Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Dr Who – Martha and Ten The Inbetweens and Backstories ❯ Chapter Twenty ( Chapter 20 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

`I wish every day could be like this,' said Martha. She was walking through the woods, occasionally feeling the heat of the sun on her skin as it dropped down through the bright green leaves above, listening to the sound of the birds singing from the branches and the soft buzz of insects in the undergrowth. It was a lovely day to be on Earth.

Martha had visited the past and the future and alien worlds in distant galaxies. She loved her life; she loved seeing new times and places, but she never minded when the TARDIS brought her back home, as it sometimes did, to England in the early twenty-first century. And that was because Martha knew that it didn't really matter where - or when - you found yourself; what mattered was who you were with.

And it was, as Martha had already commented, absolutely perfect. At the moment, she simply couldn't wish for anything better. Welllll . . . she could wish that the Doctor would get over being dumped by his ex and move on. Then he might move on to her instead.

`Be careful what you wish for,' the Doctor commented. His hands were stuffed in the trouser pockets of his pinstriped suit as he strolled along.

`Why?'

He shrugged. `Well, I can't imagine ever wanting every day to be the same.'

Smiling in agreement, Martha took him by the arm and pulled him closer. `Come on, you, I'm hungry. It's nearly teatime and I need clotted cream.'

They were walking down a slope of woody earth that led to a narrow road. A short wade through some ferns brought them to a crossroads. There was a signpost.

`Creighton Mere one mile that way,' read Martha, pointing down the road, `Ickley five miles that way.'

`Which d'you think?' the Doctor asked her. `I quite like the sound of Ickley.'

`Nearer the better as far as I'm concerned. Let's try Creighton Mere.'

`I'd keep away from that one if I were you,' said an old, dry voice from the roadside.

There was a man sitting on a stile, half hidden by the hedgerow. He was wearing filthy old boots and a worn-out parka. He was old, with weathered brown skin and matted hair, and sharp eyes peering out from beneath bushy grey eyebrows.

`I beg your pardon?' Martha said politely.

`Creighton Mere,' the old man said. `Wouldn't bother with it if I were you.' At least, that's what she thought he said. It was difficult to tell, because the huge, tangled beard which surrounded his mouth muffled half of what he was saying.

`Why not?' asked the Doctor.

The old man pulled a face, his lips shining wetly. `It's not a very nice place to live.'

`We don't want to live there,' said Martha. `We're only visiting.'

`Hmph,' said the man.

`Besides, it's too far to Ickley,' Martha added. `And we're walking.'

`You're not walkers,' the old man noted. `You're not dressed for walkin', either of you.' He pointed an old stick at their feet. `You got nice shoes on, an' he's got trainers. So you must have a car somewhere.'

`We don't have a car,' Martha said.

`We have a police box,' the Doctor added.

The man's eyebrows drew together. `Police box?'

`Yep. Big blue one, parked back there. It's better for the environment than a car.'

The old man's eyes twinkled at this. `You could have a point there.'

`So what's wrong with Creighton Mere, anyway?'

The lips pursed inside the beard. `Nothing much, I suppose,' he said slowly. `To look at.'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. `Well, we're probably not going to do much more than look at it, are we, Martha?'

Martha was about to say that a cup of tea and a slice of cake wouldn't go amiss, but then thought that might sound a bit unfair to a vagrant.

`Please yourselves, then,' the old man said. `Don't say I didn't warn you.'

`Warn us?' Martha repeated. `About what?'

`About Creighton Mere.'

`You haven't actually warned us about anything specific.'

`Well, there ain't anything specific I can warn you about. It's more of a feelin'.'

`Ah!' the Doctor nodded as if he understood perfectly.

`What I'm feeling at the moment is hungry,' Martha said. She turned to the Doctor. `Let's carry on.'

`Just take care of yourselves,' the old man said, not unkindly. `In Creighton Mere.'

`Thanks, anyway,' Martha said. She gave the man a little wave, and he nodded at her as they turned to go.

`What was all that about?' Martha demanded when they were out of earshot.

`Oh, take no notice,' the Doctor said airily. `He's probably been moved on by the locals or something and he's got a grudge against the village.'

Martha shivered, remembering the man's sharp little eyes. They had seemed to look right through her at the end, almost as if he was committing every detail of her to memory.

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The Doctor had wandered back towards the old well on the village green, which was now less of a green, and more of a field of churned mud from Angela Hook's Land Rover and ash from the remains of an alien weed-like creature called a Vurosis.

He picked around in the dirt until he found a small rock no bigger than a lump of coal. It was grey and weighed next to nothing.

Henry Gaskin, a local land owner joined him. `What is it?'

`The remains of the Vurosis brain.' The Doctor clenched his fist and the rock crumbled into powder. `Gone for ever.' He dusted his hands, and the last fragments of the Vurosis blew away on the night air like smoke across a battlefield. Scattered all around the vicinity of the well were lump of soil and rock and general debris thrown up when the Vurosis died.

`This is a right old mess, isn't it?' Gaskin said quietly.

`Oh, the grass will grow back all right,' replied the Doctor. `And it looks like the well-shaft is still intact.'

`I'm talking about the people who didn't make it. Nigel Carson, Ben Seddon . . . Old Barney Hackett,' Gaskin explained.

Nigel Carson had been controlled by the Vurosis brain, and killed the old tramp Barney Hackett. Two of Carson's university friends had been helping him dig a tunnel to the base of the well to find what they thought was hidden treasure. In the tunnel, Duncan Goode had undergone transmutagenic alteration by the Vurosis and the proto-Vurosis hybrid Duncan been forced to kill his friend Ben Seddon.

`Oh, yes, I see.' The Doctor heaved a sigh, he'd had experienced this kind of thing before. `You have to think of the people who did make it,' he said. `The people whose lives were saved. And there are an awful lot of those, you know.'

Angela arrived, picking her way carefully through the mud with the help of a borrowed torch. `Martha's checking over the walking wounded, Doctor,' she said. `And I've had a call from Sadie Brown. She says she's woken up with a terrible hangover in Henry Gaskin's bed. I think she's more traumatised by that than being turned into an alien monster. Or very nearly, at any rate.'

The proto-Vurosis hybrid Duncan, had been sent by the Vurosis to recover its brain from the mansion, and Angela's friend Sadie had gotten in the way and started to transmutate. The Doctor had then flushed the brain down the toilet to save her.

'She says to thank you and can she turn off that blasted screwdriver thing as it's making her headache worse and driving Jess up the wall. Oh, and she says the manor looks like it's been hit by a bomb.'

Duncan had smashed his way down three floors of the manor to find the brain in the sewer, while the Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to hold the transmutagenic alteration at bay.

`Oh, blast,' said Gaskin. `I'd forgotten about that!'

`It's going to cost you a fortune to get that repaired,' Angela told him bluntly.

He nodded wryly at the remains of the wishing well. `And what about this? Bit of a setback for the Creighton Mere Wishing Well Restoration Committee, I should say.'

`Oh, blow,' Angela sighed, looking at the well properly. `Look at the state of it. Sadie will go bonkers.'

The parapet wall was scorched black and the uprights were no more than pieces of splintered wood. Angela peered down the well-shaft and sighed. `Not much point in making a wish now, is there?'

`Wait a minute. What's this?' The Doctor was prodding at something in the mud with his toe. It was glinting in the light of Angela's torch near the base of the well.

Gaskin picked it up. `It's a coin, I think.' He rubbed the mud off with his thumb. `Good grief. It's gold - look!' They all peered closely at the coin.

`That's an eighteenth-century gold sovereign,' said the Doctor carefully.

`And there's more, look,' said Angela excitedly, playing the beam of the torch over the ground by their feet. Golden lights reflected all around them.

`Great Scott!' cried Gaskin. `I don't believe it!'

Martha came running over at the sound of their excited shouts. The Doctor was bending down, brushing soil from a large, leathery object.

`You're not going to believe this,' he said, holding up an old, dirty leather bag. It was mud-stained and rotted, but clearly full and very heavy. As they watched, more gold coins tumbled out of a hole in the ancient stitching.

`It's the treasure!' yelled Martha. `It's the highwayman's treasure! It really was down there all the time!'

`No, it's not the treasure,' said Angela happily. `It's the Creighton Mere Well and Gaskin Manor Restoration Fund!'

The Doctor and Martha stayed on through the night to help collect all the gold sovereigns. Martha had been thinking about the alien as they rummaged through the wreckage.

'So how did it get here then?' she asked the Doctor out of the blue. 'The Vurosis I mean.'

'Oh, it would have been a seed pod falling to Earth like a meteorite. Similar to an Isolus pod that fell to Earth in two thousand and . . .' He stopped talking when he realised that it wouldn't happen for another four years, and Angela and Sadie where listening with interest. Martha saw the sad look flash across his face, and knew it was to do with Rose.

'Any-hoo, it plunged into the soil, or was carried by the underground spring to the well chamber and slowly grew over the centuries. Ooh, here's a few more,' he said, picking some gold coins out of the mud.

Angela used her bush hat to store the coins, and somebody else managed to get their hands on a metal detector to track down the last few pieces lost in the mud. It was an exciting time for everybody, and helped take most people's minds off the terrible events of the evening, at least for a while.

When the police finally arrived, there was little they could do except stare at the muddy village green and scratch their heads. The two constables took statements from a number of people who claimed to be eyewitnesses to an attempted alien invasion of the Earth, starting with Creighton Mere, but in truth the policemen were more confused by the various different accounts of the evening and eventually, finding no actual crime to investigate, they gave up.

And after that, most people did what came naturally: they went back to the pub, taking the two constables with them. Many of them had left drinks unattended, and found them exactly as they had left them.

Henry Gaskin ordered the largest bottle of fizzy white wine the pub stocked - it would have to do instead of champagne - and paid for drinks all round. Even Jess, his Border Collie was treated to a bowl of water by the bar.

Gaskin was elected as Treasurer, a title almost everybody found unaccountably hilarious, and it was unanimously agreed that the proceeds should indeed be used to help rebuild those parts of Gaskin Manor destroyed by the Vurosis, along with a complete re-turfing of the village green, and of course the full and proper restoration of the wishing well. Sadie Brown decided to put her share towards the setting up of a small tea room adjacent to the village green.

`We'll come back and be your first customers,' Martha assured her happily.

`Make sure you do!' Sadie laughed, making a note of Martha's mobile number and promising to call her as soon as she was ready to open.

Sadie returned the Doctor's sonic screwdriver along with a pot of her Thick-Cut Tawny. She thanked him quietly but honestly for saving her life and kissed him on the cheek. Many people in the pub roared and raised their glasses.

`We really think you ought to take a cut of the loot, you know,' Angela said to the Doctor and Martha. `After all, if it wasn't for you two . . .'

`It belongs to the village,' said the Doctor. `We don't.'

`Take this as a souvenir, then,' Angela said to Martha. She pressed a single gold sovereign into her hand and then closed Martha's fingers over it like a grandmother giving a child pocket money. `Keep it for luck!'

Martha gaped. `I can't take this! It's worth a fortune.'

`So are you, dear, so are you.' She looked meaningfully at the Doctor and winked. `Take care of her, Doctor, won't you?'

He said that he would, and then, with many more hugs and kisses and handshakes, they took their leave. On the way out of the pub, Martha bumped into Duncan again.

`I thought we had a date?' he said, smiling. `Or are you just teasing me now?'

She could see that he was smiling through some very grim memories. She took him to one side. `How are you feeling? Really?'

`I can't believe Ben and Nigel are gone.'

`Nigel brought it all on himself, you know. There was nothing you could do.'

`And Ben?'

`Not your doing. None of it was.' Martha held his hand. `Do you remember much about it?'

`Nothing after that skeleton, no.' The skeleton of an old highwayman was the conduit through which the Vurosis had attacked and possessed Duncan.

`It's probably best that way.'

`I do remember asking you out, though.' He smiled at her.

`And as much as I know you can't resist me, I'll have to ask you to hold out for a bit longer. I think I'll need a little while to get over all this,' she said, returning his smile.

She was getting used to letting them down gently; Will Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre, Victor Meredith and Claude Romand in the Lake District, Riley Vashtee on the SS Pentallian. Even the 15 year old Solin Tiermann on Tiermann's World had a crush on her.

There was only one man who stood a chance with her, and he seemed completely oblivious to her romantic desires, apparently immune to her charms.

`Good idea,' Duncan agreed, reluctantly.

`Angela Hook said I can stay here for as long as I want, and help out with the well restoration,' he added. `I think I'd like that.'

Martha kissed him goodbye and went out. Once again, she found the Doctor waiting for her by the well. He was watching the sunrise.

`I can't keep this,' she said, showing him the gold sovereign Angela had given her.

`Why not?'

`It's too valuable. I mean, it would feel like stealing. I've never owned anything so valuable in all my life.'

The Doctor pulled a face. `I dunno. There's a planet called Yoga that's made from solid gold. They wouldn't be impressed with you there.'

She laughed. `Maybe not. But all the same . . .'

He watched her carefully, hands in his pockets, the tails of his long brown coat blowing out behind him. `So, what are you going to do with it, then?'

`I'm going to make a wish,' she said, holding it out over the well.

`That's a gold sovereign,' he said slowly. `That's got to be one heck of a wish.'

`We'll make it a double. Have you thought of what you'd wish for yet?'

He shook his head. `Nah.'

`Go on,' she said, stepping closer. `There must be something.'

`Nope. Nothing.' His eyes held that faraway look that Martha knew so well. He would be wishing that he could have Rose back by his side. But, whatever he was thinking, whatever it was the Doctor secretly wished for, he would never tell her. He was, and always would be, a mystery to her.

`Well,' she said eventually, `looks like I'm going to have to wish for both of us.'

She closed her eyes tight and let go of the coin. Seconds later there was a distinct, echoing plop as it hit water.

She opened her eyes in delight. `Did you hear that?'

The Doctor was already leaning over the well-shaft, peering down. 'There's water down there! The underground springs must be filling it again. Perhaps the Vurosis had been blocking them for all these years.'

`That's brilliant!'

He grinned at her. `I love a happy ending, don't you?'

She linked his arm and pulled him away from the well, heading for the TARDIS. `Always.'

`So what did you wish for?' he asked her.

She had an enigmatic smile on her lips. If only he knew . . . if only wishes came true. `Never you mind.'