16, Lunar Terrace

Ten

They followed Sally Sparrow back through the same streets they had come from, her ignoring the TARDIS completely when they passed it, perhaps because she was distracted by Donna's interrogation of her. Sally Sparrow seemed to put a lot of thought into trying to be witty with everything she said, in a way which he could see to be annoying. And Donna, especially, was none too thrilled with this facet of Sally's personality as she led them to the home she shared with Esther Drummond.

"You live here?" Donna asked.

"In the middle of this road? Yeah, that's my bed right there," Sally replied dryly, pointing with her thumb at a pothole. They had left the realm of the cobbled streets which graced the centre of the village, escaping to properly tarmacked roads. Though the abundance of potholes made it seem like they really needed to be tarmacked again. The size of some of them – it was a wonder any car could drive out there. If they were to fill with rain during a storm, someone could fall right into them, big, dirty wells in the asphalt.

"Why were you ignoring Elliott?" Donna now persisted. The third time she had asked this question. The Doctor had his hand around the hilt of the knife in his pocket, keeping it out of sight but right at his side. Keep your enemies close, and all that.

"I just don't want to talk to him," Sally said.

"Why does Christina think you're his girlfriend?"

"I don't know – maybe he told her I am."

"She said he was keeping tabs on the police reports of Hollowmire," Donna continued. She was rather observant when she wanted to be, Ten noticed, bringing up all of this inconsequential information. Probably that because she had wanted to avoid looking at the body and the assailant so much, she had taken great notice of the other, more idle details, of their encounter with Undercoll and UNIT. Sally made a start when Donna told her that, though.

"Did she? Is he? I'll have to get Esther to do something about that…" Sally said, "The last thing I want is James Elliott stalking me. It's nothing, anyway, he just fancies me." Sally did not seem remotely enthusiastic about where Elliott's feelings lay. Nor was she very welcoming when Donna decided to say she thought Elliott was cute, and why wouldn't Sally give him a chance? The Doctor thought Sally's business was Sally's business. If he gave every woman who batted her eyes at him a chance, he'd… well, he'd be a very busy man. Rose was more than enough for him. "You're as bad as Clara."

"Clara?" Donna was not impressed by this comparison.

"Yes, Clara, and not Jenny's Clara, the other one," Sally said. Jenny's Clara; what an interesting phrase. He had never heard anybody refer to Beta Clara as Jenny's Clara before, "'Why don't you sleep with every boy who smiles at you, Sally? That's what I'd do,'" she did an exaggerated imitation of Clara's northern accent Ten thought was quite good, if mocking. "It's this one." She changed the subject and turned left into the gate of a messy front garden.

In the moonlight it took the Doctor a moment to see what stood there, leaning in the corner between the garden house and the wall.

"Bloody hell!" Donna shouted before he could form the words himself.

"What?" Sally asked, fumbling in the pockets of her long winter coat for her house keys. What Sally Sparrow was doing was of no interest to the Doctor though, because he was looking at a skeleton, a real milky-white, muddy old skeleton, standing there propped up in the corner of the garden. "Oh, that? Esther calls him Skeletor. He's been there since Halloween; we have nowhere to put him in the house."

"Why is it wearing a top-hat?" Donna questioned, reaching up as if to grab the dishevelled old top-hat from off the top of 'Skeletor's' bald head.

"Don't touch that!" Sally yelled. Ten worried about them waking the neighbours.

"Why not?" he asked.

"It'll brainwash you," she answered, "Seriously, that thing is deadly, I nearly burnt the house down."

"You what?" Donna asked incredulously, not daring to touch the hat now but still not understanding what Sally was talking about. It was like she was speaking in tongues. Did Esther not mind them having a skeleton in their front garden among all the dead weeds?

"Can't find my key," she muttered.

"Isn't there a spare?"

"It's the spare I thought I had… oh, wait," and Sally tried the door, which opened immediately. She was quite pleased with her forgetfulness, but Ten was nearly horrified- anybody could have walked in there and robbed them with Esther in bed and Sally away. And he didn't think Esther would stand for that sort of laziness and danger if she heard about it.

Sally turned the lights on as they followed her into the small house, her retrieving a set of keys with a Pacman ghost on them from somewhere in the kitchen. They entered right onto a set of stairs practically, stairs lined with stray boots and shoes, and on the right was the kitchen and on the left was the dimly-lit living room.

"You like Pacman so much you got a keyring?" Donna asked Sally, again, incredulous.

"No, these are Esther's keys, I don't know where mine are," Sally answered with a shrug, locking the door behind them and returning Esther's borrowed keys to wherever it was she got them from originally, and then she implored, "Please don't tell Esther I forgot to lock the door and I've lost my keys. They're probably not lost, anyway, she probably knows exactly where they are. In a 'safe place', or something, where I'll 'remember them.'" She did inverted commas with her fingers as she spoke, but Ten didn't see what Sally found so funny. She directed them into the living room and then said she would go wake up Esther.

It was an interesting room, to say the least. All of it was very neat and orderly, perhaps too neat and orderly into the realms of it getting a tad obsessive, aside from the sofa. The sofa was a mess, a nest, swaddled in half a dozen dirty-looking blankets in various shades of grey and brown. There were all sorts of things making a home on that sofa; odd socks, a plate with a slightly furry crust of toast on it, a handful of scarves, and the contrast between this miniature domain and the rest of the spick-and-span room was startling to the Doctor.

Along with that, the television was switched on, broadcasting warm static into the room and nothing else. The pale glow of the screen and its buzzing noise coupled with the pictures hanging from the walls and leaning on the furnishings in the cramped space made it thoroughly eerie. The pictures were clearly photographs, and he wasn't sure how many of them were real and how many of them had had a helping hand from Photoshop, but they showed things like ghastly spectres and blurry flying saucers and other kinds of distorted monsters.

There was noise and voices upstairs. Esther must be awake. Esther was probably not very happy about being awake at half past three in the morning, but it was beyond Ten to figure out if Sally Sparrow actually cared or not. He wondered what kind of insight Esther Drummond the Lightning Girl could possibly have to their new predicament, the knife still clutched in his hand. It was like holding onto something very hot on the very edge of giving you a nasty burn, but just about not hot enough that you had to drop it. He didn't like holding that thing, but he didn't have anywhere to put it down.

"…you go down," Sally's voice came from above, "I have to get my book."

"Not the spooky one?" Esther's American drawl, steeped in tiredness and annoyance, questioned her. Possibly Sally told her to shut up after that, and then two sets of footsteps split away from each other, one growing louder and one growing more distant. Exhausted, messy-haired and wearing incredibly modest pyjamas, Esther came into the room, and the Doctor and Donna both beamed. "Hey," she said in greeting, "No hugs." She said this because Ten had made to hug her.

"She'll electrocute you, idiot," Donna muttered. Esther yawned. "Where's Sally gone?"

"To find this weird book she has in her room in the attic," Esther explained, "I hate that thing. She thinks it's all true, but I don't believe it."

"Your sofa is rank," Donna commented now.

"Yeah, I know," Esther looked at it with an expression akin to sorrow. That sofa was a lachrymose thing to her, sitting there, festering, "Sally won't let me clean it." She kept her arms tightly crossed and her hands hidden in the sleeves of her dressing gown. "Sorry – do you want tea? Or coffee? If she offered to make you any, she won't, she never does." Smiles broke again on both the Doctor and Donna's faces at the offer of tea, and they trailed after Esther into the freezing kitchen on the other side of the house.

"So this is where you live?" Donna asked.

"Yeah, sometimes unfortunately…" The kitchen, too, was ordered in a very meticulous way, and again the room was marred only by the amount of crusty washing up piled high in their small sink. Esther would be more talkative, Ten assumed, if it wasn't for the fact she had just been woken up. "What's that?" she spotted the knife when she left the kettle to boil, having arranged the mugs in a very precise kind of way, four of them in a line all equidistant from each other. Ten took this opportunity to put the knife down on their wooden kitchen table. "How the heck is it that colour? What is that colour?"

"I don't know, I've never seen it before," the Doctor said seriously.

"Where'd you get it?"

"Your graveyard, some bloke got done in with it," Donna explained, "Should've seen the wound, it was all rotting from where the knife went in, and the crazy one nearby-"

"Oh, you can't say 'crazy', it's insensitive," Esther interrupted, and Donna gave her a look so she apologised, "Sorry, I just mean… mental illness isn't something we should talk about so colloquially."

"Are you being a buzzkill again?" Sally questioned from the other side of the door, entering the room just as she finished talking, looking judgingly at Esther.

"I'm not being a buzzkill," Esther argued.

To Donna, Sally said, "Esther is a major buzzkill. A real fun-sponge."

"Ha, ha," Esther said dryly.

"It's true, apart from the lightning-thing, you're just a very boring person," Sally said, and again to Donna, "She's going to spend the whole day tomorrow alphabetising the contents of the kitchen cupboard." And that really riled Esther up, for some reason.

"Okay, that's ridiculous. First of all, alphabetising the cupboards is the stupidest system I've ever heard – you'd have the sardines and the sweetcorn right next to each other, it would be chaos. Second of all, I already organised the cupboards two days ago into food groups left-to-right, and by sell-by-dates front-to-back, so the joke's on you," Esther said.

"And what a hilarious joke it is," Sally responded sarcastically, making Esther pout as the kettle finished boiling. Donna looked at Esther now like she was the 'crazy' one, as she poured their drinks. The Doctor now saw that Sally was holding in her arms an enormous, leather-bound tome with dark yellow pages. He could smell the dust on it without even being near.

"What's that?" he asked.

"This-"

"Oh, here we go…" Esther muttered, mostly to herself.

Firmly, Sally began again, glaring at Esther while she spoke, "This, is an incredibly historically accurate volume called Hollowmire: A Supernatural History." She put the thing down on the table next to the knife, silver writing on the black front claiming it to be exactly that, a supernatural history. It didn't have the name of any author on it, though.

"It is not historically accurate," Esther said, pouring out hot water and milk into mugs.

"Yes it is," Sally persisted when Esther argued with her.

"In what world?"

"It told us about the Night Flyer."

"Yeah, well, that's…"

"I'm looking through it to find the symbols on that knife," Sally explained, Esther not being able to think of another way to insult this old text. Ten thought it was very interesting, mainly because Hollowmire was a very small village, and the book was huge. Was this place some kind of magnet for unexplained phenomenon? "I could have sworn I've seen symbols like that before."

"What's it made of?" Esther asked, looking at it carefully as she handed the mugs around, Ten and Donna smiling in thanks.

"I don't know," the Doctor answered, "I've never seen anything like it before, or the wound, or the man who used it. He looked… elongated. Bony."

"Huh," was all Esther said, looking at the knife again, but not daring to touch it for herself. Good, Ten thought. Who knew what giving it an electric shock might do? Or maybe an electric shock was exactly what it needed…

"You know your TV is on?" Donna said.

"Esther does it," Sally answered vacantly, poring over the pages of the book. Ten moved so that he could stand behind her, crossing his arms and reading over her shoulder.

"I do not," Esther said, then to Donna, "It happens all the time, sorry, I'll go turn it off." She disappeared for a moment, the glow under the door vanished while she was away. When she returned, she reiterated, "It's always turning itself on."

"Maybe you should get a new one?" Donna suggested.

"The last one did it too," Sally said, "Hence why it's obviously Esther doing it."

"It's not!" Esther persisted, "I just think it's something to do with the electric grid."

"Yes, you, you're to do with the electric grid," Sally argued.

"Something other than me."

"Are we even connected to the electric grid?"

"It is not me," Esther said firmly, "And anyway, it never just turns itself on, it's always on static."

"Interesting thing, static," the Doctor began on a different note, "It's the residue of the cosmic background radiation of the universe, coming through our broadcasting signals. Leftovers from the Big Bang. Oswin measures the incremental differences in it to test what universe we land in sometimes." Not that he had intended to, but that brief explanation ended the bickering between Sally and Esther.

"The Doctor brought UNIT to the village," Sally said, causing Esther to panic immediately.

"You did what!?" she exclaimed, "They have a past version of me still in their custody, you know!"

"I didn't bring them here, they brought me, they were here already," he said, "It's nothing to do with me. And anyway, it was only Kate and one other soldier."

"Sally's boyfriend said UNIT have lost most of their power, anyway," Donna added, making Sally go red.

"Oh, is Elliott here?" Esther asked. Donna laughed, finding it funny that by the small quip 'Sally's boyfriend,' Esther knew exactly whom she was talking about. Esther took Sally's silence for a yes. "Did you talk to him?"

"No."

"Did he talk to you?"

"She ignored him," Donna said.

"Sally…" Esther said disapprovingly.

"What? He just wants to ask me out, what's the point in replying? I'm still going to say no, and don't go on about it because you know exactly why; I'm not interested," she said. It sounded like this conversation had been rehashed a lot of times, and so Esther didn't press it.

"Something funny I saw about that graveyard, you know," Ten changed the subject.

"Oh yeah?" Esther asked.

"Yeah – it didn't have a church."

"Oh, the Followers don't go to church," she said. He looked at her blankly. She sipped her tea.

"The what?" Donna asked.

"The Followers," she said, "Of, uh… of… Sally?"

"Oc'thubha," Sally answered.

"The Followers of what?"

"The Followers of Oc'thubha*, they're just a religious society. They run the pub, don't they?" Esther asked.

"Oh, they're everywhere," Sally shrugged.

"Hang on, hang on, a religious society? No churches?"

"Mmm, we went to one of their meetings once, there were free scones. They just sit around and watch blank TV screens, and then afterwards they apologised to us because we don't have the 'gift of communication.' Doris next door is one of them, she brings us shortbread all the time and tells us she wishes we could become enlightened," Sally said. Donna and the Doctor both gawked at the pair of them.

"Religious society!?" the Doctor exclaimed again, "Your village is run by a 'religious society'!?"

"That's a fancy way to describe a cult if I've ever heard one," Donna added.

"Exactly," Ten said, "Cult."

"Okay, they're not a cult," Sally said, "They're nice people."

"Nice people who are in a cult."

"You can't call every religion that doesn't have a church a cult," Esther said, "And anyway, the UK has freedom of religion! They're not hurting anybody."

"What about the bloke who got stabbed to death with this weird knife?" Donna said, grabbing the knife of the table. And then something wholly unprecedented happened. Donna gasped, her eyes rolled back into her head immediately and the impossibly-coloured knife clattered to the floor – still intact – while Donna collapsed the other way and had to be caught by the Doctor. Sally looked up from the volume she had been perusing, and Esther stared in shock as Donna slowly regained herself. She had touched the knife and was nearly thrown into some sort of fit, and then she began muttering.

"I saw it," she said, keeping her eyes shut, "I saw it again."

"Saw what?" he asked, "What happened?"

"I found it," Sally declared. The Doctor tried to get information out of Donna, while Esther went around the other side of the table to see what Sally was looking at.

"Oh, yeah, that looks like the same language…" Esther said, glancing at the knife lying on the floor, "Isn't that the sign above the mine shafts in that photo? Those ones nobody is allowed in?"

"It was that city," Donna said, harrowed, "That one I saw in my dreams, my nightmares, that woke me up, the one that doesn't make sense – and that colour! It was the same colour in my dream, the same colour as the creatures I saw. And the writing…"

"What?" Ten asked, holding Donna steady by her shoulders, "What about the writing? I can't read it, Sally found some more in her book."

"It says… it says I-C-T-H-A-R-R-U," she spelt an unknown word he hardly knew how to pronounce himself while squinting at the impossible blade at her feet.

"Quick, what does the one in the book say?" Esther asked, sliding the tome out from underneath Sally's hands and showing it to Donna and the Doctor. It was a black and white picture of a rotting, wooden sign hanging above a gaping entrance to some caves. Mine shafts, she had mentioned.

And Donna spelt again, "O-C-T-H-U-B-H-A." Ten raised his eyebrows at Sally with an air of smugness.

"Alright. Fine. Maybe there is something about the Followers of Oc'thubha."

"I think they're harmless," Esther said.

"Can't hurt to go to the Mermaid and ask around," Sally declared.

"Well, wait, what does it say in your book about that mine shaft, then?"

"That it's a mine shaft – the sign isn't the centre-point of the picture. Hollowmire is an old mining village," she shrugged.

"What's this about a Mermaid?" Ten asked next.

"It's the pub."

"Will it be open at this time of night?"

"Of course it will, it's always open, except at four PM, when the Followers have their… ceremony. Service. Thingy. Whatever you call it. Come on, Esther, you'd better get dressed, we're going out on the town."

"Oh, god help me…" Esther muttered.

*The Followers of Oc'thubha were already mentioned by Ravenwood in Chapter 1007

AN: You guys let me know how well I'm capturing the essence of HP Lovecraft in these chapters. Reviews are always cool.