Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Dr Who – Martha and Ten The Inbetweens and Backstories ❯ Chapter Twenty Eight ( Chapter 28 )

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

From the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a novel to an old empty house in the series.

They're coming. The angels are coming for you. But listen, your life could depend on this. Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink.

Just to qualify the start of this story, if you watch all the episodes, the companion usually steps out of the TARDIS first, followed by the Doctor. This back story covers a couple of chapters because there was just SO much material to play with.

Non Anime: Doctor Who Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Sci-fi | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 03.14.2016 | Pages: 13 | Words: 5.0K | Visits: 330 | Status: Completed

It was 1997, and a beautiful bright day, the sky a fantastic shade of blue that made Martha think of picnics and beer gardens. Instead, they were standing at the top of what the Doctor informed her was called Calton Hill, in the centre of a triangle that was made by the row of Greek looking columns, a Roman-looking monument and something that could easily have been a lighthouse.

They were anything but alone up here: the Edinburgh Festival was in full swing, and the city was at its busiest. The Doctor had promised that he'd take her to see a good production of Measure for Measure later on, but for now he was just watching over the city with a huge grin on his face.

'Isn't it marvellous?' he said with a grin.

Martha looked out at the view. Most of what she could see hadn't even been built the last time she was here, the New Town sprawling out away from the Old and racing down towards the Firth of Forth. The houses looked grand and the streets wide, but Martha couldn't quite forget the narrow rooms with the low ceilings that the people in the Old Town had been forced to live in 240 years ago, crammed on top of each other like makeshift tower blocks.

'They're still there,' the Doctor said, doing his mind reading act. 'The Closes: underneath the Royal Exchange. Well, the City Chambers now: they say the merchants didn't want to leave the streets, but I think they were more worried another monster was going to come running out.'

Martha gave a little shudder. If she spoke to anybody here about living in a kind of 18th century shanty town, it would just be ancient history to them. But to her it was yesterday. Only yesterday, 240 years ago when she'd been chased through those dark, narrow passageways of the Closes by an alien modular organism made up of hundreds of cloned hands.

Each hand was a biological unit, a piece of a jigsaw that was Onk Ndell Kith, the whole package. It hadn't started out as a human hand of course, but when it gripped the hand of the anatomist Alexander Munro, it used his DNA to try and repair itself. The repair was incomplete, and Kith would have killed all the people in Edinburgh to try and repair itself with their DNA.

It was when the Doctor offered his own DNA that the creature found out about the TARDIS. What a prize that would be, travelling through all of time and space, gathering DNA wherever it chose to go. And that was when the Doctor had to stop it, sending it back into the Nor' Loch from where it had first arrived on this planet.

'What about the Loch?' Martha asked. 'What happened to that?'

The Doctor's smile faltered. 'The hands were dead before they hit the water,' he said sadly, guiltily. 'But they didn't want to take any chances: they had the Loch filled in. Later on, they built the Princes Street Gardens on top. See that big spiky tower over there? That's the Scott Monument. That's where the Gardens are.'

Martha looked. She thought she could just see the belt of greenery at the foot of Castle Hill. Strange to think of all those little hands buried under there. She remembered trying to stop it climbing the castle wall by using the sonic screwdriver, what it had felt like when the hands became detached from the whole and rained down on her, scratching and choking her as she'd stood and held on.

She looked around the hilltop: there were families there with little children, old couples sitting holding hands on the benches; a woman about Martha's age with bottle blonde hair jumped down from the base of the Greek columns and went over on her ankle, laughing at her own clumsiness. Martha couldn't imagine what it would be like if the hands came back.

She remembered the walking dead with the hands gripping their chests to animate them. Chasing the dead vagabond Arthur King on the stagecoach through the Grassmarket. If it happened again now, the locals would probably think it was a stunt for some show or other, and tut to themselves about how much money the students had to waste.

'There's one thing I don't understand,' Martha said. The

Doctor looked at her questioningly. 'The hands were broken, yes? They thought the dead bodies were that Kith thing, and they were just joining the rest of him? But they all still hung around together - the zombies didn't just wander off on their own.'

'The mechanism that made them combine had been damaged,' the Doctor said, a little guiltily. Martha could guess how it had been undamaged. 'But the psychic connection that made them group together was still there. That's why any damage Monro did with his electricity to the one hand managed to affect all the others under the Loch. They still wanted to find the other hands and join together. They just couldn't remember how.'

'So why was that first one chasing Benjamin Franklin?'

The Doctor nodded, looking back over the city. 'Only one reason I can think of,' he admitted quietly.

'He had a hand,' Martha said. Her heart beat a little harder.

'Probably the last one on Earth. They must have given it to him just before they packed him onto that stagecoach,' the Doctor said, still looking off into the distance. Was he remembering watching those hands fall into the Loch? He couldn't feel sorry for them, surely? 'All the others would have been destroyed by the lightning. Franklin's should have been safely on the way to London.'

'So he could clone himself?' Martha asked.

'Franklin?' the Doctor shook his head. 'I doubt it. The initial damage was a mistake. I don't think anybody but Monro could recreate it, and even then it would probably have taken him a good couple of years experimenting.'

'But Monro could do it?'

The Doctor shrugged casually.

'So shouldn't we be trying to get it back?' Martha suggested.

The Doctor spun around, his freshly laundered coat spinning with him. The smile was back on his face, the cheeky one that said he was going to suggest something particularly naughty. The one that Martha couldn't help but return, despite all her good arguments to the contrary.

'Martha Jones, your lack of knowledge about the history of medicine is truly shocking,' he mocked gently. 'Haven't you ever studied Edinburgh University's collection of Alexander Monros?'

She had to admit that she hadn't.

'Well, you can look it up next time we're near a library,' he said, stepping off with authority. 'In the meantime, why don't we go and try one of the local delicacies?'

'Haggis?' Martha wrinkled her nose.

The Doctor smiled. 'Chips,' he said, waggling his eyebrows. 'With salt and sauce.'

And they walked down Calton Hill arm in arm to Princes Street where they crossed North Bridge which took them to the Golden Mile. There were a bewildering array of street performers entertaining the passers-by. They passed acrobats, jugglers, mime artists and dancers as they made their way to the chip shop.

Having purchased their meal, they wandered down the street past stilt walkers and people on tall unicycles. A troupe of mummers were acting out a comedy sketch, and a barber shop quartet were giving an incredible rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody.

As they finished their chips, they came to the beautiful Gothic building of the Bedlam Theatre, where a group calling themselves Illyria were giving a performance of Measure for Measure.

`Here we are,' the Doctor said. `Another offering from our old mate Will, about five years after we met him. It's often referred to as one of his problem plays.'

`Why's that then?' Martha asked.

`Well, it's classified as a comedy, but just because it doesn't end in tragedy, doesn't make it funny. The play's main themes include justice, mortality and mercy in Vienna, and the dichotomy between corruption and purity: "some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall",' he explained as they entered the theatre.

When they were leaving the theatre after the performance, Martha was thanking the Doctor for explaining Will's flowery language as the play went along. `I don't think I'd have understood half of it without you.'

`Ah, you'd probably have gotten the gist of it, but when you understand the Elizabethan dialect, you get the subtleties and in jokes,' he said as they made their way back to the TARDIS.

`A heart for a heart and a deer for a deer,' Martha laughed, remembering Will trying one of his play-on-words on her.

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor examined the monitor. 'What about a `Scooby-Doo' style mystery?' he asked her.

'Yeah, go on then; do I get to peel the mask off the bad guy at the end?' she said with a laugh.

'I'd have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you pesky kids,' he replied, laughing with her. 'Well, this has got all the ingredients, a big, old, empty house, and people disappearing.'

'Sounds perfect.'

'And something Scooby doesn't have; temporal disturbances.' He threw the switch, slammed the lever, and the TARDIS wheezed across the Vortex. 'Allonz-y.'

'So, where are we then,' Martha asked as she felt the TARDIS land with a gentle bump.

'Wester Drumlin,' he said in a "Vincent Price" voice, shutting down the console.

'Ooh, it even sounds like something out of Scooby-Doo,' she said, walking down the ramp, opening the door, and stepping outside. 'Hah, it's even got the gothic statues to add to the atmosphere,' she called to him through the gap in the door.

He smiled and sauntered down the ramp, stepping outside and closing the door. 'Where are they then?' he asked her, looking around to see where she had gone. Had he actually been in an episode of Scooby-Doo, he would have heard the audience shout 'it's behind you'.

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Martha felt sick, in fact, she felt very sick . . . oh God . . . She leant over, and her last cup of tea came up and sprayed over the pavement. She shuddered and leant her head against one of the cool brick columns that were supporting a bridge that spanned the road. She was reminded of the line from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. "What's wrong with being drunk? Ask a glass of water."

'You alright Love?' A concerned passer-by asked.

'Hmmm? Oh, yeah, thanks, just a bit of an upset stomach. Sorry, I don't normally throw up in public.' She straightened up, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It felt like the motion sickness that she'd experienced once when she was a child on a rough ferry crossing to the Isle of Wight.

Where was she, where was the TARDIS, and most importantly, where was the Doctor? Moments before, they'd been in an old house, and now she was on a shopping street somewhere. She looked around, trying to get her bearings, but although she felt as though she was still in London, the shops didn't quite look right.

She walked along the street and looked in the window of an electrical retailer, and got her first indication that something was wrong. The prices were in pounds, shillings, and pence, she had only ever known the decimal monetary system that was introduced before she was born, and all the televisions were old fashioned and black and white.

'What the hell?' She looked around as panic started to grip her. 'Excuse me,' she called to the man who had asked if she was alright. 'You didn't see a man in a brown pinstriped suit and unruly hair did you?'

He looked up and down the street. 'No, sorry Love, haven't seen anyone like that. Did you lose him?'

'Yeah, it must have been when I stopped to . . . never mind, I'll catch up with him,' she said with a smile. The stranger nodded and carried on down the street.

'Right, don't panic,' she told herself. 'Think, what would the Doctor do?' And then she had a random thought, "I wonder what Rose would have done". Was she still jealous of the ghost of his previous lover? Ignoring the distracting thoughts, she tried to marshal her thoughts, she needed information.

"Where am I, when am I, and where the hell is Wester Drumlin?" She thought to herself. The first two would be fairly easy to find out; she walked down the street to look for a street name. In London, all the signs had the borough that they were in, but she didn't need it, because she came to an underground station.

'Brixton,' she said to herself with relief; that was the `where' sorted, now for the when. She carried on walking until she came to a newsagent, with the newspapers in clear plastic displays. It was Tuesday, 18th March, 1969.

She started to feel sick again as the realisation set in that she was lost and alone in 1969, with no hope of getting home if she didn't find the Doctor. But wait a minute, she had a super charged phone, she realised. She reached into her pocket, took out the phone, and flipped it open; it said `no signal'.

'Oh come on,' she said in desperation. The Doctor had told her that she could phone anywhere in the universe. What he hadn't told her was that she had to be in range of the exchange, which in this case, was the TARDIS.

'Urrgh.' She slapped the phone shut and stuffed it back in her pocket. Right, she was on her own, so she had to try and find the Doctor on her own, and to do that, she would have to think like him. "Hah! Good luck with that", she thought to herself. The only thing she could think of was to find Wester Drumlin, and hope that he would look for her there, and she knew the exact person to ask for directions.

She looked up and down the street, searching for the distinctive, black, conical helmet of a London beat bobby. If you wanted to know the time, or get directions, you asked a policeman, only there never seemed to be one around when you needed one. There were plenty of people about, and she focussed on a woman who had two small children in tow.

'Excuse me, have you seen a policeman, I think I've had my purse stolen,' Martha said, not really having to act distressed, the way she was feeling.

'Oh dear, that's awful,' the woman said. 'Pickpockets I'll bet, try down the road Luv, the station's down there at the end.' The woman was pointing up Brixton Road, in the direction Martha was already heading.

'Thank you.' She went the short distance up the road, and saw the station on the corner of Gresham Road. She went through the glass door, and approached the Desk Sergeant. She was close to tears, and started blurting out her words.

'I've lost my purse, it may have been stolen, and it had all my money in it, and I'm new to the area, and I lost my friend, and the address was in my purse, and I'm lost, and I don't know what to do,' she wailed.

'Oh dear, there, there,' the sergeant said soothingly 'Don't get yourself all upset Miss, I'm sure we'll be able to find your friend's address, let's take a few details, and I'll see what we can do.'

Martha told him about losing the Doctor on Brixton Road, feeling ill, getting lost, and realising that she didn't have her purse. He was writing it down on a notepad.

'Can you remember anything about the house where your friend lives?' he asked her.

'Only the name, Wester Drumlin.'

'That's quite a distinctive name, it's not on my beat, but I'm sure it'll be on someone's beat.'

'Oh thank you,' she said with relief.

After fifteen minutes of phone calls, and making enquiries, the Desk Sergeant wrote the address on a piece of paper for her.

'There you are Miss, and I've drawn a little map on the back for you,' he said helpfully.

'Oh, thank you SO much,' she said, taking the piece of paper. She said goodbye, and left the police station, starting the half hour long walk to Wester Drumlin.