phone with 'geronimo'?"
"What? No! Focus Clara! Where are you? How are you calling me?"
"Calling you? Doctor, you called me! And I think I'm in 1914. I'm with Spencer. And a woman called Miranda. We were on the phone with her before Spencer hung up. When she did, we ended up here. Doctor, what's happening?"
"Two telephones ringing at exactly the same time from two different points in time?" the Doctor muttered to himself under his breath, thinking. Clara heard him.
"Not just two phones, Doctor. The same phone. Calling from different years. How is that possible?" she asked into the phone, her voice travelling the impossible line across the years. The Doctor paused in his thinking.
"The same phone? Clara, are you sure? I need you to be one hundred percent sure about this."
"I'm sure, Doctor! What does it mean?"
The Doctor ran a hand through his hair. He grinned.
"Oh, you wonderful, clever thing, you," he said to the phone. "It means there's a rip in the fabric of the universe. This phone booth, this phone, it's a hole. It's a rift."
"Can you do something? Because there's an earthquake here. At least, I think it's an earthquake. Everything is shaking," Clara informed the Doctor, trying to keep the panic from her voice. The Doctor swung to check the Weeping Angel and the two girls staring at it. The statue hadn't moved. His brain shifted gears. Thoughts flew through his mind faster than he could register them. Everything he ever knew was coming at him, details and facts and useless knowledge, sifting through them all, trying to give him something that would help.
"Doctor?"
"Oh, it's nothing Clara, just the rift collapsing. If we don't close it, the whole house would fall into the hole. And if it goes, then we die. Not just you, us too. So we have to close the rift."
"How do we do that?"
The Doctor stared at the Weeping Angel, a smile beginning to spread over his face. "Don't worry Clara. I have a plan!"
He let the phone drop, not putting it back on the hook.
"I hate it when he says that," Clara muttered. Spencer looked at her expectantly.
"Well?"
"He says he has a plan. Apparently the house is built on a rift, and this phone is in the centre of it. This," she gestured around them at the house, "it's not an earthquake. It's the rift collapsing."
Spencer and Miranda looked horrified. Clara grinned.
"Don't worry. The Doctor has a plan."
"I have to find Caleb," Miranda announced, and walked out of the room, starting down the corridor, back to where the party was being held. Spencer and Clara followed, calling out to her to stop.
"I'm not leaving him behind. We've been through a lot. I've already told you that we're from 2013. I'm not going through something this big again without him."
"Wait, Caleb? Caleb Rivers? You're married to Caleb Rivers?" Spencer gasped, catching up to Miranda. The woman frowned.
"Yes."
"Oh," Spencer guffawed, "I hope you have a cemetery plot, because Hanna is going to kill you."
"Hanna? Marin? Caleb's ex-girlfriend? She left him. I doubt she's going to be killing anybody," Miranda said coolly. Spencer shook her head.
"No she didn't. As far as Hanna knows, Caleb is still her boyfriend." That gave Miranda pause. But as they turned the corner, they came face to face with the pair themselves.
"Spence!" Hanna cried out when the familiar face of her friend appeared out of the dark. She threw herself into the taller girl's arms. "I'm so glad to see you. I have no idea what's going on. Apparently this is 1914 and my boyfriend is married to some other woman!"
Caleb approached his wife, concern written on his features. They had a conversation under their breaths, away from the others. Clara stood aside, out of her depth in the tangle of other people's lives. Hers might be a dangerous life, but at least it wasn't this complicated. Even before she travelled with the Doctor it wasn't so bad.
The house shuddered around them, more forceful this time. Clara cleared her throat.
"We should go. Back to the phone booth. If the Doctor's got a plan, we'll need to be where he thinks we are."
"Are you Miranda?" Hanna called, spotting the woman Caleb was talking to.
"Han, not now," Spencer whispered, tugging her arm. Hanna wrenched herself free.
"That's me," Miranda half shrugged. Caleb glowered at Hanna.
"Hanna," he warned.
"What?" she shot. "I just want to meet the woman who marries my boyfriend. Is that a crime?"
"He wasn't your boyfriend when I married him. You left him in Ravenswood and skittered back to your little rich girls' town after he came all those miles to be with you, to help you. You just left him there. Things happened after you left. Life happened," Miranda scowled. A sense of urgency built up in Clara's chest, panic rising in her throat. She shot a pleading look at Spencer, who gave a small, helpless shrug. She tugged at Hanna's sleeve again, but was ignored.
"And for the record," Miranda added, "we didn't get married until we got here. It was 1908. You weren't even born. You were long gone. The chances of seeing you again were less than impossible."
"But here I am."
"Here you are," Caleb sighed.
"None of us are going to be here if we keep talking. Go back to the phone booth. I actually want to live to see tomorrow. The drama can wait. Hanna, come on!" Spencer yanked again, and this time Hanna complied. The five of them piled into the corridor, feeling their way to the room with the phone booth. When they entered, the phone was silent.
But only for a moment.
"Clara!" the Doctor yelled into the phone. "Clara, I need you to listen to me. I will come and get you, I promise. Cross my hearts. But more urgently, I need to close this rift. So don't panic!"
The house rocked and rumbled, the lights flickering. In one huge movement, the earth moving beneath Clara's feet, the windows burst inwards, spraying the room with shards of glass.
"Doctor, hurry!"
He left the phone hanging there, leaving the line open. His plan would work, surely, it would work. He hoped. He took a step away from the phone booth and felt it, a tremor, the house shivering as the earth shook its foundations. The Doctor's hearts pounded in his chest. He had to move now, or else it was too late. If the rift started pulling the house in from this time zone, then it was doing it across all times, a disaster rippling across the fabric of the universe, of all universes. But it wasn't just any rift. It spouted time energy, the way the sun had solar flares - big balls of energy that were thrown out into the universe. That's why the Weeping Angel was attracted to this place, to this house. A lone survivor trying its best to live off what it could find. The Doctor almost felt pity for it then, motionless marble trapped by the gaze of two teenage girls.
"You two," he pointed to Emily and Aria, "back here, into the phone booth. C'mon, c'mon, we haven't got all day."
They stumbled backwards, keeping their eyes on the Angel, even though the Doctor had his on it too. He took a breath. Another tremor, stronger this time, ran through the house. The phone, hanging in empty air, twitched. The Doctor sorely hoped this would work. All of time and space and he still hadn't learned how to close a rift yet. But it should work. Probably.
"Alright," he leaned in and spoke in a low voice into the ears of the two girls. "On the count of three, we're all going to close our eyes."
"What?!" Aria and Emily shouted in unison, wild, fear filled eyes darting back to the Doctor to check if he was serious. He was.
"Count of three, close your eyes. Trust me. I need you both to trust me. The Weeping Angel is going to move towards us, but once it gets to the phone booth, the heart of the rift, once it touches the phone, it'll fall through and the rift will be closed. The Angel feeds off time energy, and this, oh, this beautiful, clever rift, it's all errant time energy, displacing people in history. It wants the Angel, and the Angel wants it. They just didn't know it."
"I have no idea what you just said, but fine," Aria nodded, closing her eyes tight. "I just hope you're right."
Emily made sounds of uncertainty and fear, but she too closed her eyes. The Doctor kept his open for a moment longer.
"Geronimo," he whispered under his breath, then screwed his eyes shut just as the house gave a great shudder.