The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage

by Derek Landy

  She jumped lightly to the floor, turning and smiling as Rapunzel winced.

  ‘Ow,’ said Rapunzel. ‘Ow, be careful. You’re standing on my hair.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Martha said. ‘There’s just so much of it …’

  Martha hopped sideways and Rapunzel straightened up and looked at her, arms folded.

  ‘Hi,’ said Martha. ‘The Doctor says hi, too.’

  ‘What doctor?’

  ‘The man on the ground, who was shouting. My … companion. He says hi. Anyway. It’s very nice to meet you. I read about you when I was little. Also saw the Disney movie. Funny. I liked it. You won’t have seen it, though. I had to travel a few years into the future and you … well, you’re a fairy tale, so …’

  ‘Who are you?’ Rapunzel asked.

  ‘Nobody important. Just passing through. Question: if I wanted to get up on to the roof, how would I go about it?’

  ‘Why would you want to go up on to the roof?’

  ‘We left something up there. Is there an attic, or a ladder, or would I have to go outside again? I really don’t want to go outside. Do I have to? I do, don’t I?’

  Martha walked back to the window, stuck her head out, and looked up. No handholds to be seen. The sun was going down fast. Unnaturally fast. Suddenly it was dusk, and then it was night. She looked down towards the Doctor and gasped. An old man clung to the tower wall below, his black cloak opening around him like great bat wings. She glimpsed sharp teeth beneath his long white moustache and withdrew quickly before his red eyes found her.

  Rapunzel looked at her in puzzlement. ‘Something is wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Martha said, backing away from the window. ‘You’ve got Dracula climbing up your tower.’

  Rapunzel clapped her hands excitedly. ‘Is Dracula a prince?’

  ‘He’s a count.’

  She sagged. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is there another way out of here?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be much of a prison if there was another way out.’

  ‘Do you happen to have a crucifix or holy water or, I don’t know, a lightsaber or something?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rapunzel. ‘I have none of those things. But I have many brushes for my hair.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ Martha muttered, looking around. Rapunzel hadn’t been lying. There was a large table just for brushes of varying sizes. Martha picked up the heaviest one, a brush with a golden handle, and when Dracula popped his head up at the window she hurled it with all her strength. It hit him in the forehead and he grunted and dropped from sight.

  She grabbed Rapunzel’s hair, looping her arm around it loosely. ‘It really was lovely to meet you,’ she said, and ran for the window, letting the hair slip through the loop.

  She jumped out into the night sky and fell, the hair slipping by. She glimpsed Dracula, clinging to the wall, trying to grab her as she dropped. She tightened her grip on the hair and swung suddenly in towards the tower. There was another window right in front of her and she tumbled through it, staggered up and burst through a door, entering a room that flickered with candlelight.

  The first thing she saw was a dressing table, hemmed in on all sides by large, half-empty trunks. On the dressing table lay an assortment of jewellery and its mirror was covered with a fine sheen of dust. In the armchair next to it sat an old lady in a yellowed wedding dress, with wilted flowers in her hair and a tattered veil over her face.

  ‘Who is it?’ said the lady.

  ‘Uh,’ said Martha, panting slightly. ‘I can come back later.’

  ‘Come close. Let me look at you.’

  Martha hesitated, then walked forward.

  The old lady blinked at her through her veil. ‘You are not Pumblechook’s boy. Who are you?’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Martha. ‘You’re Miss Havisham, aren’t you? Oh, this is … You made me suffer so much in school, do you know that? I like a bit of Dickens as much as the next girl, but all those coincidences were just a few steps too far, you know? What you did to Pip was horrible. And where’s Estella? Is she here? Always wanted to give that girl a good slap.’

  She looked around and saw no sign of Estella, but did see a window that she crossed to. She parted the sea of lace curtains and peered out. It was daytime again. Dickens’s England was right outside. She looked back. Miss Havisham was standing, her head down, face hidden by that veil and loose strands of white hair.

  ‘You’d better sit down,’ Martha said. ‘You’re pretty frail and if I were you I’d get rid of all the naked flames in here. You’re not doing yourself any favours by –’

  Miss Havisham snapped her head up and leaped, her cold, wrinkly hand closing round Martha’s throat and lifting her off her feet. Martha was slammed back against the wall, gagging, struggling to breathe, her fingers trying to prise apart the old lady’s grip.

  The door burst open and the Doctor stood there, his eyes narrowed, but before he could say anything dramatic Dracula loomed from behind, grabbed him and yanked him back out of the room.

  Martha rammed both fists down on the inside of Miss Havisham’s elbow. Her grip was loosened and Martha was back on her feet now, gasping, then she powered forward, shoving Miss Havisham a whole two steps back. The yellowed wedding dress started to contract, and Miss Havisham grew taller and broader, and the veil melted to form the face of one of Cotterill’s Un-Men. Martha grabbed a brass candlestick and smacked it into the side of the Un-Man’s head. The Un-Man staggered and Martha ran for the door. The Doctor lurched into her, grabbed her arm, and they sprinted down a stone corridor.

  ‘I punched Dracula!’ he said triumphantly, then winced as he flexed his fingers. ‘He has a very hard face.’

  ‘I bet. First time you’ve met him?’

  ‘No, but the first time it was an android, second time it was Vlad the Impaler and the third time it was a Cyber-Dracula, so I don’t really think they count. Ha! Count.’

  ‘You are hilarious,’ Martha muttered. They took a corner, ran a little more, then came to a door. The Doctor gripped the handle, but didn’t turn it.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Martha asked, getting her breath back. ‘They’re behind us.’

  ‘We’re giving this world the chance to calm down and settle itself.’

  ‘Right. OK, yeah. Doctor, this plan you were talking about …’

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘About time we enacted it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Probably, if I knew what it was.’

  He grinned. ‘Oh, it’s genius, Martha. Pure genius. I’d be jealous of me if I wasn’t already, you know … me.’

  ‘The other time, in the Land of Fiction, how did you beat them?’

  ‘Well, we kind of, sort of, stopped believing in them.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He looked sheepish. ‘You know, like … Hey, you, Minotaur, you don’t actually exist, and, well … That was it.’

  ‘That worked?’

  ‘It worked there. Won’t work here. No reason it would, but I tried it anyway, on Dracula. He just kept trying to bite me. He’s very bitey. Cotterill may draw his power from people rejecting reality, but it isn’t enough for us to simply stop believing in whatever is in front of us. He’s stored up too much power for that to have any effect.’

  ‘So how do we stop him?’

  ‘He told us how. He said this world is just the beginning. Meaning the stronger he gets, the more he’ll be able to do. He draws power from people, then uses that power to create all this. Input and output. So as long as the input is running higher than the output, he’s sorted. We just have to switch that round. Imagination fuels this place, and I’d be willing to bet that imagination can also drain it. You were the first one out of the TARDIS – you were the one he latched on to. We need to cut off that power supply. We need to get you back inside.’

  ‘Into the TARDIS? But that’s stuck up on the top of Rapunzel’s tower.’

  ‘Is it?’ the Doctor said, acting all enigmatic as he turne
d the handle. They walked out through the front door of the haunted cottage, back into the sunshine.

  It would have been a wonderful moment were it not for the Troubleseekers standing there, waiting for them, their faces slack and devoid of expression. For a moment, nobody moved.

  ‘Oooh, I hate awkward silences,’ said the Doctor, and the Troubleseekers lunged.

  Martha yelped, stumbling as she dodged their grasping hands, but she ran on, the Doctor beside her. They stuck to the path until they saw Mrs O’Grady ahead of them, then they veered off on to the grass. The Troubleseekers were right behind them. Mrs O’Grady jumped on her bike and joined the pursuit, proving herself to be surprisingly limber for one so old.

  The Doctor and Martha ran up the hill, trampling over the picnic blanket and scattering the tarts and sandwiches and bottles of ginger beer. They crested the hill, saw the blue police box down the other side and piled on the speed. Martha glanced behind them. Mrs O’Grady had passed the Troubleseekers and she was freewheeling after them.

  The Doctor pointed the sonic screwdriver at her as they ran. The brakes of Mrs O’Grady’s bike squealed and seized, and the woman was launched over the handlebars for the second time since they’d arrived.

  ‘That never gets old,’ the Doctor said, panting slightly. ‘Got your key?’

  ‘Key? Yes. Why?’

  ‘Once you’re inside the TARDIS, Cotterill will latch on to the next available mind for power.’

  ‘Yours?’

  The Doctor looked at her and grinned. ‘Mine.’

  He stopped suddenly, whirled round, and the Troubleseekers ran right into him as Martha kept going. She reached the bottom of the hill, slipped the key into the lock and pushed through into the TARDIS, slamming the door behind her.

  She stepped back. All was quiet. She realised she had no idea what to do next, so she counted to ten, then opened the door and peeked out.

  The Doctor was on his knees, the Troubleseekers surrounding him. Mrs O’Grady stood nearby. They grew taller, lost their features, turning into Un-Men as the landscape shifted. The grassy hill flattened out, became sand. There was a castle in the distance. The landscape shifted again, sand turning to snow, blue sky turning red. Three moons on the horizon. The snow melted, sprouted trees that grew fast, dwarfing any skyscraper that Martha had ever seen and forming a dense forest.

  A man walked through the trees.

  Cotterill.

  6

  ‘I love a good chase,’ Cotterill said. ‘All the best stories end with a good chase.’ He looked around as the forest faded, becoming a mountaintop. ‘You certainly have read a lot of books.’

  ‘Yes I have,’ said the Doctor, raising his head. ‘I have read a lot of books. Travelling as much as I do, spending all that time alone, not really sleeping … Well, you tend to read, don’t you? I’ve got nine hundred years’ worth of books in my head, Cotterill, and you’re getting all of them. All at once.’

  Their surroundings started shifting faster – open water, countryside, a sterile lobby, alien world, alien building, missile silo – like a flipbook being flicked through.

  ‘Stop,’ said Cotterill, his eyes widening.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said the Doctor. ‘See, now you’re in here.’ He tapped his head. ‘And I’m not letting you out.’

  The world around them was a blur. Cotterill staggered, his face pale.

  ‘Stop him!’ he shouted. ‘Kill him!’

  Martha ran to the Doctor’s side as the Un-Men closed in. ‘Doctor! Could really do with a weapon!’

  Their flickering surroundings slowed suddenly, and Martha found a thick branch by her foot. She snatched it up and the world got back to blurring.

  ‘A branch,’ she said. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Best I could do,’ the Doctor muttered. His face was tight with concentration and his eyes were closed.

  Martha swung at the nearest Un-Man, whacking it across the head. It took a single step back. She didn’t know how – or even if – it registered pain, but it was a biped, so most of what she knew about human anatomy could be applied – she hoped.

  She swung again, low this time, the branch crunching into the side of its knee. It dropped and she spun round, the branch cracking into the elbow of another Un-Man who was reaching for the Doctor. She charged into it, bounced off, but managed to send it back a few steps.

  ‘Come on!’ she roared as the other Un-Men circled her. ‘I’ll have the lot of you!’

  They didn’t appear to be the slightest bit intimidated by her challenge, and pressed forward.

  ‘No,’ Cotterill gasped, looking behind him. Martha glanced over. The ever-changing landscape was making her feel sick and dizzy, but in the distance there was a pocket of nothingness, and it was growing bigger.

  One of the Un-Men grabbed Martha and she whirled, swinging the branch – but right before it made contact the branch vanished from her hands.

  ‘Sorry,’ the Doctor muttered.

  The Un-Man’s fingers closed round Martha’s throat, began to squeeze, and then suddenly the Un-Man wasn’t there any more either. Martha turned, gasping, and watched the remaining Un-Men vanish.

  The pocket of nothing was getting closer. It joined up with another. Martha saw more nothingness on the outskirts, beyond the trees and buildings and walls and rocks that flickered by.

  ‘Stop!’ Cotterill roared. ‘Please! This is my home!’

  The landscape lost its features. It was now something small and curved, like they were standing on a planet only as wide as a football pitch, surrounded on all sides by the ever-encroaching emptiness. And Cotterill himself was changing, shrinking, losing his physical form, becoming a twisting thing of shadows and light.

  The Doctor got to his feet, slowly. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘I think someone owes someone else an apology.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the being that was once Cotterill. Its voice echoed in Martha’s ears. ‘Please let me leave your mind. It hurts.’

  ‘I know it does,’ the Doctor said. The screwdriver was in his hand again, scanning. He looked at the results, and grunted. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My people do not have names,’ it said. ‘I am of the Ch’otterai. The legends of my people told us we were once gods; told us we could reshape reality with our minds. But the Ch’otterai have never had particularly vibrant imaginations, so if we had ever had that potential we had long since squandered it on petty acts of showmanship.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘My ship malfunctioned, exploded, destroyed my physical body and cast my consciousness adrift.’

  Martha narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re a ghost?’

  ‘In a way,’ the Doctor murmured. ‘So what happened? A few centuries pass, you get bored, someone has the misfortune to get too close … and you latch on?’

  ‘I thought they could take me home,’ the Ch’otterai said. ‘All I needed was enough strength to take physical form … but I couldn’t leave this point in space. I was stuck here, in this point where I died. So I gave them their stories and fed on the power that resulted, and then I drew another ship here, and another … and I created a planet. I reshaped reality. I became a god.’

  ‘A big god in a small pond,’ said the Doctor, ‘using other people’s imaginations because your own is too stunted. And what happened to these ships you drew in, eh? What happened to these people?’

  The Ch’otterai hesitated. ‘I gave them their stories.’

  ‘And then what happened to them?’

  ‘They left.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘They left. I promise you, I let them go. I am a benevolent god.’

  ‘You’re quick to anger, is what you are. Quick to shout, “Off with their heads!”’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘What did you do with their bodies? And the ships? Did you push them into a big lake of nothingness, let that swallow them up?’

  The swirling form of the Ch’otterai slowed for a moment.
‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what it has been like for me. They were going to leave, Doctor. Their stories turned stale and they grew bored. I needed them and they were going to abandon me, they were going to warn others to stay away. I … I couldn’t let that happen.’

  ‘So you killed them.’

  ‘I gave them a choice. Every single one of them, I gave them a choice. Stay and I will provide, or try to leave and I will destroy.’

  ‘They all tried to leave,’ Martha said softly.

  The Ch’otterai’s voice turned hard, and its swirling intensified with anger. ‘They lied. They promised to stay and then tried to get to their ships. They sought to steal my energy from me. They deserved destruction.’

  The swirling became so violent Martha took a step back – and then, as if it had realised it had gone too far, the swirling slowed, and the Ch’otterai’s voice became softer.

  ‘But, Doctor … you’re different. If we take our time, you could make me strong enough to build a galaxy, and from there, a universe. You could rule that universe, the both of you, as king and queen.’

  ‘With you as our god,’ the Doctor murmured.

  ‘Yes,’ the Ch’otterai responded.

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor. He put his hand out, found Martha’s, and they both started walking backwards. They were now on a surface no bigger than a swimming pool.

  The Ch’otterai’s form was twisting so fast it was blurring. ‘Stop!’ it shrieked. ‘Take one more step and I’ll flood you with the void. You won’t even get to your ship!’

  Martha and the Doctor froze.

  ‘You’ll be sacrificing the last of your power,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘I’ll do it! I’ll kill you before I let you leave! I’ll start again! I’ll find someone new!’

  Martha glanced behind her. The TARDIS was three strides away. Too far.

  ‘We’re not going to stay,’ the Doctor said. ‘We can’t.’

  The Ch’otterai’s voice took on an edge. ‘Then find a way to take me with you. Or better yet, find a way to transport me to this Land of Fiction. One of my Un-Men heard you talking about it. Take me there, Doctor, and I will let you both live.’