"When a great ship is in harbour and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt.
But that is not what great ships are built for."
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
Chapter 3: Phantom Time
[The House]
By the time everything stopped spinning, Rose was fighting her body's urge throw up from the nausea caused by her impromptu trip. She curled in on herself, one hand pressed over her mouth and the other pressed to her stomach. She would not throw up on the floor, she would not throw up, she would not… She might… Nope, she would not throw up. She refused to do that. But god, the nausea was overwhelming.
"Oh god," she whispered, when she could finally speak without possibly vomiting, "Oh my god."
The air was cool and still around her. Unnaturally still. The whispering voices had disappeared.
She sat up, eyes wide and breathing shallow. What had she just done?
The house was creaking every seconds. Shadows shifted and formed strange shapes that Rose could only see out of the corner of her eye. In that unnatural silence, she suddenly heard footsteps travel across the second floor directly above her.
Adrenaline shot through her. She scrambled to her feet and bolted into the darkened living room, desperately search for a place to hide.
She wasn't alone in the house. Someone or something else was there.
Rose almost tripped over a throw rug and the coffee table as she moved, despite attempting to stifle every noise she made. Even her breathing sounded too loud in the crushing silence.
It didn't help that almost no light came in through the big living room window. She could barely see the street outside through the curtains. It was nighttime outside, maybe a new moon night. The street outside, along with the other houses lining it, made it quite clear that she was no longer in an empty Santa Fe warehouse. She could still hear phantom footsteps though, now slowly making their way down the stairs behind her.
'Bloody hell,' she cursed internally, spinning around and pulling her gun out of the holster at her hip. She was NOT going to run from whoever it was. She was a Torchwood commander, and she'd travelled with the Doctor. She would not let thoughts of phantoms and ghosts scare her away from this place until she'd gotten what she came for: her dimension cannon.
"I am Commander Rose Tyler of Torchwood. Declare yourself!" She called out, carefully aiming her weapon at the doorway she'd just come through.
There was no on there, yet the footsteps grew louder as they moved down the stairs.
"I'm warning you, I'm armed!" She raised her voice even more, desperately hoping that she would receive some kind of expected response.
Instead, the phantom footsteps faded away.
A faint buzzing sound reached her ears then, growing stronger by the second. It was coming from the dining room that was openly connected to the living room. On the table, she saw there were five place settings set. She was sure they had not been there before. There was also with a large, alien-looking device in the middle of them table. It looked like part of a radio that had been forcefully combined with the base of a record player, with three inlaid bronze disks bolted to the top in a neat stack.
The device itself was humming quietly. Another sound, a low electrical whine, was building somewhere in the kitchen. It sounded like a large machine that was slowly dying.
Rose peeked into the kitchen from doorway to the dining room. The old white fridge against the far wall was shaking. Well and truly shaking, like something was trapped inside it that was increasingly desperate to get out.
There was also closed door at the back of the kitchen. She prayed it was the house's back door.
Rose stepped further into the kitchen, gun still raised. The front door was clearly visible down the hall through another doorway. It was too far away though. She wanted out of here as soon as possible, and she didn't want to go past the stairs if she could help it.
A fast decision had to be made when she noticed white smoke start to creep around the edges of the fridge door. "This cannot be happening right now," Rose whispered, as she watched the wisps of smoke sink to the linoleum floor and make their way toward her.
The back door was her best option, even though she had to go past the shaking, smoking fridge to get to it.
The device behind her hummed louder. The fridge shook harder. Rose did not like how close its door looked to bursting open.
With that thought, she rushed over to the back door and shoved it open as hard as she could. She promptly fell over its threshold onto a warm, sunlit landing at the top of a flight of stairs, just managing to stop herself from tumbling down them by grabbing onto the railing with one hand. One glance behind her revealed that the door she'd just come through had disappeared entirely. "What the…" Rose mouthed, staring at the small home office that now stood behind her. She straightened, taking in her new surroundings and feeling her heart and stomach drop when she realized they weren't new surroundings at all.
Somehow she had gone out the back door of the Victorian house and ended up on its second floor landing. And it was sunny now, not the middle of the night. She could even see the living room from here, and the doorway into the kitchen. The front door looked exactly the same as the last time she'd seen it a few seconds earlier. Distant voices, regular, human voices, could be heard from somewhere downstairs.
All she wanted to do was leave this place, that's all. Was that too much to ask for? She just wanted to get outside, where she could take stock of her situation better.
"Who are you?"
Rose jumped at the sound of a woman's voice nearby. She turned to see an exhausted-looking woman leaning against the railing that ran along part of the second floor hallway and down the stairs. Her clothes were paint-stained, and her dirty blonde hair looked like it hadn't been brushed in a week.
When Rose didn't respond immediately, the woman pushed off the railing and took a step toward her. "Are you one of them?" She demanded with a cold expression on her face.
Rose stared at her in confusion. "I'm…not?" It came as more of a question than she'd intended.
The woman's expression did not change. "Show me your wrists." She ordered.
Not knowing what else to do, Rose did as she asked, pulling up her sleeves and baring her wrists. The woman studied them, then Rose's face. "No, you're not one of them," she whispered, "They always wear watches. You, though, you have such strange, tangled lines around you, nothing like them. You're like nothing I've ever seen before."
Rose began to back away from her, a little wary of the woman's intense stare. "What are you talking about?" She asked.
The woman's expression fell. Her whole stance seemed to collapse inward a little. "I live here. For better or worse." She muttered, her gaze drifting to something over Rose's shoulder.
Rose relaxed slightly, sensing that there was more to this strange woman than there first appeared. "I'm sorry for barging in on you. I don't know how I got here, but I'll just leave now, if that's alright. Sorry." With that, Rose turned to go down the stairs, eyeing the front door with determination.
She was leaving. Immediately.
"Wait!" The woman said. She rushed forward, stopping at the top of stairs with her hands outstretched imploringly. "Wait, if you're not one of them, then you must be from Her! Please, you must know who I am! I need your help! My son Lex—"
Rose's eyes widened at the name, but she never got the chance to hear the end of the woman's sentence. A small hand suddenly grabbed hers, the one not holding the gun. She jerked away in surprise, almost losing her footing. A young blonde girl had appeared out of nowhere on the stair beside her.
The world dissolved into swirling colors again.
The next thing Rose knew, she was standing in the dining room again. It looked cleaner, and the table was empty. The little girl was still standing next to her, tugging on the purple sleeve of Rose's jacket impatiently.
Rose stepped away from her. "Who are you? Where did you come from?" She choked out.
"I'm Morgan," the girl said simply. Her blonde hair was in braided pigtails, and her purple dress seemed to shimmer with some kind of energy Rose couldn't quite see when she looked at it directly.
Rose took a deep breath. How would the Doctor go about dealing with this strange situation? She had to remain calm, and find out more about the house and its occupants. "Hello Morgan," she said, "I'm Rose. Do you live here?"
The girl smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
"Do you know what's going on here? Why is this house so…strange?"
The girl's smile became a look of confusion. "Our house isn't strange," she said. "It's part of the Anomaly."
"The anomaly? What is that?" Rose tried to keep her voice even and calm as she questioned Morgan, but her heartbeat was still racing, and it raced even faster at the girl's words. Something about this "Anomaly" was tugging at the Bad Wolf part of her mind.
"Not the anomaly. THE Anomaly. She is here." The girl explained, although Rose didn't understand her any more than she had before.
Bewildered at whatever she had managed to stumble into this time (jeopardy-friendly alien trouble magnet that she was) Rose sighed. "I'm sorry, I still don't understand what you mean," she said, holstering her gun as she spoke.
The girl's eyes drilled into her own. For one second, they almost seemed to burn with golden fire. "She is here," Morgan repeated, "And they are here. They are coming for the us all."
"Is it, is it the Charter? Why do they want me?" Rose asked. She hoped that this girl would not give her the same answer Lex had.
Morgan tugged at Rose's hand until she bent down to be at eye level with the girl. "You frighten them," the girl whispered. And then she disappeared into thin air, leaving Rose alone in the house once again.
Rose let out a shaky breath, clenching her hands into fists at her sides. She was so tired of receiving elusive half-answers.
The faint buzzing sound was also back, she realized. It was much louder now.
And the phantom footsteps that Rose had very nearly forgotten about in all the excitement of the past few minutes suddenly came from somewhere close behind her. She tensed, hand flying to the grip of her gun again, the power of Bad Wolf rising to the forefront of her mind.
"You should listen to Lex and Morgan," a man's voice said, in a quiet, sympathetic tone. "They are correct. You need to run."
What felt like someone's hand lightly squeezed her right shoulder as if in consolation, and then disappeared. Rose nearly jumped out of her skin at the sensation, whirling around the see who had touched her. She thought she saw a something move by the living room fireplace against the wall to her left, but when she went closer to investigate, there was nothing there. She groaned in exasperation. This house, chock full of time-space anomalies the likes of which Rose and Torchwood combined had not seen or experienced before, was making her paranoid and jumpy.
She shook her head, mentally snarling at herself to focus. She had a dimension cannon to find. And a house to get out of as soon as possible. She'd try the front door this time.
One framed photo above the fireplace caught her attention then. Wherever the house was now enough light came in through windows that she could see the family of four in the picture. One of them was definitely Lex. Another was the strange, exhausted woman Rose had encountered on the second floor landing. A third was the little blond girl that had somehow transported her back to the dining room. Rose didn't recognize fourth person in the picture, but he appeared to be Lex and Morgan's father and the partner of the painter woman.
What on earth was so special about this one family, and this one house? Nothing about this was normal, not even by Pete's World's Torchwood standards.
Rose rubbed her temples, sparing a moment to wish that everything had been different. She wished Bad Wolf had given her the power to simply get back to her Doctor, wherever he was. She wished she didn't have to deal with this crazy, stupid house that didn't seem to want to let her leave. She wished she didn't feel like she was being watched by invisible eyes, stalked by invisible footsteps. And yet…that spark of Bad Wolf in her mind had encouraged her to enter the house, and hadn't really reacted to anything inside it so far. That that must mean something. She had to keep going, try to open a few more doors and windows, find out who this family was, and figure out why time and space were warping around every other corner of this house.
She couldn't sense the warping very strongly, but now that she thought more about the sensation through the lens of the wolf inside her, she was sure she could feel some very strange temporal oddities occurring around her. It was like thousands of possible timelines were on the verge of exploding into existence. And there, at the very edge of her perception, hovered one particular timeline that presented a hopeful possibility.
The TARDIS key on the chain around her neck felt warmer against her skin than it had in over three and a half years.