TURLOUGH'S TALE
Chapter Seven
The Doctor examines what has fallen onto us. Had it fallen with full force we would have been injured but apart from being a bit sore from having a man I was supposed to have killed the previous day fall on me, I'm fine, and the Doctor seems okay too, at first. In fact, though, the heavy thing, now splintered, has hit him right where I myself had hit him, and he looks more dazed than I feel.
"Doctor?" tries Tegan, holding him by the arm that isn't raised (the flat of his hand is against the reopened wound).
"I'm fine," he declares, freeing his arm and looking down at the fallen object: a rotting cedar chest; even I can smell it. "It takes a lot to rot cedar," he muses. "This must have been here for a long time, maybe longer than the house itself. This Ice Age is not as close to its beginning stages as I thought. Still relatively early, though."
"How long do Ice Ages last?" I ask.
"Well," says the Doctor, squatting down by the remains of the chest, "that depends. I don't know much about Carbalexina but I know there've been a few here. There have been five on Earth that we know of and the longest lasted three hundred million years. Even a cedar chest can't last that long. What's this?" He clears away some wood and tries to lift a shiny, new-looking metal lock box, too heavy to lift alone. I help him. "It's at times like this I really miss my sonic screwdriver." He looks around for something to use as a lock pick.
"Don't look at me," says Tegan, although neither of us has been looking at her. "I don't use kirby grips."
"Oh, a hair grip! Now that's a thought." The Doctor starts to empty his pockets but has nowhere to put his possessions, as the floor is broken. I grab one of several torn blankets that must have been in the chest and spread it on the floor.
"Yes," says Tegan, and she starts to spread more blankets about for us to sit on, setting aside some in better condition. The Doctor empties his pockets onto my blanket: that yo-yo, the ball of string and portion of it I'd used to tie him up (a large portion in fact, as the string was thin and needed to be wound around him several times), a safety pin, a Frisbee, two books of poetry by Robert Browning, his Panama hat, two English halfpennies, six drachmae and an American quarter dated 2025, a remote control (to what?), a black tea kettle with light wicker woven around the handle, a Hummel figurine (a child bathing her doll in what looks like a gravy boat), two ballpoint pens (one black, one blue), a short brown skirt with a spot of blood on it (I think it's Nyssa's), 16 unopened envelopes addressed variously to "The Doctor," "John Smith" and "Lord President," and, at last, a hair grip.
"Ah ha!" repeats the Doctor, and proceeds to unlock the metal box. Tegan and I start stuffing the other items back into his pockets, since he appears to have forgotten them already. This isn't easy, as he still has the parka on, but he has unzipped it in order to empty his coat pockets. I take the cricket ball out of my pocket – I must have put it there without realizing, back in the woods – and deposit that as well into one of the Doctor's pockets.
"How does all of this fit in there?" I ask Tegan.
"Bigger on the inside?"
"Got it!" cries the Doctor, opening the box. Then he closes it again and sets it aside. "We need better shelter." He starts to gather pieces of railing, floor, anything with some length to it, and takes the string from my hands before I can return it to a pocket. "This will do." He reaches out his hand and looks at me expectantly. I hand him my knife. Tegan's eyes widen but she says nothing. With all of this and a couple of blankets, the Doctor constructs a tent on the hearth and we gather under it. "Now, what have we here?" He reopens the metal box and there, lying on top of everything else in the box, are two matchbooks. He pockets one and uses the other to start a fire in the fireplace. The snow extinguishes it right away.
"Here," I say, gently pushing the Doctor aside. I arrange some logs into a "log cabin," another of the very few useful skills I learned at Brendan. "Now try." The Doctor gets another fire going and this one looks as if it will also allow itself to be snuffed, then suddenly blazes nicely and throws some actual heat our way.
"All right, now we have ourselves a viable shelter. We'll camp out here."
Tegan is doubtful. "How far back is the TARDIS? Can't we just go back?"
"Far, Tegan, far. We've come a long way and it's getting dark." He looks at me again and I realize what he's up to: the Black Guardian can find us more easily in the TARDIS, as it is not technically on this planet or in this Ice Age; it has its own dimension, one the Black Guardian knows well. Tegan doesn't know it, but we're in hiding.
"But," protests Tegan, "There is food in the TARDIS."
"Hmm." The Doctor rises, leaves our little shelter and wanders off.
"Where are you going?" calls Tegan.
"Checking something out," he calls back. "Ah ha!" He comes back looking for all the world like the Abominable Snowman, his arms laden with frosty packages, which he drops triumphantly into the center of the makeshift tent, plopping down crosslegged where he'd sat before, beaming at his own cleverness. "Next to the fridge, a huge mound of snow, not a natural fall, and come to think of it, why is this whole house not buried? I'll tell you why. Someone has been here recently. Someone shelters here intermittently. They could come back at any time."