Colours Out of Space

Ten

Neither Ten nor Donna could initially place where it was they knew the name of 'Hollowmire' from, but it was a weird sort of village they soon realised. Everything about it, when they stepped out of the TARDIS, was shining with a peculiar sheen. Not a natural sheen, not even a real shine at all, but as though there was an oddly-textured film sitting between their eyes and the world around them now. This, and the fog that floated around quite complacently, gave everything an unnatural quality, and all the sights, from the strange calligraphy of the shop signs to the very colour of the bulbs in the streetlamps, had something off-kilter about them. Already, the Doctor was unnerved, like the world was on a wonky axis in comparison to his manner of balancing, this accentuated by a man walking past with a flat-cap nodding his head in greeting. He must have seen the TARDIS appear out of nowhere, the Doctor knew, yet he acted as though nothing at all had happened…

The streets were cobbled, the buildings were somehow crooked and leaning against each other even though when he squinted at them carefully he could have sworn they were just as straight as any other shopfront. The roads bumped and rose, his feet falling at strange angles he could not anticipate, and he felt conscious suddenly of the very way he was walking. Even Donna sensed something eerie about this town as they passed under the luminescent streetlights towards the location Kate Stewart's phone call had come from, following a conspicuous and blinking electronic device in the palm of the Doctor's hand. The people who passed, more people than he expected to see out and about in the middle of the night, didn't give them a second look.

"Are you okay?" Donna asked in a whisper. Why they felt the need to whisper, he did not know, but there was something wholly disturbing already about this place Kate Stewart had stranded herself in. He tried to focus on the blinking of his triangulator, not on this spooky old settlement they were trudging through. Even the fog was heavier, tasted metallic on his tongue. Soon, he thought, he was going to start jumping at shadows…

"Fine," he said stiffly. What else could he say? They couldn't turn around and leave, he never did that, and especially not when he had been summoned and asked for help by a friend. Kate Stewart was almost family, he had been such friends with her father back in his long-gone UNIT days. So, he resolved, he would just have to put up with whatever discomfort he was experiencing.

They rounded a corner, the triangulator flared up and strobed, and out of the rimy gloom Kate Lethbridge-Stewart took shape with a red-bereted crony behind her, in a heated argument with a pair of leather-clad ad hoc types. Undercoll, he assumed. A twig-like old man was there by their side with a large old lamp on the floor at his feet, clutching his back in a decrepit, broken way.

"Kate!" the Doctor shouted in greeting, hearing his voice reverberate tenfold on the damp cobbles at their feet. The echo made him jump. They were standing just within the low-walled boundaries of a graveyard, which climbed up within to form a hill. That hill, he found himself thinking, was exactly where the church should go. Only, this graveyard had no church that he could see, none at all, it was just rows of stones marking the dead.

"Doctor?" He expected that word to come from Kate, but it didn't, because Ten realised shortly that he had two old friends in that graveyard. He stopped dead in his tracks upon recognising the voice as that of Lady Christina de Souza. She was one of the two in leather. Christina turned, annoyed, to Kate, "He's who you rang when you wandered off to 'make an important phone call'? Oh, I shouldn't be surprised, of course he was, it's not like you have any real authority to be here." Then she looked back at Donna and the Doctor and smiled, "Hello. Long-time no-see. Not liking the frowns, though."

"You've got some nerve," Donna said to Christina. It took Ten racking his brain to chronicle their meetings with Christina de Souza, which, more often than not, involved her getting up to some rather untoward things with Captain Jack, or the Shadow, weirdly enough. Very different types of 'untoward' with them each respectively, though. Because it was, he now remembered, Christina, who had given them the clues to discover the truth behind the Shadow, through that godawful work of fiction she had created called The Doctor Within Me, which had no bearing on the reality of his friendship with Christina, he frequently had to reiterate to Rose.

"I've got a lot of nerve, people tell me – what am I supposed to have done this time?" she asked.

"You're trying to steal UNIT property," Kate accused. Christina had her arms crossed, and looked at Kate with exasperation and overt boredom, sick of her by now.

"It's a dead body, it's not your 'property,'" she said coldly, shaking her head.

"Dead body? Where?" the Doctor asked, walking right up to the wall of the graveyard. When he made to step over it and was shouted at by all of the voices on the opposite side of the structure, he froze, and looked down. Oh. There was the dead body; shoved into the corner and out of his immediate line of sight. The Doctor withdrew his leg and instead asked where the gate was. The old man with the lantern made a wheezing noise and pointed with a crooked arm in another, vague direction.

"You slept with Jack is what you've done," Donna said quite loudly to Christina.

"Jack Harkness?" Kate asked Christina when she heard this. Christina raised an eyebrow at Donna and then sighed.

"Yes," she answered Kate, then to Donna, "And I'm quite sure rather a lot of people have slept with Jack, so I don't see why I get all the blame for the collapse of his marriage. Anyway, they were cheating on each other. And she started it."

"Oi!" Ten protested, "Don't talk about her like that."

"Who her?" Kate inquired.

"His daughter," Donna answered, "Haven't you ever met Jenny?" Kate Stewart racked her brains, but it eventuated that she never had met Jenny, actually, which the Doctor found quite interesting. He might like for Jenny to meet Kate – the next generation after himself and the Brigadier.

"Jenny has seen me naked," Christina said, sounding surprised and disturbed by this information, pondering it briefly, "I wonder if she's into me… not that I'm interested. I'm a boys-only kind of girl."

"And aren't those rare to come by these days…" Donna mumbled.

"Enough of this – dead body. What's going on with that, then? And who are you?" he asked the young man at Christina de Souza's side, the other Undercoll-type, when he and Donna had finally wended their way through enough of the headstones to reach them. Donna looked at the man like she knew him.

"Elliott," he said, "James Elliott, used to be a detective, just call me Elliott. I've met another one of you." He was Welsh, taking the Doctor by surprise, and he held out a hand for Ten to shake. Never one to be rude to someone purely on the basis they worked for a clandestine and royally-sanctioned government agency, the Doctor shook it.

"Oh yeah, you were there when I got my brain removed by those robots," Donna said, smiling a little in realisation.

"You do get around a fair bit, don't you?" Christina said to Elliott.

"You work for Undercoll now?" Ten interrupted, "New Torchwood?"

"Yes, but Darling hates people calling it that. And you're going to step on the body, be careful, would you?" she said, dragging him away against his will by his arm, never one to care much about the tacit boundaries of personal space.

"What's so remarkable about this body? Why are you fighting over it? Who's this?" Ten asked about the old man with his lantern, who stood there, wrinkled and silent, pondering all of them with his milky eyes.

"This is the groundskeeper for this graveyard, or something, he hasn't said a word," Christina explained, "He was hanging around here when we arrived and he let us in. Then the amateurs showed up."

"Amateurs!?" Kate exclaimed.

"If you weren't amateurs you wouldn't have found out about this by tapping our network."

"Undercoll were tapping Hollowmire's infrastructure already."

"Undercoll are fully aware that James was tapping Hollowmire's infrastructure, and it's no mystery why he was doing that," Christina said very pointedly to Elliott, making him go a guilty shade of red, and the Doctor got the feeling there was a joke at play he and Donna were not in on. "Anyway, we flew up from London-"

"Flew?" Ten asked, crouching down to get a look at this body, fallen hunched over so it was hard to get a look at the middle, where the fatal injury was.

"Of course, I have a plane," Christina said. Why did that not surprise him? "And we showed up to find no police here, just this dead body and that man in the corner." For a second, Ten thought Christina meant the creepy, silent groundskeeper, but she in fact meant somebody the Doctor hadn't even noticed yet, curled up in the foetal position and rocking on his own. The Doctor had to look away instantly. There was something about that man there that he did not like, he did not want to see, did not want to acknowledge the existence of the person propped up against the wall.

"He's wrong," Donna said, staring, but with glassy eyes, defocused, "There's something wrong. I can't look at him." She turned towards the Doctor, who remained looking himself, though he knew the kind of intense feeling Donna was experiencing. There was something about the body, too, that made him not want to look at it. Just something off. Like there was something off about the entire village they had seen so far, only greatly exacerbated when faced with these two humans.

For a split second the rocking man looked up and met the Doctor's eyes with his own haggard expression. It shocked Ten to see how gaunt he was, how his skin was the same shade of grey as an old bruise, how it hung, sallow, off his skeletal features, how the whites of his eyes were somehow luminescent green and impossibly deranged. He looked away again, continued to rock, whispering to himself, words which drifted along the edge of the Doctor's interior perception without entering the realm of comprehension and understanding. The Doctor didn't know what he was saying. That shouldn't happen, either.

"He's definitely the murderer," Elliott, said, nodding at the man. Ten said nothing, and then remembered something unrelated, again striving to keep away from facing the inevitable examination of the body to settle this issue of jurisdictions that had arisen between Undercoll and UNIT.

"Hang on – aren't you wanted by the police for thievery and fraud?" the Doctor asked Christina.

"Yes," said Kate.

"My name has been cleared, by order of the crown, because I'm a useful asset to this country's defence against unnatural phenomenon. No matter what Kate Stewart thinks should be done about me," Christina boasted about her clean criminal record, "I have this job now, anyway, I don't need the kicks of robbing national treasures from museums anymore. It was getting a bit boring."

"What are you fighting about, then?" Ten continued to change the subject away from the body, finding it quite easy to fix his eyes on the faces of those around him and not on the murderer or his victim.

"The knife in the body," Kate explained, "De Souza things it's her job to take the knife for evidence, she thinks this whole crime scene belongs to Undercoll."

"It does."

"This is an alien event," Kate said firmly.

"You have no proof of it being alien. Undercoll deal with the unexplained, all you deal with is Zygons and Daleks. UNIT is a shell of what it was, your duties have all been taken over by the HCC and Undercoll," Christina said, "You're here on a whim. UNIT would be gotten rid of if it wasn't part of some agreement with the United Nations that all member-countries keep a sect of the taskforce in operation." All these things made sense to the Doctor, who had been told in the last few days, by Rose, of the HCC taking everything over in the near future and of UNIT's power being taken away. But he didn't fancy taking Undercoll's side, either.

"I'll look at the knife, then," the Doctor declared finally, which seemed agreeable to all of them, as long as somebody took the knife out of the body. And so, it fell to him, and he stooped again and reached out a hand to try and move the stiff cadaver, Elliott coming to assist him, and finally clasped a hand around the large, engraved hilt of whatever fancy knife this was. And he pulled, and it came out, sliding free of the viscera within the corpse and resting in the palm of his hand, a huge, machete-sized thing.

"That colour…" Donna said, in awe. It didn't make any sense. He nearly dropped it. This knife, it was like nothing he had ever seen before, because Donna was correct about the colour. What colour was that? It was like the colour of the creatures who lived at the bottom of the sea mixed with the tail of a burning comet mixed with the centre of a star. It was impossible to accurately describe this unknown phosphorescence he saw sneaking out of the invisible end of the colour spectrum. It was heavy, too, and made of something both smooth and abrasive, and it both scratched his hands and cooled them. The colour, the alloy, the fact it came out of the body completely free of blood – none of it made sense.

"Take a look at the wound," the Doctor ordered Elliott, not wanting to let this knife into the hands of either agency present. Elliott did, pushing the body over so that it lay belly-up towards the moon and the injury was visible to all. Despite the bloodless, sparkling knife, the wound was ghastly and definitely real. But blood did not leak out of the gash, instead the skin around it turned black, the flesh already dying and in a stage of impossibly late decay. He was rotting away and turning to fallow mush from the point of entry of this complex knife.

"Whatcha all looking at?"

They jumped, Ten nearly dropped the knife, and James Elliott went a ghastly colour of pale shock and heinous embarrassment when they were greeted by Sally Sparrow, of all the people.

"Sally Sparrow!?" the Doctor exclaimed.

"Doctor Who!?" Sally Sparrow retorted in the exact same tone of voice. And then she smiled, and came to lean on the wall into the graveyard. "How're the girls, Lyle?" she asked. Who was Lyle, the Doctor wondered? His question was answered by the groundskeeper with his lantern making a grunting noise, and meekly shrugging. "That's good, then," Sally said, as though she knew what his anomalous gestures meant. When Sally glanced down and saw the dead body right beneath the wall she was leaning against, she moved back. "What's going on?"

"What are you doing here!?" Ten asked her, "I haven't seen you for months! Or is it years to you?" Sally narrowed her eyes. He could have sworn he'd heard mention some weeks ago of Sally Sparrow's presence on the TARDIS, but the Doctor hadn't been there to witness it. He himself, despite of the talk of where Esther Drummond had ended up, had not seen Sally since that first venture in Staffordshire practically eons ago now with Martha and the Twins.

"It's three in the morning," Elliott said to her with a tone of concern. Sally pretended like she didn't even see him.

"Is this your girlfriend, Jimmy?" Christina asked. Kate Stewart said something about wanting to get back to the matter at hand, but the crime's details were so disturbing to Ten he would much rather interrogate Sally Sparrow on what on Gallifrey she was doing wandering around out in this creepy settlement in the middle of the night, as Elliott had pointed out. When Christina called him 'Jimmy' and made her quip, he turned even redder.

"I'm not his girlfriend," Sally said to Christina, then narrowed her eyes, "Who are you?"

"Lady Christina de Souza," Christina said, and Sally's eyes widened.

"Didn't you shag Jack? And you've come here? You know Jenny's girlfriend lives on the hill," Sally said. Which hill, Ten was not sure, because there seemed to be an awful lot of hills. It was the Yorkshire moors they were nestled in, so the land wasn't remotely flat.

"That's why we recognised the name…" Donna said to the Doctor, speaking for the first time in a while after she had been rendered so harrowed by the sight of that rocking, distorted man who was still muttering to himself a few metres away from them. "Hollowmire."

"Oh," Ten realised the same thing. "Right. Sorry. I thought you lived in London?"

"Keep up with the gossip, Doctor," Sally remarked, "What's that you're holding?"

"Can I talk to you?" Elliott asked her. She still ignored him. What was this 'girlfriend' thing?

"A knife," Kate Stewart answered for him, "Property of UNIT – and you're on our watch list, Miss Sparrow."

"UNIT?" Sally asked, growing unusually serious. She said to the Doctor, "You brought UNIT here? Where…" He didn't know what she stopped herself from saying, but she looked at him imploringly, willing him to understand something.

"They called us," Donna explained, "We've come to investigate this murder."

"We need to get this body to Cohen," Elliott began saying to Christina, but Christina was watching Sally with quite an amused air. Kate Stewart wasn't amused by any of this. He wondered if she had ever really been amused in her life.

"The body isn't yours," Kate said, "It's coming with us, to UNIT." Sally was glaring at the Doctor for some unknown reason. "And so is the knife."

"This knife is clearly not from this planet, which I think falls into my jurisdiction rather than any of you lot, alright?" the Doctor said, "You called me down, so I'm in charge. I'm the expert, none of you even know what it's made of."

"What is it made of, then?" Christina challenged him.

"Well, I… that's not important right now, what's important is that you all make yourselves scarce."

"I agree, scarcity is a wonderful thing when it comes to the government," Sally said.

"Why are you awake at three in the morning?" Donna asked her.

"I'm always awake at three in the morning, I go for walks when I can't sleep," she said, "Thought I might go and see if Clara's around but she doesn't want to play right now."

"You can't sleep? Why? Have you been having strange dreams, as well?" Donna asked quite urgently, causing a quiet to fall on everybody else conglomerated in the church-less graveyard.

"Uh, no… not per se," Sally said, narrowing her eyes, "Why?" Donna did not answer.

"Sally-" Elliott persisted.

"She's ignoring you on purpose, anyone can see that," Kate snapped at him coldly, and Sally looked at the wall in front of her and pretended she hadn't heard any of that.

"Alright, you're all acting like children," the Doctor said loudly, "Kate. I'm sorry, but they're right, this isn't UNIT's job."

"And UNIT being in Hollowmire doesn't bode well for anyone," Sally said in a very pointed way, still trying to convey a message to the Doctor he didn't understand.

"Well, yes," he agreed with her anyway, then turned to Undercoll, "And you two – see if you can get anything out of him," he waved a hand at the muttering, greying, glowing man lurking against the wall, "Take him out of here, make sure he's… safe. Ask where he got the knife, I don't know, but the knife is mine. I don't trust any of you with weapons, and I'm sure you're all carrying guns anyway. So go on, scatter."

"Yes, sir," Kate said, saluting to him. He didn't tell her not to, because he knew that in that instant she had saluted because she knew how much he hated it. But to his surprise, they actually all listened to him, even the constantly rebellious Christina de Souza. Perhaps the mutating murderer had piqued her interest more than the mystery of the bloodless blade in his hands. Sally was still trying to communicate something to him wordlessly, but he ignored her and looked at the knife again.

There was something else on it he hadn't yet noticed, some other strange trait it frightened him to realise. There were symbols carved into it, into the blade itself and its unknown alloy, and he didn't understand them at all. They were like nothing he had ever seen, sharp and curved, smooth and deep and beautiful and terrible, and it was as though the words – though he could not understand them – bored into his mind.

"That's not right. It should translate. I speak every language, why isn't it translating…" he muttered, Kate and her stray soldier actually leaving, Elliott and Christina turning their attention to the murderer. No doubt Undercoll were going to claim the body as soon as he left, but it was probably best to get the ghastly, rotting thing out of sight and the horror of the black gore in its middle. The Doctor showed the knife to Donna, but she didn't want to look.

"What is it?" Sally asked, intrigued more than she was annoyed. The Doctor walked away from the body and vaulted with one hand over the wall to meet her, leaving Donna to traipse around through the graves again and leave through the gate. Lyle the groundskeeper remained there, looking at the body in an odd, intense way. She reached out her hands to take the weapon, but he pulled it away. "I'm not going to stab anyone, Doctor," she said coolly, and he relinquished it to her after a few more seconds. He didn't think she would stab anyone, really.

"There's only one other time a language hasn't translated," the Doctor said to Donna, "When Rose and I were on an asteroid orbiting a black hole."

"Can things orbit black holes?" Donna asked.

"No," was all he said, quite darkly. But the knowledge of meeting the Beast on that planet being the only other time writing had remained indecipherable frightened him. Where had this knife come from, and its troglodyte-owner who had now gone stark-raving mad in the middle of a graveyard? Why had he killed anyone to begin with? It was the most intriguing murder-mystery Ten had come across in recent times.

"I've seen these before," Sally surprised them all, examining the symbols.

"You've what?"

"Something like these," she said, then lowering her voice she grew quite angry, "You know Esther is supposed to be in UNIT custody right now, and there's the leader wandering around the village. What if she gets seen? She lives here, too."

"Kate's leaving," the Doctor said firmly.

"And isn't Esther asleep?" Donna added.

"She is, but she won't be for long," Sally said cryptically, then she gave the Doctor the large knife with its obscene colour back, "Do you two want to come round for a cup of tea?"