"Fare Forward, travellers!
Not escaping from the past into indifferent lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station,
Or who will arrive at any terminus…"
— T. S. Eliot

Chapter 4: Ghost Stories Come To Life

[The TARDIS]

Donna Noble had been asleep in her nice, comfortable bed, in her nice, cozy room on the TARDIS, in the middle of a rather pleasant dream. To her immense displeasure, she was no longer asleep or able to go back to sleep, no thanks to the bass tones of the cloister bell reverberating through the time ship, and red emergency lighting filling her bedroom.

Growling to herself, Donna threw off her covers, slipped on some shoes that would be good for running in, and stalked out of the room, muttering under her breath about annoying Time Lords and the moral implications of strangling the last one for waking her up. After all, she had just FINALLY gotten to sleep after a long, hard week of running, escaping prison cells, and rescuing refugees in the midst of an alien civil war.

The emergency lighting and cloister bell persisted as Donna stormed toward the console room. The resident Time Lord—who Donna was still contemplating strangling for this incident, whatever it was—was already standing at the console, frantically flipping levers and turning dials when Donna spotted him.

"What's going on? Oi, Spaceman! I'm talking to you!" She shouted. Irritation at losing her precious hours of hard-earned sleep radiated off the redhead in waves as she stalked across the grating toward him.

The Doctor barely glanced up at her as he rushed around the console in a whirlwind of brown pinstripes. "I don't know!" He said, pausing briefly to peer at the monitor in confusion. "I don't understand. None of this makes sense. The TARDIS just shows me the same coordinates over and over again, and insists that we're going there right now. When I asked about why, she shocked me! Mildly shocked me, but still, she shocked me. Twice!"

"The TARDIS won't tell you what's wrong?" Donna crossed her arms, distinctly unimpressed.

The Doctor finally looked at her fully. In the split second before he managed to mask the fear in his eyes and turn away, Donna realized that something was very wrong.

"Where are we going?" she asked, calmer this time as she moved around the console to look at the monitor with him. The symbols flashing rapidly on the screen made little sense to her, but she guessed that they must be the coordinates the Doctor had been talking about.

He didn't answer her right away, pressing another button on the console and tapping impatiently on the side of the monitor. The TARDIS must have decided to cooperate with him this time, for the visual on the screen changed to show an map of the Earth. Another moment and the image shifted to show a map of the United States.

"Doctor?" Donna prompted.

"See this?" The Doctor jabbed a finger at the coast of northern California. "There's something going on here in 2016 that the TARDIS just picked up on. It's a temporal anomaly of some kind."

Donna stifled an exasperated groan and rubbed at her tired eyes with both hands. She had long given up trying to understand most of how the TARDIS worked, but did the ship really have to wake her up for an event that was still a good seven years in her own future? "We're not anywhere near 2016 or Earth," she said.

"Exactly." He sounded rather grim.

"Are you serious?" Donna grumbled, lacking any enthusiasm for another adventure at the moment. "Humans need sleep, Doctor. And food, or even better, both of them, regularly. Is the universe going to end if I get something to eat before we deal with this?"

Before the Doctor could answer, the TARDIS lurched violently to one side, sending both Donna and the Time Lord crashing to the floor. Then, with a hard thud, the time ship dropped out of the Vortex, her engines grinding as she materialized on some kind of blessedly solid ground.

Donna quickly clambered to her feet, whirling on Doctor when he stood up beside her with a small groan. "Okay, I get it. No sleep for Donna! I swear— "

The offending Time Lord was quick to interrupt her. "It was the TARDIS! She hasn't exactly cooperated with me lately, but—"

Donna threw her hands up. "And no wonder! I haven't forgotten that we were having a pleasant time in Colorado a few weeks ago, and then look where we got stuck right after! In the middle of another—"

"Actually—"

"—civil war! For the second time than once in the last month, may I remind you! Honestly, when it's not your bad driving, then it's your ship that never listens to you!"

A stream of sparks shot out from the console, almost reaching Donna.

"Oi!" she shrieked, quickly backing away from the console and glaring at it. "I never said I disagreed with you about him!"

The sparks died down somewhat reluctantly. The cloister bell continued to toll in the silence that followed.

The Doctor sighed, wondering exactly when Donna had started talking (not telepathically, but still talking) directly to his ship. The TARDIS seemed pretty smug about the whole thing for a sentient time ship that was supposed to be on high alert about a crisis somewhere in 2016 (as if that year needed another crisis added to it.)

'Must you act like this right now?' the Doctor silently demanded of his ship, a touch of exasperation seeping into the projected thought before he could stop it. He already knew the TARDIS wasn't in the mood for an argument, but her response still took him by surprise.

A flood of restlessness, irritation and a hint of panic surged across their telepathic bond with the force of a cannon ball. The Time Lord held back a flinch, swiftly gathering his thoughts and pushing back. 'What in Rassilon's name are you trying to do? You KNOW I can't fix whatever you've detected in California until you tell me what it is!'

For a moment, he wondered if the TARDIS was going to remain silent. Then the Doctor caught the faintest impression of two words from her that sent an electric spark through every cell in his body.

'Eternal Return.'

His brow furrowed. 'I don't understand. Why make all this fuss if you're not going to tell us what's wrong? Donna will find a way to make me regenerate for this someday, I just know it, and we both don't want to deal with that sort of mess right now!'

The TARDIS gave him the equivalent of a telepathic eye roll and a pat on the back. She proceeded to reminded her Time Lord that she was always nice when it really mattered—to her. After all, she was willing to put up with him for centuries, and always took him where he needed to go, even when he didn't want to listen to her. Which was something he really should do more, and do it often.

The Doctor didn't completely agree with all of that, but for now he gave up trying to win that particular argument with his ship that was supposed to listen to him, not the other way around. There were more important things to deal with at the moment anyway. Like finding out why the TARDIS was acting so antsy about something in California in 2016.

The Doctor turned to his red-haired companion, who was impatiently waiting for him to wrap up his mental conversation. "How about you go change and meet me back here in five minutes? I need to finish putting something together, then we'll be able find out what's going on," he said cautiously, hoping that his suggestion wouldn't set her off again. She left the console room muttering under her breath about anomalies, Time Lords, and whether or not regenerating could turn one into a better driver.

All of those things were more than a little concerning for the Time Lord in question, so he waited to exit the console room until a full minute had passed following Donna's departure.

He sincerely hoped the TARDIS hadn't moved his workshop again. Its last location was a bit close to Donna's room, which he actively wanted to avoid when she was angry. Not that he thought she would actually do anything to him, and not that he was actually scared of her. He was a Time Lord, he wasn't scared of one sleep-deprived human.

Well… that was only partially true. He swore he could still feel the slap he'd once received from Rose's—

No.

He was not going to think about anything related to her right now. He wouldn't, couldn't let himself drown in those thoughts, not today. He had enough to deal with at the moment without adding his own bleeding, broken hearts to the mix. He had a temporal anomaly detector to finish putting together, and a massive anomaly to locate.

When Donna and the Doctor reconvened at the doors of the TARDIS a few minutes later, the cloister bell was still going off. The redhead was becoming rather good at ignoring it, though, and it didn't seem as loud now anyway.

Watching the Time Lord shrug on his coat as he walked down the ramp to the front doors, Donna's eyes were drawn to the small rectangular device in his hand. She could see a small screen on the front of it, displaying several oscillating lines. It reminded her a little bit of a heart rate monitor from a hospital, albeit a tiny one.

"What's that?" she asked.

"It's a timey-wimey detector!" The Doctor announced, looking far too pleased with himself as he handed said detector to his companion.

Donna smiled a little at his excitement, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at the device's name. "I thought this thing was destroyed when we went to India a little while back," she said, turning it over in her hands with curiosity.

"It was! This is my brand new timey-wimey detector. It goes—"

"—ding when there's stuff, I know. It still needs a new name," Donna finished. It still amazed her sometimes how the Time Lord could get excited over the smallest things.

The new device was much smaller and more streamlined than the one she had seen the Doctor use during their memorable adventures in India. It also had a proper back cover protecting the important detecting bits inside.

"Why would you need a new one now?" She asked.

"The name fits it perfectly, Donna. Don't insult the name. It's going to help us find our temporal anomaly," the Doctor said with a grin. He promptly pulled the ship's doors open with an enthusiastic, "Allons-y!"

Donna shook her head in fond exasperation as she followed him, pulling the the doors closed behind her.

They had landed in the shadow of an old wooden water tower. There was a small grassy field on one side of the tower, and a long row of small shops and houses one the other. The narrow street in front of them was lined parked cars and passed by a number of cute, seaside shops. Across the street, there lay a beautiful, wild waterfront park with a paths leading down to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. It was early evening here, and the sun was hanging low in the sky, partially hidden by cloud cover.

"So we're really in California?" Donna looked around with mild curiosity. She didn't know what she had expected California to look like, but it wasn't exactly the little, weather-worn cliffside town they had stepped into.

"The one and only. Well, in this century at least, until you lot establish New California in the 34th Century. Anyway, welcome to Mendocino. It's a relatively small town, has a population of about 900, give or take." The Doctor swept the detector through the air as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the tiny screen. He was searching for some kind of signal, some indication that there had was a major temporal crisis somewhere in the vicinity.

"There are secondary schools back home with more students than this entire town," Donna muttered.

Looking down the road at the row of shops to her right, Donna could help but wonder, 'What could possibly be so bad about a town like this?' The sea breeze was a bit cooler that she would have liked, with wind continuously rushing up the cliffs, but overall, she could see the town's visual appeal.

Donna tilted her head back, watching as grey storm clouds slowly moved in from the Pacific. "What's the date here?" She asked.

"2016. March 19th, to be exact. Local time is 5:42pm," the Doctor answered distractedly. He froze, moving the detector through the air a few inches to his left in the opposite direction of Donna and the row of shops. The device let out a faint 'ding!', and the Doctor's face lit up.

Donna crossed her arms as chilly breeze rushed over them, patiently waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Doctor suddenly narrowed his eyes at the oscillating lines on the detector screen. There it was, the catch that Donna had come to expect from their adventures. From what Donna could tell, the lines on the detector screen seemed to be moving a little more erratically than they had inside the TARDIS. Nothing else looked different, to her at least.

The Doctor silently took his glasses out of his jacket pocket and slipped them on, tilting his head to one side as he stared down at the screen. He seemed rather puzzled.

When he didn't tell her what he found so odd, Donna prodded his shoulder. "You gonna tell me about what we're looking for anytime soon?"

She wasn't quite prepared for the exuberant way the Doctor turned to face her. "Something is not quite right about the timelines in this town, something so problematic that the TARDIS was able to pick up on it all the way across the universe—and we're close to its source! Come on, Donna! Adventure awaits!" He exclaimed, bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement as he started down the street away from the row of little shops.

Donna sighed. She had a feeling that she wouldn't be resting much until this new temporal anomaly mystery was solved. She also very much wished that she didn't feel so drained from running around a war-torn planet for the last week; but once again, she steeled herself and her sore muscles and chased after the Doctor as always.

She had almost caught up to him when she stumbled over a newspaper lying discarded on the ground. She would have simply grumbled about irresponsible people leaving their trash in places unfortunate souls to trip over, but something on the front page caught her eye. Stooping to pick it up, Donna noticed that it had been printed earlier that week.

The headline over the large section of print in the middle of the front page said: "LIGHTS IN THE SKY: REPORTS OF STRANGE LIGHTS SHAPES ACCOMPANY STORMS". Another section beside that talked about a series of storms coming to Mendocino that week. A glance up at the storm clouds gathering overhead and Donna could certainly believe it. She hoped that she and the Doctor would leave the town before this particular storm hit.

She ran after him with the paper clutched in one hand. "Doctor," she called, "Doctor, wait!"

He turned to looked back at her, slowing his pace. "What? Did you find something?"

"Read this!" She caught up to him and thrust the paper into his hands. He took it, reading through the front page in a few seconds. Donna watched his face, especially wanting to know what he made of the article about strange lights in the sky. At first he seemed amused by it. Then his smug expression turned to one of concern, and he quickly opened up the newspaper to read the second half of the article on page two.

He started muttering under his breath too, and Donna could only make out some of what he said. "The Charter? What's the Charter? Not the Men in Black, what a ridiculous name for their organization anyway… No, this can't be UNIT, isn't their area, doesn't sound like Torchwood either...but we could ask Jack about it. No, no, not doing that. Shouldn't involve Jack, that could get messy, don't want another incident. But why would these people just go into houses without…strange noises all over town, odd lights, an approaching storm...hmmm."

A cold gust of wind blew in from the sea, making Donna shiver. The storm was definitely getting closer, and the streets were mostly quiet, lined with parked cars but with few people present outside. It was a bit eerie.

"It sounds like a classic alien abduction story," Donna commented, gesturing to the newspaper flapping in the wind in the Doctor's hands. From her place beside him, she could easily see the second half of the article which talked about supposedly fake organization called the Charter. People belonging to the Charter were going into people's houses and questioning them without warrant, then disappearing into thin air. Their departures were usually accompanied by a strange buzzing noise.

The Doctor shot Donna a dry, deadpan look. "Classic alien abductions? Really, Donna, after all we've been through, that's the best you can come up with."

She rolled her eyes. "I didn't say it was that, I said it sounded like a classic alien abduction story, except for the breaking into people's houses and questioning them part. You know, those stories that show up in trashy supermarket tabloids where half the stories are made up anyway. Obviously this isn't like that. And, obviously, I know first hand now that most aliens don't actually abduct humans like that anyway."

The Gallifreyan Time Lord before her arched an eyebrow in disbelief. "I'm going to hold you to that," he said, "and I'm going to remind that you said that, if and when you ever accuse me of abducting you again."

Donna laughed, mentally brushing away the memories of their tumultuous first meeting. "At least I signed up for it the second time. Now, don't we have things to investigate? I really don't want to be outside when that storm hits."

"I'm pretty sure I have an umbrella in my pocket somewhere, if you're worried."

"I don't want to have to use an umbrella at all!"

"But it's—"

"Oh god, do not say it's sonic." Donna cut him off, though the contained smile on her face ruined the effect of her reprimand. The Doctor matched her expression for a moment, and Donna was glad that in times like these he didn't appear to be as sad or lonely as she knew he could be.

They started down the street again, discussing the newspaper article about reported sightings of alien lights in the sky, the mysterious Charter "men in black", and odd humming noises all around town.

"I'm glad I brought the new detector with us, because we may have a rather large anomaly on our hands. Just based on the timelines around this town alone, this anomaly is centered around a place where a lot of things have gone, well, incredibly wrong, to put it mildly," the Doctor said.

"Are we just following the detector?" Donna asked. "Or do you actually know where we're going?"

"Eh, bit of both. The number of events coming together here is beyond coincidental. What are the odds that the TARDIS would pick up on an anomaly here, and the one newspaper you happen to find on the street talks about lights in the sky, and a strange humming noise all around town, all in relation to a particular house? I bet you we're going to end up looking for that house or something similar, actually. They might not know what's going on, but even regular people in this town know something is wrong here." The Doctor showed Donna a section of the newspaper article where a woman spoke about a strange house and family in town. The woman seemed to be implying that their young son was either no longer living there, or had recently died. Donna wondered why the boy's disappearance was being kept under wraps. Surely people in this town cared about a child dying, or going missing?

The two of them followed the street into one of the town's older neighborhoods. Donna swore she saw someone in a black suit trailing her and the Doctor at least two separate times. Whenever she turned to get a good look at them, they had already vanished. The Doctor was quite sure he saw a man in a black overcoat standing at a street corner up ahead, talking into a device on his wrist, but he disappeared down a side street the moment the Time Lord started toward him.

The arrival of the sound took them by surprise.

No, not the sound. The Sound. The one the interviewees in the newspaper article had talked about. It was an extremely specific combination of sonic frequencies that grated at the eardrums of all who heard it, inescapable and irritating to the extreme. 'Like the worst case of human tinnitus ever,' the Doctor quickly decided, 'a very dangerous form of it.'The ringing, buzzing noise droned on and on, making his eardrums throb and ache, and providing an intensely distracting static sensation in his mind.

The longer he was forced to endure this, the more he began to seriously suspect less-than-innocent intentions behind it. This wasn't just coming from pure sound waves. No, there was definitely else underneath the frequencies that didn't belong there, something that...something...

Where had he been going with that thought? He couldn't remember, and that realization sent a cold shiver of fear down his spine.

The Sound was just like as the people of Mendocino had described in the paper. No one could possibly think much about anything while hearing it. The Time Lord tried covering his ears with his hands at, but that did little to block out the noise.

Now the Doctor understood why that woman in the newspaper had sounded so desperate. If he had to live with this high pitched buzzing in his head all the time, it would drive him completely barmy too.

The Sound stopped so abruptly that he almost didn't believe his ears until Donna whispered a relieved, "Thank god!" He had to agree.

A short distance further up the road, the timey-wimey detector began dinging rapidly. The Doctor quickly turned a dial on its side to stop the racket, coming to a halt in the middle of the pavement and studying the device's readout. "Ha! There we go!" He exclaimed. "Whatever we're looking for, it's right…here."

The detector was pointing toward a house directly to their right. It was a Victorian-style two story dwelling, with a covered front porch and flower pots hanging from the roof. The wooden railing and support columns lining the porch had various purely ornamental elements to them, with pink shingles and paint highlighting some decorative elements against the backdrop of green and white of most of the house's exterior.

The driveway was empty, and the mailbox at the curb stuffed to the point of overflowing. All the lights were off, all the curtains drawn.

A chill went up the Doctor's spine. There was something very odd about this place. Some thing wrong, tearing at his time sense like an open wound.

Beside him, he saw Donna shiver.

"Did you feel that? The chill in the air?" he asked her, holding out a hand in front of him and feeling that something in the air that remained intangible yet quite palpable.

Donna crossed her arms. "It's just a little colder than I expected," she replied shortly.

The Doctor did not dismiss the cold sensation settling over his limbs so easily. He dropped the detector into one of the dimensional transcendental pockets of his coat and drew out his sonic screwdriver. "I think it's more than that. It's not a natural phenomenon we're feeling right now. And that should be nearly impossible anyway, given your human senses. You can't see or feel timelines, but somehow you're all able to feel this anomaly. That means whatever this is, it has to be either very strong or very big to affect you so much. It's like— I know, it's like that feeling you humans always talk about when you're in a really, really old building, or a dark forest at night. You always say you feel like spirits or ghosts are watching you, right? Ghosts don't really exist, or course, but that feeling explains this phenomenon well enough."

"I've never been one to be scared off by ghost stories. And it's just a house!" Donna insisted, gesturing at the structure in question with a dismissive flap of her hand.

The Doctor shook his head. "I know you're not one to be scared by a few ghost stories, Donna. But you can tell something is wrong here, and I'm telling you you're exactly right for thinking that. I'm just not sure why it feels that way yet."

Donna looked back at the house without replying, shivering once again.

The Doctor was proven right a minute later when he raised his sonic screwdriver to pinpoint the exact location of the temporal anomaly. A transparent barrier shimmered into existence around the entire property, and the buzzing sound in the air increased in volume.

"What's that?" Donna had to raise her voice to be heard.

The silver-hued barrier was as thin as a soap bubble, its surface rippling gently. The Doctor contemplated it for a second before shrugging. "Energy field of some kind," he said. They watched it undulate in silence.

The Doctor took the timey-wimey detector out of his coat pocket again and turned it on. "OH! Look at this!" He showed her the detector screen. Multiple lines were moving across it, oscillating so rapidly and erratically that she could barely tell them apart.

"What's it mean?" she asked.

"These little lines here represent timelines, in a very, very simplified sense. It's really much more complicated, but anyway, you saw what they were supposed to look like earlier, in the TARDIS. Usually a bit calmer. Right here and now, the natural timelines are incredibly active. Much more active than almost any individual's should be, and so in flux that any more temporal energy here and we could be standing in the middle of a giant fissure in space-time."

"So this house and whoever's in it, it's all part of the temporal anomaly we were looking for," Donna summed up. The Doctor gave a tense nod.

Without warning, every light in the house suddenly flared to full brightness, then began to dim ever so slowly.

Then, in a flash of light so fast that even the Doctor's eyes almost missed it, the house and everything else on the property disappeared, leaving behind a vacant lot that looked abandoned and quite overgrown. The Time Lord blinked, eyebrows raising in surprise as he stared, dumbfounded, at the empty lot.

"What on earth was that?" Donna was the first to break the silence.

The Doctor subconsciously pulled on his left ear, for once not certain about how to respond. Even he wasn't exactly sure what they'd just seen. "I, ah, well, I'm not exactly sure. This is a very strange temporal anomaly, that much I can tell you. I'll need to run a few tests back at the TARDIS to know more."

When they returned to the time ship, there was a folded piece of paper lying in front of the doors. The Doctor picked it up, turning it over in his hands once before he gingerly unfolded it and read it aloud. His expression darkened with every word.

"To The Doctor of Gallifrey and Donna Noble of Earth: You have trespassed on Charter property. Leave immediately, and no further actions will be taken against you. Continuing to impede our organization's business will result in action being taken as necessary, and without hesitation." A black logo, a teardrop shape suspended over a wide concave base, was printed at the bottom of the paper along with the words "THE CHARTER".

"What did we ever do to these people? Have you ever met them?" Donna demanded, taking the note from the Doctor's hands and rereading it herself.

The Time Lord shook his head. "Never heard of them. But they clearly know about us." He didn't like where this particular adventure was headed anymore. Accidental life-and-death incidents were par for course in his life, but he always hated when someone directly threatened the lives of his companions.

While Donna got something to eat from the TARDIS kitchen, the Doctor searched through his ship's archives. Frustratingly, he and the TARDIS were only able to locate a single mention of the Charter. It was in a document buried in the oldest section of the archived memory banks, dating all the way back to Gallifrey. He didn't remember when or why he had archived this particular document, but he didn't stop to dwell on it now.

The document was an excerpt from a much larger piece related to the Laws of Time, and briefly mentioned the Charter in a footnote. The Charter claimed to base their purpose around combating the "negative effects" of something called they called Anomaly, which "spread creative chaos". The footnote also mentioned that after some investigation into the "Anomaly" and possible dangers of the Charter's methods (whatever those were,) no such Anomaly was ever found to exist. Thus, the old Time Lords of Gallifrey considered the Charter a low-level threat because it didn't have any ability to interfere with the Laws of Time. In fact, the Doctor surmised, they seemed to be a sort of cult, and a somewhat insane cult at that.

The Doctor found this last piece of information both quite helpful and unhelpful. Nothing good came from insane cults, and whatever this Charter had become over the centuries, it certainly sounded more threatening now. They knew about him and Donna, where both of them were from, and about the TARDIS. This situation was becoming a little more concerning the longer it went on, and the Doctor soon began to wonder exactly what else the Charter knew about him. Information about him and his life could be quite dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.

That singular record of the Charter from Gallifrey was older than the Doctor himself by thousands of years, so where had the Charter been hiding all this time?

The Time Lord paced around the console room muttering to himself as he tried to piece together the puzzle of the Charter and the Mendocino house. He kept coming back to the same handful of questions that he simply couldn't answer.

"It makes no sense! Where did they come from? What happened here that's so important this Charter felt they had to become involved?" He dropped down onto the jump seat with a groan.

First things first. He knew some things with certainty. They would have to do as touchstones. The TARDIS had detected such a dangerous temporal anomaly that she had triggered a mauve alert to bring his attention to it (something that he was still positive Donna was going to make him regenerate for someday soon.) The anomaly in question had occurred in Mendocino, California on or around March 19, 2016.

The Charter's "agents" had been mentioned multiple times in the local newspaper, largely in negative terms. Their presence seemed to centered around one particular family and house in town, a house that was almost certainly the same one he and Donna had tracked down with the timey-wimey detector.

Then there was the note from the Charter with a rather ominous message, and that meant there was also a threat to his and Donna's lives involved with all of this. He wasn't going to heed it, exactly, but he couldn't afford to ignore it.

This left the Doctor with a great big problem. He had no concrete idea of where to begin with this particular temporal anomaly, nor did he know where to start looking for the Charter. (Perhaps the Shadow Proclamation had dealt with the Charter at some point, but he really didn't want to involve the Proclamation unless it was as a last resort.)

A quiet beep from the TARDIS console jolted the Doctor out of his thoughts. He quickly hopped off the jump seat, pushing his glasses up his nose as he made his way over to the monitor. "Alright old girl, what have you got for me?" he asked, leaning forward over the console slightly as he studied the results of the sonic's scan of the house.

He had to do a double take as he read through the TARDIS' data analysis. He'd seen a lot of impossible things in his long life, but what his ship was trying to tell him this time couldn't possibly be true.

"Find out anything interesting while I was getting breakfast?" Donna asked, entering the console room with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of buttered toast in the other.

"The TARDIS thinks so," the Doctor muttered. He was simultaneously reading through the rest of the TARDIS' analysis of the site of the strange temporal anomaly and carrying on an intense telepathic conversation with his ship.

'What you're telling me happened at that house is impossible. Beyond impossible! That many tears in space-time would destroy multiple universes at once, which obviously, it did not.' He knew first-hand how impossible it was to rip holes between parallel universes without consequences.

'Not impossible, the Charter,' the TARDIS insisted.

Donna grew impatient. "Oi! Are you ever going to say what you found, or are you just going to stand there staring at the screen?"

The Doctor explained as best he could. "The TARDIS analyzed my scans of the property after the house disappeared. The anomaly we've come across appears to have both happened and not happened very recently, which is why the TARDIS couldn't tell us much about what happened. It an odd kind of paradox, because you can't really exist and not exist at the same time. The thing is, whatever the event was, it isn't acting like a proper paradox. There are traces of so many different kinds of energy that shouldn't exist here at all, along with multiple fractured timelines that I can sense but only just, like I'm picking up distant echoes of the real thing."

Donna rubbed a hand over her eyes. "So the Charter had something to do with this, and whatever went wrong really did happen but also it doesn't exist. Typical."

"Oh, wait, wait, wait! Ghost stories!" The Doctor came to a sudden, brilliant realization and quickly entered new coordinates into the console controls "It's like I said earlier, when we felt that cold spot outside the house. Some beings naturally perceptive more of reality than others, and sometimes, they're able to sense things like temporal anomalies. Things like temporary connections between their present and some other time, or places where the walls between worlds are slightly thinner than normal. I wasn't really expecting you to be able to sense this one, but then you did. Both of us felt like something was wrong with that house before it disappeared, and we were right! The house only looked like it was there, but it wasn't all there. It couldn't be because— Aha! Because it really disappeared on March 17th at 7:06pm!"

Donna looked lost. "What? Why 7:06pm?"

"That's the exact moment that the anomaly formed somewhere in that house. We were just two days too late to see it happen, because the TARDIS has fail-safes built in prevent her getting close to dangerous anomalies like this one. Forgot about those. We might have to get around them somehow…" The Doctor trailed off, contemplating how to do that.

Donna coughed pointedly

"Right, sorry," he said, snapping out of his trance. "Anyway, today, we managed to stumble across a temporal aftershock of the house, the way it would have been had the anomaly not formed. And I should probably point out now that a lot of these things should, theoretically, be impossible."

"Of course temporal aftershocks exist," Donna sighed, setting her empty teacup on the jump seat. "Is that where we're going now? Back two days to see what happened?"

With a final pull of a lever, the time rotor began to move, and the ship quaked and groaned. The Doctor grinned at Donna's wary expression. "That is exactly what we're going to do," he said. "Hold onto something!"

Donna latched onto the nearest handrail just in time. The TARDIS rematerialized with a loud screech, a few unhappy bangs, and a heavy thud that made both her passengers stumble.

The Doctor ran to the doors and yanked them open with a flourish. "Let's find out who our ghosts are, shall we? Hopefully we should be able to see exactly what happened in Mendocino on the night of March 17, 2016. It's 6:55pm, we shouldn't have to wait long," he said.

Stepping outside, the two of them found themselves standing on the side of a narrow side street that ran parallel to Mendocino's Main Street. It was not quite sunset, and the sky was clear. The TARDIS had materialized about half a block away from the old Victorian house.

This time, the lights were on and two cars were parked in the driveway along one side of the house. The Doctor could hear raised voices coming from inside the house as he and Donna moved closer. The living room curtains were closed, but at least three silhouettes could be seen moving behind it.

At 7:02pm, small signs began to indicate that something out of the ordinary was happening within the house. Every light inside began to dim. That otherworldly buzzing sound from before filled the night air, pulsating and grating against the Doctor and Donna's eardrums in a way that had less to do with how it actually sounded, and more to do with what the sound itself was doing to space and time.

The horrible sound grew and grew in strength until it became unbearable. The Time Lord was wholly unprepared for the assault, every one of his senses agonized by the sound. Even his finely-tuned time sense decided to go haywire in the face of it. He quickly realized that the pain in his head was not only from him, but from the TARDIS as well. The noise was badly affecting her too—and that really took some power to actually hurt a TARDIS.

The lights in the house started flickering on and off as the Doctor sank to his knees. His hands pressed tightly over his ears, but that didn't help at all.

Donna, slightly less affected by the sound, quickly knelt down beside him. "Doctor, what's wrong?"

He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut and fingers gripping his hair as he tried to block out the sound in every way he knew how. "Just keep watching the house! We need to find out what happened." He spoke through gritted teeth, shame flooding through him at being blindsided so completely by mere sonic energy.

At 7:05pm, every single light in the house flared, shining far brighter than any normal light bulb could or should have. Donna thought she could almost feel the electricity in the house skyrocket.

Then the entire house went dark all at once, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass.

"Oh no," the Doctor whispered. The sound coming from the house was reaching peak intensity. It was 7:06pm.

He didn't need his time sense to tell him something catastrophic was happening to the walls of his universe, and it would continue to happen no matter what he did now. The walls were cracking, the Void was opening, and it was all starting to feel horribly familiar. He heard a scream that might have come from him as something ripped through time and space inside the house, leaving gaping holes so large and unstable that not one or two, but hundreds of new, impossible worlds burst into existence in that single moment. The temporal aftershocks of this moment burst outward from the house in like a tidal wave, and the Doctor was sure he and Donna were about to be consumed by it in a matter of seconds. He couldn't move, couldn't stop it, and really, he was the worst friend imaginable, about to get both of them killed—

Barely a second passed after the Doctor had this thought before the excruciating sound abruptly went silent. There was a flash of movement in front of the house, just the hint of that same shimmering barrier forming around the property, before the entire house collapsed in on itself like an imploding star. Everything, the house, the driveway, both cars, the mailbox full of mail, and the wrought-iron street lamp by the curb all disappeared in less than an instant. The only thing left was a small open field of tall grasses and wildflowers that looked like it had been there for years.

The Doctor finally raised his head, lowering his trembling hands from his ears. "Did you see it?" he asked.

Donna nodded distractedly, staring with wide eyes at the empty lot in front of them. "It was…I don't know even how to describe it," she said haltingly. "Every light in the house was so bright all of the sudden, and then it all seemed to freeze. That energy barrier appeared again, then the house just collapsed on itself and disappeared with everything else around it. How's your head?"

"I'm fine," the Doctor said, jumping to his feet. A quick scan from the sonic screwdriver told him that the energy signatures of the time anomaly that had been present in the Mendocino house were much stronger than the last time he and Donna had been there. Not only that, but the temporal aftershocks from the house's disappearance were still actively originating from somewhere on Earth. The source was fading rapidly though. They would have to move fast if they wanted to catch up with it.

A man walking his dog turned the corner and began walking down the street toward Donna and the Doctor. He gave no indication of having seen or heard anything unusual. He simply smiled and said hello to the two of them as he passed, continuing on his merry way. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that an entire house in his neighborhood had vanished barely a minute before.

"Was that anomaly forming?" Donna spoke up, casting a worried glance at the Doctor. (She didn't believe for a moment that he was fine.)

He huffed, purposefully keeping his gaze trained on his sonic screwdriver. "I've heard a good number of theories about the use of specific sound resonances, that is sonic energy, to create time fissures or possibly damage the walls between universes, but I've never considered that such things could actually happen in a small town in California! There shouldn't be any kind of technology like that here and now."

"I'm still concerned about what that sound did to you," Donna said, jabbing a finger at his face.

"I'm fine!" he insisted, carefully moving out of range of her hand.

"Oh yes, we've certainly established that!" Donna lowered her hand with a roll of her eyes when she realized he was backing away from her.

"I'm fine. I don't know why the house disappeared, but we are going to find out." The Doctor forced their conversation to an end when he turned on his heel and stalked back into the TARDIS.

Donna crossed her arms as she followed home, wondering why she bothered to ask him personal questions anymore. He rarely gave a straight answer about anything directly related to himself.

Of course, she really knew why she kept asking him things he didn't like to answer. She did care about the Time Lord's well being after all, something he so often didn't do for himself. She was his friend, one of the precious few that he allowed to get somewhat close to him and all his enthusiastic, adventurous, self-preservation-lacking glory. They were always going to be the Doctor and Donna Noble, friends and partners in crime, constant investigators into universal timey-wimey strangeness.

The Charter wouldn't know what hit them.