Now! To the gallery! The Doctor is standing in front of a painting of the Time War, with the sealed orders of his former—oh, what shall we call her?—playmate?—in his hand. Those of you who want to pop back and refresh your memories, please do so now. Oh, there they all go, dashing off. Stampeding like a comfort break. Please be careful, flicking the pages like that, I’m getting a draught in here. And stay away from Chapter Nine, if you happen across it. All in good time, as the old fool himself would probably say.
Ah, here you all are, back again. Splendid.
One last warning before we resume. As you will have seen, at the end of the last chapter, we are now entering the area of the narrative where more than one iteration of the Doctor is active simultaneously. Now it is common among students such as yourselves to refer to the Doctors by number—the seventh Doctor, say, or the third Doctor—but of course he never does this himself. The Doctor thinks of himself only as the Doctor, whatever face he’s wearing, so these papers can only refer to him that way—even when there is more than one Doctor present in a given sequence. To clarify: you are about to read material where multiple participants have the same name and are the same person, and it will be up to you to work out which one is talking or being talked about from the contextual evidence.
So please pay close attention, as we proceed to the next of the Doctor Papers, Chapter Twelve, The Leap of the Doctor.
Chapter 12
The Leap of the Doctor
‘That’s impossible,’ Clara Oswald was saying. ‘How’s it doing that?’ She had stepped forward to the painting, and now raised a hand to touch its surface. ‘It’s an oil painting,’ she continued, ‘in 3D!’
I pulled myself together to answer her. ‘Time Lord art,’ said the Doctor, straightening his bow tie. ‘Bigger on the inside, a slice of real time, frozen.’
She was rocking from side to side in front of the picture, watching the buildings turn against the glowering sky. It was like looking down on a burning city, through a window—but the flames were frozen, and the window stood on an easel in the middle of a room. ‘You don’t even need those funny glasses,’ she marvelled.
‘He was there,’ said the Doctor.
‘Who was there?’
‘Me.’
Clara looked at him. ‘Doctor?’
‘The other me. The one I don’t talk about.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Clara, and glanced at Kate.
‘You’re not being clear, Doctor,’ said Kate. ‘Are you referring to yourself or someone else?’
Yeah, easy question, if you’re a tiny little human with a ten-minute life span and one face. He felt himself recoil from his own anger. Where had that come from him? He’d closed the door on all that rage a very long time ago. Keep it calm and clear, Doctor!
‘I’ve had many faces,’ he explained, ‘many lives.’
Kate nodded. ‘Yes, I know, we all know that. Regeneration. You have had a number of forms and faces.’
‘Lives,’ he insisted. ‘But I don’t admit to all of them. There’s one life, one face, I’ve tried very hard to forget.’
There was a squeak from the side of the room. He glanced round. The girl in the long scarf was staring at him in what looked like panic.
‘Yes, well, my colleague here is the expert on your faces,’ said Kate. ‘She’s become quite obsessed about numbering them, so if you’re about to pop a new one in, I think she’d have preferred to know before she got the tattoos.’
The girl went as red as a Zygon, and she looked so quickly at the floor the Doctor wondered if the rush of blood to her face had toppled her head forwards.
Zygons? Why was he thinking about Zygons?
‘Okay,’ Clara was saying, the brisk schoolteacher again. ‘So this is a painting of the Time War, and you were there with a different face—you’ve told me the story, I know what you did—but it was ages ago. Why’s this coming up now? Why have we been brought here to look at a painting?’
Ages ago! despaired the Doctor. Oh, Clara! When you’re a time traveller, nothing is ever ages ago.
‘We didn’t,’ Kate was replying. ‘The painting serves only as Elizabeth’s credentials. Proof that the letter is indeed from her. It’s not why you’re here.’
The Doctor had almost forgotten the envelope in his hand. He looked at it—the stiff, dusty paper, the ancient wax seal. Elizabeth! How had he left it with her? He had a vague sense that he hadn’t behaved well, and that she was probably cross with him. He had bumped into her much older self at the Globe Theatre once, and she’d attempted to have him killed. But then that wasn’t a first for her, and in truth a lot of his old friends did that when he called round. Winston Churchill had personally dug a pit for him, but then he loved a bit of gardening.
He ripped open the envelope, and unfolded the letter. Her handwriting was as clear and firm as the level blue gaze in his memory.
By order of HM Queen Elizabeth.
My dearest love, I hope the painting known as Gallifrey Falls will serve as proof that it is your Elizabeth who writes to you now. You will recall that you pledged yourself to me as a protector of my Kingdom. It is in this capacity that I have appointed you as Curator of the Under Gallery, where deadly danger to England is locked away. Should any disturbance occur within its walls, it is my wish that you be summoned. God speed, gentle husband.
He quickly folded the letter away before Clara could read the last word. Husband? He’d always had a vague sense that he’d probably married Elizabeth at some point, but it had been a busy life, and he was bit unsure as to why or when. He wondered if it was a happy marriage, but then realised the chances were slim, given that he hadn’t seen her for several centuries, and she was dead.
He looked to Kate. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Easier to show you,’ she said. She nodded to the soldiers standing guard on the painting, and started to lead the way out of the room. Clara was already following her, and as the Doctor turned to do the same, he noticed another of the UNIT personnel—a scientist, going by the white coat—frowning in puzzlement at the screen of his mobile phone. Clearly he’d just answered it, and now seemed to be staring in disbelief at the caller ID. The Doctor would barely have registered this, if the scientist hadn’t then looked up directly into his face, stared at him for a moment in seeming shock, before turning quickly away. As the Doctor headed after the others, he heard the scientist talking into his phone. His voice was low and urgent, with a faint Irish accent, but it carried down the long, cavernous corridor: ‘But that’s not possible, sir,’ came the scientist’s voice. ‘He’s right here.’
‘I’m a schoolteacher,’ said Clara, suddenly crashing across his thoughts, as usual.
‘I know. I know that. Did I know that? I’m sure I knew that.’
‘I’m good at reading handwriting. Even upside down.’
‘Good, great, I’m glad you shared that. So long as we’re discussing rare skill sets, when it comes to the pogo stick—’
‘Husband!’ said Clara.
Oh! thought the Doctor. They walked along in silence for a moment, but he knew she wouldn’t let it lie.
‘Husband,’ she repeated. ‘Queen Elizabeth the First called you husband.’
‘Yeah, she did, didn’t she? I think that’s probably just a term of affection sometimes.’
‘No, it absolutely never is. Not even in marriages. Are you married?’
‘I may have been. I’ve been around a bit, Clara, I’m probably married to lots of people, it happens,’ he said, and made a dismissive hand gesture, to suggest that the occasional marriage was really no more than a parking ticket, and a moment later heard a vase smash behind him. He really had to get his peripheral movements under control.
‘But to her, though?’
‘Oh, to her, to him, to who-knows. Sometimes the conversation just gets out of control. I think I’m even married to Jack Harkness, but there were a lot of people in the room at the time, it was hard to keep track.’<
br />
‘Jack who?’
‘He’ll get around to you.’
Ahead of them, Kate was opening a pair of doors and, as she stood aside to wave them in, the Doctor found himself coming to a halt. Whatever he had expected to see in the room, it hadn’t been this.
The eyes were as lethal and blue as ever, the hair still a tangle of red, and she hadn’t aged a day. The smile he’d known so well wasn’t there, but looked as though it might arrive any second, and as usual, she wasn’t giving anything away. He straightened his bow tie, sent a silent message to his quiff to behave itself, and took a moment to shine his shoes on the backs of his trouser legs, as he had always done when entering the presence of his wife, Elizabeth I of England.
‘Is that her?’ Clara was asking. Usually she had no sense of occasion, but this time she had the decency to whisper. He contained himself to a brisk little nod. ‘Who’s the skinny bloke?’
In the shadows behind Elizabeth, stood a youngish, sharply featured man who seemed somehow familiar. There was a look of presumption about his eyes that annoyed the Doctor intensely, so he sent what he hoped was a very similar look right back.
Kate had stepped forward. She now reached across the Queen, clicked something behind the frame, and Elizabeth and the skinny stranger swung out of sight as the whole painting hinged open like a door.
Cold air and the smell of damp stone spilled from behind the painting, and the room seemed to darken, as if the light was being drained into the open doorway that was now revealed. Just visible was the beginning of a stone staircase leading sharply down, into the distant glimmer of torchlight.
‘Welcome,’ Kate said, ‘to the Under Gallery.’
‘The what?’ Clara asked.
‘In the reign of Elizabeth the First, certain artworks were deemed too dangerous for public display.’
‘Nothing changes,’ said Clara. ‘People always lock up art.’
Kate had passed them both electric torches, and now clicked on one of her own. ‘In the case of this particular gallery, they had a reason,’ she said, stepping into the dark. ‘They had to stop it getting out.’
‘The universe was born alive,’ said the Doctor, answering Clara’s question, as they crunched down the second flight of stone steps, ‘but it could only become aware of itself by developing sensors across its surface, known as life forms—that’s us—each of which suffers a temporary delusion of separate identity during data collection—that’s what we call consciousness—but in reality has no more individual existence than the hairs on your forearm when they tell you there’s a draught—’
‘I was asking,’ said Clara, as they descended yet more steps, ‘about you and Elizabeth.’
‘You said begin at the beginning.’
‘Not the beginning of the universe.’
‘You didn’t specify.’
‘You’re just trying to waste time. You’re avoiding the subject.’
‘Ah, that’s exactly where you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘You can’t waste time, because the passage of time is an illusion caused by the permanent discrepancy between your memory and your circumstances across all the simultaneously experienced moments of your life. Is that noise bothering anyone else?’
‘What noise?’ Kate asked, turning from in front of them. But the Doctor just frowned and shook his head, and they began crunching down the steps to the next level.
Each deeper layer of the Under Gallery seemed darker and colder than the one before. As they descended, it became clear that the purpose of this place was not display but containment. All the statues were bound and sheeted—the muffled shapes of reaching hands and straining faces looming in their torch beams—and the paintings were all hung face to the wall, some with warnings printed on the back. One of them read, DO NOT TURN WHILE ALONE. Everywhere there were glass-fronted cabinets, tall as wardrobes, with bars and padlocks. Clara had shone her torch in a few of them. In one she saw racks of green daggers whose blades seemed to reflect her eyes back at her whatever angle she was looking from. In another there were rows of skulls that looked human but each with only one central eye socket above the grinning teeth. There were shelves of thick, bulging books bound shut with twine, a few with nails driven into the spines and dark stains crusting round the punctures. She looked in a mirror that only showed the back of her head, and as she turned away from it, sensed her own face in the glass turning to watch her go. Suddenly in her torch beam, there was a cabinet crammed to bursting with mummified rats, their claws and teeth splayed against the glass doors. As she recoiled a step, the rat mass seemed to twitch.
They descended another staircase, and she noticed more and more of the cabinets stood open and empty, as if they’d been ransacked.
‘Some of the stuff has been moved elsewhere,’ explained Kate.
‘Where?’ asked Clara, flashing her torch across a few of them. There was a letter B chalked on the door of every emptied cabinet.
‘And by whose authority?’ added the Doctor.
‘The Curator.’
‘I thought I was the Curator.’
‘It’s complicated. You’re never here, the job had to be split.’
‘Among whom?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Really,’ protested the Doctor, ‘is that noise not bothering anyone else?’
‘Well perhaps if you told us what noise?’ said Clara. ‘Or alternatively, what you were up to with Elizabeth the First, and why she calls you husband.’
He came to a halt, looked at them impatiently for a moment, then started walking on the spot. Crunch, crunch, crunch. ‘The crunching. The crunchy crunch-crunching. Can’t anyone else hear crunching?’ He directed his torch beam at the floor. ‘Forgive an enquiring mind,’ he said, ‘but what have we been walking in?’
In the light of their torches, they saw that the floor was covered with what looked grit or sand. Kate sighed. ‘Well I’m terribly sorry if our housekeeping isn’t up to your standards, Doctor …’
‘That’s the thing about being a curator, you can’t turn your back for a minute.’ The Doctor was kneeling on the floor now, running a handful of grit, through his fingers. ‘Dust,’ he mused. ‘Dust made of stone.’
‘You mean sand,’ said Clara.
‘Stone dust. Dust, or powder, composed entirely of tiny particles of different varieties of rock.’
‘Yeah, sand.’
‘Sand!’ declared the Doctor, as if he’d just invented the word.
‘Do you think it’s important?’ Kate asked.
‘Dunno. But in twelve hundred years, I’ve never stepped in anything that wasn’t.’ He licked a little of the grit from his finger, sloshed it round his mouth, then tried a little more.
‘Can you tell something from the taste?’ asked Clara.
‘No, just peckish.’ He straightened up, flashed his torch beam behind him. The girl in the long scarf startled back from the light. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Are you sciencey or soldiery?’
Self-consciously, she straightened her white coat. ‘Yes,’ she husked, and the Doctor thought if her eyes got any wider, they would fill the lenses of her spectacles.
‘She’s science,’ said Kate from behind him. ‘And she’s brilliant.’
‘Good, science and brilliant are my favourite words. Do you have a name?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Great, I’ve always wanted to meet someone called Yes, that’s also my favourite word. If your name is already Yes, it’s going to save a lot of time when I make suggestions.’
‘Her name is Osgood, her IQ is through the roof, and if you patronise her again I will cut you off at the bow tie,’ said Kate.
‘Osgood is now my new favourite word. Osgood, could you get this stone dust analysed. Tell me what it’s made of, tell me everything.’
‘Yes!’ she said, before adding, ‘Yes!’ and then, ‘Yes!’
‘I can see why they call you that.’
‘Doctor!’ warned Kate, then turned to Osgood.
‘Get a team here, fast as you can, analyse the stone dust, sand, whatever it is.’
‘Yes,’ said Osgood, still staring at the Doctor. She was taking big whooping breaths, which bounced the spectacles on her nose, and the Doctor found himself pleasantly reminded of the TARDIS engines.
‘Inhaler!’ snapped Kate.
Osgood jammed her inhaler in her mouth, and hurried off, back the way she’d come.
The Doctor watched her disappear into the shadows, wondering why he made her so nervous, and if there was anything he could say to relax her. ‘Great to meet you, Osgood!’ he called after her, in his most reassuring voice. ‘I’d love to see your tattoos some time!’
There was a squeak from the darkness, and the crash of a collision.
‘This way,’ said Kate, with the determined calm of a woman who had successfully not punched someone. ‘We’re nearly there.’
‘Nearly where?’ asked the Doctor as he and Clara followed.
‘This is the deepest level. Most of the stuff above was added later. Some of it is nonsense—fairground hoaxes, a lot of it, and some frankly lunatic attempts at censorship.’ They had rounded a corner, and Kate was now shining her torch on what looked like a bank vault door, which stood slightly ajar, slicing a wedge of yellow light across the floor. ‘But down here is the original purpose of Elizabeth’s Under Gallery.’
‘Hence the updated security?’ asked Clara.
‘Quite so. The maintenance of the seal on this door, in all its incarnations down the centuries, is the longest-standing executive order in England. It was guarded throughout the London Blitz by an entire platoon of soldiers, permanently stationed here.’
Clara frowned. ‘So why’s it open?’
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