So, here's a weird thing: I've just learned that there is a new "e-mail opt-in" in your account settings... if you have not been receiving notifications on this story, or others, perhaps consider changing your settings! Just a thought. ;-)
Careening toward a resolution now...
The Doctor, Jack, and Glenn have been in the TARDIS, doing dangerous stuff, ripping through the Rift, causing an unnecessary time jump. At this moment, Martha hasn't seen nor heard from them in three weeks, when she was planning to keep in touch several times a day. She knows the stakes, and they are terrifying!
But two men showed up at her door, claiming to be from the future... what now? Who are they? And how are they going to figure in the big picture? Enjoy!
FIFTEEN
Martha served tea, because she had already had the kettle going, and the house was freezing in the Connecticut late October. She was also British, as were her guests, and it seemed like the thing to do.
"Sorry it's so cold," she said, pouring water into the cups of her new friends. "My housemate's a 1980 chain smoker, and I've got delicate twenty-first century lungs. I can't not open all the windows when she leaves."
"It's fine," Haroun said.
"I've been noticing, the whole world smells like an ash tray in 1980," Steve said, chuckling, awkwardly. "Or, Connecticut does. Haven't been all over the world yet."
"That is definitely true," Martha said. Then, she sat down in an armchair, across a coffee table from the sofa, where the men sat, bobbing their teabags. "Right. Let's get down to it, gents. How the hell did you find me?"
Steve Anderson (né Kingsley) and Haroun Chowdhury (né Shaan) looked at each other. The latter said, "Go ahead. You tell it better than I do."
"How would you know?" asked Steve.
"Because I have no idea what the fuck is going on," said Haroun. "And you're the one who found me, so clearly you've worked it out."
"Hardly," Steve sighed. He looked at Martha, and said, "As you might have guessed, we both got somehow transported back in time."
"I had, actually, guessed that."
"By a statue."
"Right. In Oystermouth Cemetery in Swansea, sometime in 2007," Martha finished.
"Yeah. A statue of an angel."
"They're called Weeping Angels."
"So, you don't think I'm a complete nutter for saying so?"
"I wish I did."
"So that's how you got here, too, then?"
"Not really," Martha said. "My story's a bit different. But you keep talking."
"Okay. I was visiting my gran's grave and was taken completely unawares. I had visited that cemetery every six weeks for four years, and had never noticed those Angels before – I just thought they were a new, ornamental thing at the front gate. Made to walk past them without a care in the world, and arrived here in 1980 with the bouquet of flowers still in my hand… thought I'd been drugged."
"My story is much dafter, though I, too, wondered if I had been drugged," said Haroun, the Indian man, apparently raised in Kent. "I'm a blogger – I mostly debunk."
"You don't say," Martha chuckled, marvelling at the fact that the word blogger didn't even exist yet there, where they sat.
"I went to Oystermouth to try and chase down this rumour of statues that move. And, well…" Haroun said, spreading his hands as if to say, and you see how that turned out.
"That's the same thing that happened to Tamara Litzinger," Martha mused. "She was a photographer who had heard the online chatter, and… zap. And I'm going to guess that the same Angel that got her got you two as well, since you wound up in the same time and place."
"Oh," Steve said, blinking with confusion. "Litzinger… she wasn't on the flier."
"What flier?" Martha asked, interest now piqued.
"Wait," Haroun cut in. "Same Angel… how many are there?"
"As far as we know, four," Martha answered.
"Oh! And they each transport people to a different time and place?"
"We think so, yes," Martha said. "Though this is the only one I know about for certain – Connecticut, 1980."
"Oh, that makes so much more sense!" Steve exclaimed, and indeed, Martha could see behind his eyes, he was making connections.
"What does?" Martha wondered.
"Well, there's a whole story behind… the flier."
"The flier again… did a flier somehow lead you here?" she asked.
Steve reached into his pocket, and pulled out a loose piece of paper. "I found this at a post office in Norwalk." He leaned across the table and handed it to her.
It was a Missing Persons bulletin, with photos of Steve, Haroun, and herself. It was a photo she did not recognise, perhaps one that had not been taken yet.
"Oh!" she said, blinking hard at what she was seeing. Then she read aloud a piece of text at the bottom of the page. "Do you know Steve Kingsley Anderson, or Haroun Shaan Chowdhury? These individuals have been missing since April, 1980, from Norwalk and/or New Canaan, Connecticut, and are trapped, out of their element. If you have any information regarding their whereabouts, please contact the home of Dr. S. Penn of New Canaan, but do not phone. And you are not seeking Dr. Penn herself, but rather another Doctor, via Martha Jones (pictured above)."
"We were very struck by the fact that our real names – our names from 2007 – were on the bulletin," Steve said.
"Indeed," Martha said. Then she read the fine print: "Other things that might shed light on the situation: Liam Detton, Devin Prather, Yoshio Muramoto. In the absence of Google, larger city libraries with networking and access to archives may be your best bet. Also a wallbox, England's big win, and a key entrusted to a President."
"Library… it's how we found Dr. Penn's house," Haroun pointed out. "He's not here is he?"
"She. And no, she's out. I'm hoping for quite a while. Who are the others? Detton, Prather, Muramoto?" Martha wondered.
"Well, that's a long story."
"And what's this thing about a wallbox, England's big win, and a key? Blimey, it sounds like The DaVinci Code," Martha muttered.
"There's a story there, too," said Steve.
After a pause, Haroun chimed in. "Listen, Ms. Jones, we assumed that finding you meant the end of the line. That the flyer seemed to indicate you would know how to get us back home."
Martha sighed heavily, again. "Well, I might. I'm a time traveller – sort of. Actually, my friend is – well, he's more than just my friend – but anyway, he's the time traveller, and there are two other guys on board with us right now. But here's the thing: I asked to be left behind here temporarily to look after another Angel victim, and I am now completely out of touch from my time-travelling friends, and I have no idea what's happened to them. So, ordinarily, we could get you back, but as things stand…" Martha swallowed hard, trying not to think too hard about the loneliness she felt, and the devastating possibilities.
"Okay, then," Haroun said. "What do we have to do get in touch with them? We'll help you – whatever we have to do."
"Absolutely," agreed Steve.
"I actually have no idea. Yet. My mobile phone is supposed to work wherever I am, wherever they are, but I haven't heard anything in three weeks," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. "And given what they're dealing with… Angels that feed on time energy, a vessel that carries within it a host of time energy, and a Doctor who is… well, time energy personified…"
"Doctor," said Steve. "That's the Doctor mentioned on the flier?"
"Yeah," she said, swallowing hard.
"He's the time traveller?"
"Yeah."
"He's… time energy personified? Like some sort of time-travelling species?"
"Yeah. That's exactly what he is."
"Oh. I was joking."
"Well, I'm not," Martha said. "He's not human, he's… well, something else. And the point is, anything could have happened to him, and to our other friends, and I would never know. And that means we're stuck here."
"Okay. So you have no plan, as of now?" Steve asked.
"Nothing comes to mind. Nothing has come to mind in three weeks, other than to keep trying to ring them, and to… well, be a bit miserable," she said, sheepishly. These two guys were nice, but they were still complete strangers, and she didn't fancy showing too much vulnerability in their presence.
The three of them sat, sipping tea, shivering a bit, thinking.
Not for the first time, Martha racked her brain, trying to come up with any grain of idea of how to contact the Doctor, or Jack, or the TARDIS. Or even Glenn. The only sensible thing she could fathom, that was within her abilities, was to leave a message for them somewhere in time – Billy Shipton and Sally Sparrow came to mind. But the trouble was, she had no idea when or where they would turn up, and/or where to look for…
"Wait!" she said, suddenly. "You just randomly found that flier in a post office?"
"Well, yeah, but... story," Steve said.
The flier was currently laying in her lap, so she picked it up again, and looked at it closely. She squinted at the grainy black-and-white photos. "When and where were these photos of you taken?"
Both men frowned, and looked at each other. "Let me see that," Steve said, reaching out. She handed it back, and after a few moments of inspecting it, he said, "Good point – I have no idea! I can't believe I've never thought about that before!"
"It's not your passport photo, or your driving licence photo?"
"No," he said. He turned to Haroun and asked, "You?"
Haroun did the same thing, and came to the same conclusion. "It looks recent… it looks like my 1980 hair, even. But I've been careful not to have my photo taken here."
"Clever man," Martha said. "So who took it?"
"Erm…"
"You said there was a story behind the flier? The names? What's the story?" she asked, avidly, suddenly desperate to know more.
The stone Angel in the console room was just a stone angel. Just a statue – no consciousness, no longer any soul. No longer any impetus to zap, or suck time, or destroy. Its essence had magnetised back to whatever channel of the Rift it had come from, gone to a sort of Angel afterlife, when the TARDIS had flown through the Rift just a few minutes before.
The Doctor squinted at the screen to read the data, but it was then the eye of the storm ended, as the TARDIS began to cry out…
"Didn't the Rift rip out the Angel that's got into the TARDIS?" Jack yelled, hands over his ears.
"I guess not," the Doctor responded, wincing. "That one didn't come from the Rift. It came from a computer!"
"Now what?"
"I don't know!" the Time Lord shouted, now covering his ears as well. And the TARDIS spun again, knocking them both off their feet.
But there was still an Angel wreaking havoc inside of the TARDIS, two digital/sentient/living bodies, warring for control of the vessel, and all of its potential…
The grinding sound in the TARDIS had once again become deafening and intense. The Doctor's trusted ship was in pain, frightened, and locked in battle.
Illumination in the room became akin to a strobe light, and it was disorienting, but the Doctor remained focused. He was engrossed in the struggle, investing whatever energy he could in assisting the TARDIS.
The Time Rotor turned all sorts of colours – its usual green went muted, then to grey, then dark altogether. Then it came back on and went to blue, purple, rose red, then dark, again, all the while, lights in the console room flashed like constant lightning.
Back on, and orange and yellow. Gears screaming, a mad and horrifying sound…
"Doctor!" Jack tried again. "What's happening now?"
His shout finally penetrated the Time Lord's bubble of absorbed disgust and fascination. "They're fighting – the digital Angel is getting desperate now!" the Doctor answered.
He threw himself forward and used the controls to right the TARDIS temporarily, then without saying anything, he took Jack's hands and placed them where he needed them, to keep the vessel steady. Jack obeyed, without having to ask what he was doing.
Glenn's mum's CPU had been thrown every which way, and the Doctor went to look for it. He ended up crawling, amidst the disarray of light, sound, screaming, fighting, underneath the platform to retrieve it.
He pulled it out and brought it back up onto the console and set it there.
"I've got it right here, Old Girl," he told the TARDIS, as he went to work hooking it up again. "Just give it a good shove – I know you can do it."
The Doctor stepped back, the three men all looked at each other, waited ten seconds while the sounds and oppressive air went deeper and darker. Jack and Glenn were confused, but the Doctor's eyes began to dart about maniacally, expectantly, and his tongue sat against his outside lip, as though concentrating…
And then the TARDIS gave a great heave – it sounded like a wheeze, and a big bear-down, and the CPU exploded with green sparks.
"Whoa! Shit!" Glenn cried out, not having expected that.
"Yes!" the Doctor hissed and cried out with a big smile. "That's my girl!"
And with that, the CPU went flying across the console room, and hit the wall. It broke into a hundred pieces, all of which slid down the curved structure and hit the floor listlessly.
The lights went back to normal, the sound stopped, and the TARDIS was calm.
"Oh my God," Glenn said. "Is it over?"
The Doctor hopped down onto the floor of the console room, outside the main platform, and he picked up a green and silver circuit board.
"It will be, as soon as we deposit this thing back into the rift," he said, then came back up to the grated floor once again.
"That's the hard drive?" asked Jack.
"Yep," the Doctor said, depositing the thing in his pocket.
"The TARDIS shoved the Angel back into it?"
"Yep."
"Do you still need to give her as scan? To make sure the Angel is gone?"
"Probably," the Doctor shrugged.
"And… we have to do all that again, don't we? With the other Angels?" Glenn wondered.
"I'm sorry, but yes. Three more times. Can't risk having three of them in here at once," the Doctor said. "But we'll wait a few days, Glenn. Maybe we can look into getting your mum back first."
And then the phone rang in his pocket.
"Hello?" he said.
"Doctor! Oh my God, you're alive!" Martha's voice came bursting through the speaker.
Martha listened to Steve's story with interest, and when it was over, she was left staring at Steve Kingsley with the narrowed eyes of confusion, and a million questions. But the big question came first: "How do you know about all this?"
"Well, that's where the wallbox comes into play," he replied. He took a manila-coloured envelope, just a bit larger than standard letter size, from his inside pocket, and held it out to her.
She took it from him, and looked inside. There were a variety of papers inside, in various states of age and decay. "What's this?" she wondered.
"When I was a kid, my mother kept a stash of cash in a safety deposit box," Steve said. "I used to go with her to extract from it, and it was a big wall of boxes. I was only five the first time I saw it, so I always called it a wallbox."
"Oh!"
"I reckoned the flier was sending me to a safety deposit box, and it took me a while to realise that the wallbox thing must be directed, somehow, at me," he went on. "Seems like a no-brainer now, but you have to understand my disorientation."
"Totally understand," Martha agreed.
"And, well, I'm a bit of a football statistician - amateur of course," he continued. "England's only World Cup win was in 1966. Most Brits know that. But the specific date was 30 July. I looked into the nearest bank, to see if they had safety deposit box number 30766. The cashier I spoke to turned very pale, and went and got the bank President."
"Let me guess," Martha said. "The key to that particular box had been entrusted to the bank President many years ago, and has been handed down to the current President. And the employees have been under strict instructions to summon him, should anyone ever come looking to get into that box."
"Yep. He asked me my name, and a few questions about myself - Steven Kingsley, born in 1975, and apparently I answered them all correctly according to the little piece of paper he held, because he gave me the key. This envelope was in the box. It tells the whole story."
Martha did not remove any papers from the envelope, she just turned it over and over in her hands, and asked, "So this whole thing started in Siberia?"
"Yes, Yakutsk, now the coldest major city on Earth. Though, back in 1899, when it was a fur-trading camp," said Steve.
"And there were how many Welsh people there?"
"Three Welsh, two English."
"All said to have appeared out of nowhere?"
"Yes. Almost as though zapped there from the future, wouldn't you say?"
"And you said they all knew each other from university?"
He nodded. "Class of 2009. One of them died of hypothermia within the first week after arriving in Yakutsk."
"Ugh," Martha groaned.
"But of the other four, three of them disappeared about a year after arrival – the remaining man, Liam Detton, said they died on a hunting expedition. But their bodies were never found, and around the time the folks in the camp started to suspect him, he took off on a summer trek to the East, with a travelling caravan…"
"What, and they just thought, good riddance?"
"I suppose, yes."
"But he hadn't killed them, he had sacrificed himself," Martha said, getting her mind around things.
"Yes. Well, sacrificed his opportunity to get back home, in order to help others get back home. Or so it seems."
"Liam Detton," Martha said. "And he wound up in Japan?"
"Hokkaido. It's not as far as you might think," Steve shrugged. "I mean, Russia is huge, but Yakutsk is on the east end, and Hokkaido is on the north end of Japan."
"It's probably still a couple thousand miles," Haroun offered. "But given how hard it could have been…"
"And why?" Martha wanted to know, though she thought she knew the answer.
"No-one seems to know," Steve said. "Only that he acted very purposefully."
"Like he had instructions," she mused.
"Exactly."
"And then he went to work at the Sapporo beer factory?" she asked, a bit incredulous.
"So it goes," Steve said.
"Why?"
"Again, no-one knows, but he wouldn't take no for an answer when he went there asking for a job."
"Sapporo was already up and running in 1900?"
"It was founded in the 1870s, yes. Detton started working there in 1900, when he was twenty years old, and he was the only white man working there until 1938, when another Englishman was hired, Devin Prather, aged 35.
"And Detton…"
Steve nodded. "…mysteriously retired with no notice, one week after Prather's hiring."
"And was never heard from again?"
Steve didn't fancy repeating himself. However, he understood that it was a fairly mad story, and could see that Martha Jones just wanted to get the details right. Though in certain cases, she was asking for details he had not given on the first telling.
"No, he seems to have lived out the rest of his life in Hokkaido, with a Japanese wife, kids, and grandkids," he said.
"And Prather…"
Again, Steve nodded. "…Prather, his brother, and two other British people in Hokkaido disappeared about a year later. There are diaries of people who worked with them, lived nearby, and whatnot."
"Okay…"
"And you know what? 1939 seems like an eminently sane time to leave Japan, you know?"
"Right, then, how do we get to Argentina? Is this where the mass exodus comes into play?"
"Yeah. As I said, 1939 was a good time to not be an English-speaker in Japan, because you might have heard that a war broke out around then?"
"I have heard, yes. And you mentioned a mass exodus…"
"Of Nazi and Nazi-sympathising officers from Germany, Italy and Japan, yes. Mostly to avoid the Allies and being tried at the Hague."
"Okay, I see, and I've read that South America was quite welcoming of them," Martha said, nodding vigorously.
"Right. So, it seems that a good friend of Prather's from Hokkaido, someone called Yoshio Muramoto, left his family in 1945 and took total advantage of that Exodus and had turned up in Junín, Argentina, by the fall of 1946. It's a small town, people notice other people and their movements."
"And he was still there in 1952."
"He was seen on New Year's Day, 1952, posting a bulletin in a local cantina."
"And tell me again what Beyoncé has to do with it?"
"The flier was in English, which is why it was all the more noticeable. And it mentioned Beyoncé, meant to grab the attention of anyone who..."
"…who might have mysteriously appeared in Junín that year, fresh from the early twenty-first century. Who then disappeared some months later."
"Correct. And that was twenty-eight years ago," Steve confirmed. "And when I asked about the bulletin at the post office, the lady showed me the envelope it had come in. A Ms. Michiko Alvarez-Muramoto had sent it from Buenos Aires in late 1979."
"His daughter?"
"That's what I'm thinking."
"This is fantastic news!" Martha said, getting to her feet. She might've known it before, but digging into the story had confirmed it. "Because of Beyoncé!"
"Because of… what?"
"It means Jack is still out there! And if Jack is alive, so is the Doctor! And if it all started in Siberia, it means the TARDIS can still do her thing!"
The phone rang in the Doctor's pocket.
"Hello?" he said.
"Doctor! Oh my God, you're alive!" Martha's voice came bursting through the speaker.
"Yeah, we're alive – all four of us," the Doctor responded, harried. "TARDIS included."
Martha seemed to burst into tears then. "Where the hell have you been?"
"Oystermouth, Torchwood, the Rift, and… some combination of back again. It's been a hell of a day."
"A hell of a day? A hell of a day, Doctor, seriously?" she shrieked.
"Yeah, what of it?" he asked, puzzled.
"I haven't heard a word in three whole weeks, and you tell me it's been a hell of a day?" she scolded.
"Three weeks? Wha…"
"You could at least start by…"
"Wait, Martha, stop. Three weeks?"
"Yes!"
"Er, sorry, love, but from my point of view, it's been less than twenty-four hours. A lot less!"
"What?"
"But you say you haven't been able to get hold of us for three weeks?"
"Yes! Again, yes! I've called and called, and just got static!"
"Oh. Blimey."
"Doctor, do you have any idea the kinds of horrors that have been bouncing about in my mind? The Angels, the TARDIS, time, Glenn… you!"
"I can imagine. Just static?"
"Yes. No signs of life, Doctor. No signs. I thought I'd lost you."
The Doctor buried his free hand in his hair, and sighed. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Martha. The TARDIS has just been through the wringer."
"Doctor… my heart was breaking."
"Well, there's no need for that," he assured her. "It was just a blip. A temporary blip – I'm here. You can hear my voice, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"And you know I still love you, and that I'm coming for you?"
"I do now!" she said, her voice breaking again.
"It was just a freak of the TARDIS' interaction with the vortex over the past day or so. We Bluetoothed into the Rift Manipulator at Torchwood then flew through the Rift, reversed the polarity of some of its channels, and did a fairly harsh stripping-away of Angel energy, and then the TARDIS went to battle with the Angel that's been knocking about in its heart, and just now shoved it back into Glenn's mum's hard drive, and shattered the CPU against the wall, and I guess it was all just too much. The TARDIS must've got its linear circuits scrambled pretty good… well, they never worked great to begin with. And Glenn…"
"Doctor?"
"Yes?"
"I have no idea what you just said. My linear circuits are scrambled, as well."
"I'm sorry."
"No, I'm just… I'm just so happy to hear your voice, it's all I can think about. I just… I just need you to come and get me. I don't care if you don't want to make too many trips or whatever… I just don't care. I need… I need…" she was starting to fall apart.
"Okay, okay," he said. "It's all right – I'll be there as soon as I can. Martha, I'm sorry."
"Wait," she said. "Give us until tomorrow morning. That way, I can say a proper goodbye to Sybil, and get my things gathered."
"All right. Date?"
"30th October, 1980," she said.
"30th? Wow."
"We'll meet you outside the house at 9 am, and not a second later."
"Okay. Wait, Martha?"
"Who is we? Did Tammy decide to go home? Did you manage to find Glenn's mum?"
"No," she said. "Funny story."
Angels sorted. Sort of.
And now the rescues begin.
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