How to Become a Mad Scientist

Ram Singh

Out of all of them, Ram was the only one who knew how drive and who had a car. That meant it became his job to drive the Doctor and his daughter all the way out to Nicholas Vanderbilt's house. He didn't even like Nicholas Vanderbilt; Ram kind of thought Nicholas Vanderbilt was a rich little shit. So it was him in the front of the car, the Doctor in the passenger seat, and Jenny and Tanya in the back. Nicholas hadn't been in school, and hadn't called in sick, so they were left on a bit of a manhunt.

"Maybe I won't get a staff," Jenny said thoughtfully, watching out of the window in the seat diagonally behind her father, behind Ram. It was hellish driving in the entrails of that hurricane, but it was a whole lot better than walking. The roads were full and traffic was bad; cars had been diverted after a telephone pole had been blown over by the wind and blocked off a whole street elsewhere. So they were just sat around in the bad weather waiting for the emergency traffic lights to let them move, despite Jenny's persistent advice that he should just drive on the pavement.

"Really?" the Doctor asked her. Ram couldn't tell if the Doctor was interested in what she was saying or not, they were both quite absent as they talked to one another.

"Yeah, what about a longbow? I'm good with a bow, and you can recycle arrows like you can recycle Emmett's spikes," she said.

"Who's Emmett?" Ram asked, interrupting them.

"One of my guns."

"You name your guns?" he puzzled, watching her in the wing-mirror. Tanya was slouched down against the door watching the rain pour down. It was impossible to see out of those windows, and he had the windscreen wipers going on max.

"Of course I do," she said.

"Oswin thinks it's weird," the Doctor commented.

"What do I care about what Oswin thinks is weird? Oswin wouldn't know weird if it chopped off her other leg," she said, bored. Ram flinched, and met Tanya's eyes in the rear-view mirror. Tanya hadn't really been listening much until Jenny made that remark.

"Why do you say that?" Tanya asked as the lights switched to yellow so Ram changed the gears and prepared to drive off.

"Say what?" Jenny, oblivious, asked.

"About her leg getting chopped off." The car began to move again.

Jenny frowned, "Because she only has one leg, that's why."

"Yes, well, I suppose if one tries to kill themselves with a large bomb, one has to deal with the consequences," the Doctor said dryly, "She has an excellent talent for sucking all the life out of the room."

"I'll tell her you said that?" Jenny suggested.

"What? No!" he protested.

"Well don't say it then! She doesn't suck the life out of a room," Jenny defended this Oswin, "And besides, she's your sister-in-law."

"Miss Oswald had a sister?" Ram asked quickly, spotting Tanya roll her eyes as he drove. Truth be told, he was a little distracted by thoughts of Miss Oswald's sister now.

"No, not really," the Doctor said, "It's complicated, they're more… clones. There's a lot of them."

"Clones? As in, identical?"

"Pick your jaw up off the floor, Ram," Tanya told him, "Eyes on the road. You have a girlfriend." Ram scowled and carried on driving.

"Why were you asking about her legs, anyway? Does Ram have a keen interest in Clara's legs?" Jenny asked wryly, and he felt his face go hot and he did not answer. He'd been fifteen when Clara Oswald had still been teaching at Coal Hill, and teenage boys had certain… wandering thoughts. And wandering eyes. And wandering hands, upon occasion.

"The Shadow Kin chopped it off," he said.

"You see, Jenny? Swords: dangerous," the Doctor told his daughter sharply.

"Then you gave me this weird robot leg, from the future or something," Ram said, "Makes me shit at football."

"I used to have a robot hand," Jenny said, "It was pretty good at punching things. And robot eyes, too, after Oswin gouged them out. Have either of you seen Alien?"

Ram said, "Yeah," when Tanya said, "My mum won't let me." Ram added, "What about Alien?"

"One of them got me, their facehuggers, in another universe. Like how we're in the Betaverse now; that one's called the Etaverse. Oswin calls it. Anyway, their acid blood got in my eyes, and it was right after I regenerated. Everyone's all, 'use your excess regeneration energy, Jenny!' as if I even have excess regeneration energy."

"And I thought we had weird lives…" Tanya said. Jenny laughed. "You talk about this Oswin a lot."

"That's-"

"That's because she fancies her," the Doctor cut her off. She went red.

"I do not!"

"Oh, please, everybody knows you do."

"I have a girlfriend."

"Yes, a girlfriend who looks exactly like her," he said. Jenny looked like she wanted to continue this, but realised at the last moment that he was only teasing her. She shut up, and he looked smug, leaving her a bit miffed. Sounded like a lot of dirty laundry that didn't need bringing up, Ram thought to himself as he turned a corner in the car. Complicated dirty laundry. And really, he wasn't all that interested. He had enough to worry about in his own life without listening to this too.

"I think it's this street," Tanya said. Quill had retrieved the Vanderbilt address from the Coal Hill system, and Tanya had been sat giving Ram directions via Google Maps in the backseat for the last half-hour they'd been crawling around suburban London in a typhoon.

"This isn't a street, this is their own personal driveway," Ram said, staring around. It was a mansion, a huge mansion right there in London of all places. "He lives in Wayne Manor but he comes to a comprehensive school, why's that?"

"Does Coal Hill have a good reputation?" the Doctor suggested as a reason for Nicholas Vanderbilt's place of education.

"No," Ram answered.

"Kids keep going missing and dying," Tanya said. They drove right up to it, the gates wide open and the drive empty of all vehicles. As the house grew on the horizon, it became more apparent that there was something amiss with this fancy place. He drove them all the way up to the door so that they'd hardly have to walk, but going out into the weather was still unpleasant enough. He had half a mind to just stay in the car, if he wasn't interested in what was going on. Jenny and the Doctor didn't appear to mind the rain that much.

"Imagine living in a house that big – what do you think they do with all those rooms?" Tanya asked him.

"Swimming pool!" the Doctor declared excitedly, "Perhaps they have a swimming pool? I've got a swimming pool. And a library, a huge one, and a greenhouse. And this one has been trying her luck trying to get a gym built."

"It has been built, thanks very much," Jenny quipped at him, "It's great. You know Helix's handset was originally a VR games console? I made it make some holograms for me to swordfight with."

"I'm glad you're amused," he said, walking up to the front door. It was large, oak, engraved, had a fancy door knocker that looked like the head of a lion. Just the type of gaudy crap Ram expected from a house belonging to a family called Vanderbilt. They even had their name on a big, gold sign on top, but it was grimy and had been battered badly in the weather. He took some pleasure seeing that. The Doctor knocked on the door. Ram wished he'd brought a coat with him.

When no-one answered the third time the Doctor knocked, he just got out his weird-looking screwdriver with its green light and waved it like a magic wand at the lock while it buzzed. Then he tried the door himself, and found he couldn't open it.

"Put your back into it," Jenny said, smirking.

"You try, then, there's something the matter with it."

"Maybe if you got a screwdriver that works on wood…" she said, a joke Ram didn't understand. But the Doctor stepped aside and let his daughter try her hand; she tried the door normally, then tried to force it with her shoulder. Ram thought this was kind of funny, being as she was – what? Five feet tall? Something like that? Tiny. "It's barricaded."

"So, what do we do? Leave?" Tanya asked.

"Leave!?" they both exclaimed.

Jenny continued, "No, no, no. You think I was admitted into the Blacklight Society because I just walk away at every barricaded door, or safe, or elaborate laser-tripwire system? The day I was born I did twenty somersaults over a bunch of explosive laser-tripwires."

"What's a 'blacklight society'?"

"The Blacklight Society," the Doctor told him a little quietly, "It's an infamous thieves' guild."

"They prefer the word 'prestigious'," Jenny said, standing back and glancing around the house as though she was scouting it. She probably was. "Anyway, I am a master at infiltration. This will be easy." And then she just wall-ran up the front door and grabbed onto the lintel above. She scaled it with an ease Ram thought impossible, like something out of Assassin's Creed, hanging off the window ledges and jumping to the next ones until she found an open window she must have spotted from the ground. Who'd leave their window open in this hurricane, he wondered?

"That's great, but how do we get in there? This house is freaky, will she be alright on her own?" Ram asked.

"Jenny will be fine on her own," the Doctor said, "She can take care of herself."

"Why'd you come here with her, then?" Tanya asked.

"Because, I…" he began, thinking about what he was going to say, "I haven't been a particularly good father until very recently, and I enjoy spending time with my daughter now that she lets me." They were distracted when a rope was thrown out of the upper window Jenny Young had just climbed into. "Lightest first, then?" the Doctor said, looking at Tanya.

"Me? I don't know how to climb up a rope," she said.

"It's easy," Ram said.

"Says the athlete."

Ram shrugged, "I'll catch you if you fall."

"You'd better…" she said, approaching the rope Jenny had dropped very guardedly. In the end, it was a lot less of Tanya climbing the rope and more Jenny pulling the rope until she could haul the girl through the window herself, and then Ram went up second and the Doctor last of all.

It was a new kind of hell they were dragged into. He had never seen anything like the mess they found in the Vanderbilt house. It was appalling, a real shit-show, the walls all filthy with mould crawling across the ceiling, wallpaper peeling down to reveal old, wooden walls full of rotten splinters. It reeked, too, like the entire place was festering, which it very well could be.

"Eurgh, this is rancid," said Tanya. It was a bedroom, the bed unmade like it had been recently slept in, though the sheets were stained and dirty, all the other windows blocked off by planks of wood. Did the Vanderbilts really live here? Maybe they'd abandoned it and the house had become a squat for homeless people.

"And that's not all," Jenny said, motioning to the door as she wound her rope back up to put in her bag. The door had about twenty different locks and bolts on it to keep it tightly sealed, all kinds of mechanisms in place to stop that door from being opened easily.

"Has this kid been locking people in his room?" Ram asked.

"Of course not," Jenny said, "All those locks open from in here. And the window's not blocked. He's not trying to keep himself in, he's trying to keep something else out."

"Like whatever killed Josh Hart…" Tanya realised.

"Tell you what, though, those locks aren't very strong," she said. Ram was about to ask how she knew, because they looked plenty strong to him, when she continued, "You've just got to get in the right place…" Then she lifted her leg up and kicked it dead-centre, hard, and all the locks broke, chains and screws torn off, and the door slammed open with a dent in it the shape of a small, girlish foot.

An even greater stench hit them from the rest of the house, wafting from the other rooms and the hallway. The room they were in led into a corridor, another boarded up window at one end. All the other doors were pulled off their hinges, leaving the space open and practically breathing with its stink. It was like death and excretions, all mixed together, and Ram didn't even want to know what had been going on in there. Surely the kind of people who paid for a gold-plated plaque with an engraving of their name to go above the door wouldn't let their house deteriorate to this level? It was dark, too, hardly any sunlight getting in through more and more boarded up, moulding windows, the air full of dust and the coatings of filth from the floors kicked up and floating. Ram coughed and felt like he might be sick just being in there; the hurricane continued to batter the house from outside.

"God, can they not afford a maid?" Tanya asked, gawking around. The floor, Ram was sure, was covered in faeces, all types of it. It was permanently damp and he was worried he was going to damage his lungs just by breathing in that hovel. There was straw down there, too, straw and all kinds of putrid footprints that definitely didn't just belong to a human.

"It's definitely a fixer-upper," the Doctor said, holding a hand across his mouth and nose for a second. Then out of his pocket he pulled a torch – an industrial type of thing much too large to ordinarily fit in his pockets, just like the kinds of huge objects Jenny kept pulling out of her really very small shoulder bag.

They heard noise from downstairs. Movement, grunting.

"If Nicholas is the one who made those things, then what if he's keeping them in the house?" Tanya asked in a whisper.

"What gave it away? All the animal shit on the floor, or are you psychic?" Ram quipped, and she gave him an annoyed look.

"April's not gonna kiss you for a week if you come back smelling like this," she retaliated, and then Jenny made a start, getting distracted from where she had been crouched down and looking at the floor while desperately trying to keep the hem of her fancy coat from getting shit on it.

"You and April are going out!?"

"Yes, she wouldn't stop talking about it early," the Doctor affirmed, "Seems quite happy."

"Aww, cute. Young love," Jenny said, "God, I don't even think I fancied anybody else until I was in my forties."

"Your forties?" Tanya asked her, "How old are you?"

"208," she said. Ram couldn't even imagine living to be two-hundred years old.

The noises downstairs continued. Something was definitely moving around, and it sounded like something big. And because the Doctor and his daughter were clearly mental, or something, they decided that the best course of action was to follow this weird noises. So they crept down mucky, slimy, creaking stairs, everything bloated and rotten, like the house was itself a corpse. If they pried beneath the surface, all sorts of horrors were going to start crawling out, like maggots from a wound. Like maggots from the wounds on the sides of Josh Hart's decapitated head. Ram was beginning to really hate maggots.

"What's this?" Tanya picked something up from on top of a cabinet when they got downstairs. It was dirty, and initially Ram went to swat it out of her hand, until she opened it and revealed it was some kind of notebook. A notebook full of writing.

"Looks to me like some conveniently placed plot exposition," the Doctor commented, but nobody else heard him as Tanya began to skim the pages looking for anything useful. Ram found himself walking almost on tip-toes, like that would help limit the grossness he was coming into contact with.

He found it unusual that all the furniture was still there. Chairs, bookshelves, a piano of all things – they still sat around the fancy room in the entrance hall of that mansion. Well, they were pushed up against the front door to create a barricade, but nobody had cleared them out. What had happened to the Vanderbilts? They were rich arseholes, but he didn't think he wanted them to die.

"Oh my god, this is a journal of his… experiments," Tanya said, "Doctor, there's a drawing of something here." She held up the yellow, soiled pages for his eyes to see; it was an ink drawing clearly done with a fountain pen by somebody with a talent for artistry, and it showed some sort of technologically advanced device Ram couldn't begin to describe.

"Uh-oh," he said, "That's trouble."

"What is it?" Jenny asked. The noises they kept hearing were increasing in volume and tenacity, and coming from one of the rooms just off the one they were in now. They couldn't be Nicholas, could they? Maybe this was all him. Maybe there were no more weird monsters. Maybe it was just a stray dog and a rattlesnake that had killed Josh Hart, albeit an unusually aggressive dog.

"Another SAI*, but it has a component missing, I'm sure. It's been bashed around coming through the rift, damaged," he said, looking at the drawing.

"What's an S-A-I?" Ram queried.

"Oh, sorry; Shape Alteration Inducer. Makes people shapeshift, most often unwillingly, but it can do other things, too. It's highly radioactive – you see, if only I had a Geiger counter with me. I've never been good at smelling radiation on things," he said, "I need to run more basic tests on things… could've figured this all out sooner if I'd just checked if those corpses were irradiated!"

"Well, this is why everybody says you're an idiot, father," Jenny said. He grumbled something incoherent and she didn't rise to it.

"It's got stuff in here about Josh's death," Tanya said, "'The Hybridifier-' that's what he calls the device – 'has claimed its next victim after the deaths of Mr Snuggles and Bernard. Now my only friend failed to share the joys of my creations as well, and Scrappy tried to eat him.' Then he drew a picture of a guinea pig and a dog – I guess that's Mr Snuggles and Bernard…"

"What a sicko – he's been feeding his own pets to these things?"

"They're his pets, too," Jenny said, "So Scrappy is the one we have to look out for."

"Nice name for a monster," the Doctor said. Ram was pretty sure that this 'Scrappy' was the thing pawing around in the next room, and after both Tanya and Jenny spoke its name quite loudly there was a smashing sound against a set of double doors which were nailed shut with a plank of wood.

"He's crazy," Tanya said, then she carried on reading from Nicholas' journal, "'I hate to do it, but I have to get rid of Josh's body somehow, and the butchers are getting suspicious of me buying so much meat, not to mention my parents. Not that they care what I'm buying when they've been in Morocco for three months. But Scrappy won't eat the heads. I've had to take his head and put it in his locker – a good thing I found his key down in the den. I need to stop going down there, it's hard climbing back out every time I do.'"

"There's a way in from above?" Jenny asked. This Scrappy sounded like it was throwing itself at the wall. "Let's see if we can't get a look at-" This Scrappy had been throwing itself at the wall. And the door. And it was heavy, and strong, and the door – despite the plants of wood nailed across it to prevent exactly this kind of 'security breach' – splintered. They didn't have to go and find a way in from above, in the end.

He didn't know how he would describe it other than as a monster. Tanya screamed. Ram might have screamed a bit, too, but later on he would plead with Tanya not to tell April that. It crashed out and came barrelling towards the four of them; Ram and Tanya both made for the stairs, while Jenny and the Doctor both dodged out of the way, the former doing a very spy, evasive roll. For once, she didn't have a gun out. Not that Ram saw. And then the thing – Scrappy – mooed. He'd never been scared of something that went moo before. Living in suburban London, Ram didn't see an awful lot of cows, and he wasn't sure Scrappy counted. It was only part cow, after all.

"What is that!?" he wanted to know, and the creature rolled its head to look at him. It was probably the most horrifying thing he'd ever seen in his life. There was a cow, or it had the body and most of the head of a cow, until its jaws morphed into those of a savage wolf with long, sharp, venom-soaked fangs. A rattling tail whipped around from side to side behind it, scales formed on its underbelly and udders until out of its sides sprouted eight huge, hairy legs like those of a tarantula.

It was going to charge at Ram until Jenny whistled and said desperately, "Here, boy!" How the hell had Nicholas Vanderbilt been controlling this thing? It was covered in blood and brutal viscera and turned its whole spidery form towards the Doctor's daughter instead, while Ram and Tanya retreated further up the stairs.

"I don't think that was a very good idea," Ram said.

It went for her. The room they were in was really not all that big, even if it was a millionaire's mansion, and that thing could move fast and had already killed Josh Hart and who knew how many other innocent pets? But it wasn't banking on Jenny, who did another of those trick rolls to get out of its way. It made to bite the space in the air where she had been, but ended up pulling itself onto the wall instead. Its spider-legs enabled it to walk on the walls, and then it jumped down from above the door where it hung, its tail slashing around, and tried to get at her again.

She joined Ram and Tanya on the stairs, Ram and Tanya who quickly began to run in a different direction as Scrappy gave immediate pursuit, crawling along the wall. All this while he wanted to know what the hell the Doctor was going to do about all this. Then Jenny shouted, "Catch!" at him, and threw that circular shoulder bag towards him. The brown leather disc whirled towards him in the air while she was preoccupied with keeping Scrappy's attention, Ram and Tanya still retreating. Now the Doctor was fumbling with the bag. Jenny was on the landing above now.

"What do you want me to get out of this bag!?"

"Any weapon!" she shouted at him, "And hurry up!" Scrappy jumped with the power of all eight of its horrible legs, and Jenny only had a second to jump herself, jump onto the thin, wooden railing of the balcony, which immediately snapped under her weight. She didn't expect this, didn't count on it, and so Jenny tripped and fumbled in mid-air, lunging for the ornate chandelier that hung above the room. But she missed, she fell. Scrappy collided with this chandelier and dust fell from the ceiling under this weight. When Jenny hit the ground she rolled quite easily and took just a second to regain her balance.

"Didn't you say your fencing has been coming along!?"

"What!?" And he threw something. Her eyes widened, barely prepared, and she stepped out of the way while Scrappy struggled to get a grip on the chandelier above them. Plaster dust fell, the ceiling began to crack, this thing that the Doctor had thrown ended up wedged in part of one of the bookshelves behind Jenny's head. Ram saw that it was a sword. Could she really manage to swordfight with her hand the way it was? It didn't matter because she grabbed it anyway.

"Is that a cutlass? Like pirates use?" Tanya asked. Ram didn't answer because he didn't know, and he was distracted by this sword suddenly lighting up bright orange along one of its edges. Molten-hot metal as Scrappy finally got the clue that it shouldn't stay clinging to that fragile chandelier for much longer. A few more seconds and it may have fallen and crushed Jenny. Scrappy leapt down from it, falling through the air.

It was all over in a moment. Jenny didn't need to use whatever these fencing-talents of hers were, because she just held out her arm, stepped back, and let Scrappy impale its own vicious, rabid, snakelike head on the white-hot blade of whatever weird sword she'd been keeping in her bag. She let go of the hilt and let Scrappy fall, and for a few seconds the beast writhed, making terrible noises, the sword burning up from the bottom of its jaw through its brain. The red-hot tip stuck out of the roof of its nose, yet it wasn't dead, just unable to bite and not possessing claws with which to tear.

It was just about to start to come at Jenny again, in spite of its injury, when its dabbling with the chandelier finally came to bite it. There was a tearing sound as the entire thing came crashing down from above. If Scrappy hadn't been dead before, it was certainly dead five seconds later, when the sharp shards of about a hundred broken lightbulbs and ornate, metal fixtures pierced it all over. It was left with its legs stabbed into the wooden floor like a pinned-up, dead butterfly left on show in a collector's cabinet. But it was smellier, and had more blood. When Scrappy went limp, the Vanderbilt house became quiet.

"…I suppose Nicholas isn't in, then…" Ram said eventually.

"You threw a sword at my head!" Jenny exclaimed, ignoring Ram.

"I threw it to you! You were meant to catch it!" he argued. She glared. "Are you accusing me of trying to kill you now?" She realised how stupid that sounded.

"Well I'm not getting it back," she said, looking at scrappy, "The chandelier broke the hilt off where the power supply comes from. To think, I kind of liked that heat cutlass… hadn't thought of a name for it yet…"

"What about Iveanne?"

"Ha, ha." Ram got the feeling he was listening to a string of inside-jokes.

"What about Nicholas, though? Who we actually came here to get?" Ram persisted. The pair of them thought this over.

Jenny asked Tanya, "What's the latest entry in that journal?" and Tanya quickly flipped through to the end.

"It's from… shit, it's just from this morning."

"Oi! Watch your language. Who taught you to swear?" Jenny told her off.

"Sorry… um… this morning, he wrote something about… there not being any point to life."

"Typical teenager," the Doctor commented.

"Saying he doesn't want to go on like this."

"Again, typical teenager."

"And then he says he's going to hybridise himself and become his own 'magnum opus monstrous creation.'"

"Like I said. A typical teenager."

*The SAI first appears in Chapter 500, "The Case of the Ambiguous Isotope," and again in the short-stories in Chapters 617-630, then Oswin says she destroyed in Chapter 918 for it being too dangerous