by Jenny Colgan
‘They let you out,’ said Etienne sourly.
‘Here is everything you need. You will protect the drawbridge: the skeletons have done their duty well. You may build your little worlds, Etienne, on your computers; you can play in a virtual world till your heart’s content, but you must never see sunlight again. I will deadlock seal this room.’
‘Nooo!’ said Etienne, tears now mingling with the sweat pouring down his face, his eyes darting all around looking for an escape route.
‘You can take the drawbridge of course…’
Etienne shook his head frantically. ‘No. No no no no.’
‘Then we understand each other,’ said the Doctor. ‘Build virtual worlds of suffering. This one can no longer contain you.’
He moved over and spoke quietly to the skeletons piled by the drawbridge. They rattled once, twice. The Doctor understood. He took out the remote control and, with a consoling hand on the uppermost skull, gently powered it down until they were, once more, simple piles of bones. Etienne, screaming in disbelief, followed it with his eyes, and the rest of them as they filed out, leaving him alone.
*
Outside, it didn’t take much; a simple act of the sonic screwdriver to deadlock the door for ever. They could hear Etienne inside, cursing and yelling and screaming and banging on it; a toddler in a rage.
‘But what about the… the tree,’ said Clara, whose memories of exactly what had gone on were hazy and muddled. ‘Isn’t it round the back of the house?’
‘Go look,’ said the Doctor, and Clara did, even though it was dark and freezing and once more the empty, horrible windswept plain of before – and remained so, all the way around.
‘Where is it?’ she asked.
‘Through his drawbridge, in that room,’ said the Doctor. ‘He always controlled the portal.’
‘And won’t he go through it?’
‘He knows exactly what will happen if he does,’ said the Doctor. ‘The instant he takes a bite of that apple, the cold wind will blow and the sun will disappear and his mind will be full of the knowledge of a universe of pain and suffering and death, and he will have to live inside that mind a long, long time.’
He picked up one of the many loose pebbles then, and hurled it with some force at the horizon. This time, nothing rattled.
‘Is that what you have?’ Clara asked timidly.
He turned to her with a half-smile. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘When you gain knowledge for yourself… when you see the universe and learn about its good and its bad… you get the fairy in the bottom of the box too. You see the whole picture, not just… the entropic chronicle of perpetuity.’
Clara was still thoughtful as they stepped out in the moonlight. ‘Doctor…’ she said nervously. ‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘Oh, I expect the Shadow Proclamation have been looking for him for a long time.’ He stared back at the house, shaking his head.
‘And, er, how are we going to get off this planet?’
The Doctor gave her a gentle smile. ‘Very, very slowly and with great care.’
*
The Doctor was true to his word. First he gathered all of the remaining skeletons together. Then he sent them out with all the seedlings, to disseminate throughout the planet. He brought the bees and birds out of hyper-sleep and sent them forward to pollinate the seed, and recalibrated the weather centre to give them hyper-fast growing seasons, which meant it was rainy and sunny every five minutes it seemed to Clara, mostly wet.
Every time he emptied out a room, they dismantled the bones and buried them far and wide so they could fertilise the earth, until there were only two rooms left standing; Etienne’s, which they gave a wide berth (it had gone very quiet: the Doctor suspected that Etienne had gone straight back into eating and playing with computers and wasn’t necessarily having a much different experience to his life before, except now he was doing it virtually), and the library, tidied up, as a shelter from the rainfall.
The rain washed away the scree, and extraordinarily fast the plants began to sprout and take hold, spread about like a desert after rain. They grew up thick and fast. Some Clara had seen before: huge, sprawling bushes of bougainvillea, in thick pinks and purples, bright and popping against the pale blue sky between showers; willows that followed the rivulets of water; sunflowers that sprang up overnight and followed the path of the sun, a banana plantation the Doctor had insisted on. And others she didn’t recognise; great yawning bushes that looked like sea anemones; flame-coloured trees in bright red. Every day the landscaped changed; the scents strong on the gentle morning breeze. Vines grew up and wrapped themselves around the two remaining rooms, almost concealing their grisly origins.
*
Clara sat shelling peas and glanced over at the Doctor, who had taken off his jacket in the sunshine, turned up his sleeves, and was whittling. He was humming a cheerful song of contentment as he did so. A light breeze was ruffling his hair, and she smiled involuntarily as she watched him. He looked up just at that moment and caught her eye and smiled back.
‘What?’
Clara shook her head. ‘It’s just… I can’t believe how peaceful it is here now.’
He held her gaze for a long moment. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But we have to move on.’
She nodded.
‘And you…’ he said. ‘When I was in your head…’
Even though her memories were confused, she remembered glimpses; her inexplicable fury at the ravine, and her sense of him: of pity and of shame.
‘Do you still feel like that?’ he persisted, obviously uncomfortable with the conversation. ‘About me, you know. About what we do. I mean, because, for me. Well. You know. Surprise! Ha!’
Clara picked her words carefully. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, truthfully. ‘Sometimes I feel that things are too hard. And sometimes I feel brave as a lion. But I don’t know why. It’s like a dream I had once, that’s just out of reach… but it’s always with me.’
‘Because I can’t… I can’t be a burden.’
Clara looked at him in surprise. ‘But burdens can be shared,’ she said gently. ‘And I am… I am…’
They were interrupted suddenly by one of the taller skeletons. The Doctor had found old identity passes and names scattered about one of the rooms, but there were so many, so many, and they had not been able to give anyone a name, or a grave.
The adult skeleton before them held up his finger to indicate that he wanted to talk, and the Doctor nodded. Clara came over to watch, as the ash scattered on the ground.
‘O-N-E-T-H-I-N-G,’ it said. ‘T-H-E-N-G-O.’
The Doctor nodded respectfully. ‘Of course,’ he said. He took the skeleton’s claw in his and held it carefully. ‘Thank you.’
The skull nodded.
‘What?’ said Clara.
‘Time to leave,’ said the Doctor.
*
The Doctor made final adjustments to the weather station to set it on a smooth path; tidied up carefully, glanced not even once at the locked bone room sitting solitary.
‘Why didn’t they destroy this planet?’ said Clara, as they started to move, following the long marching line of remaining skeletons, who travelled ahead. ‘To have all the knowledge in the universe concentrated in such a small way. It’s so dangerous. Any life form that takes it… it’s dangerous for everyone. Wouldn’t it be better just to destroy it?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly. ‘There may come a day when the universe needs that knowledge, when everybody needs it.’
‘Who put it there?’ said Clara.
‘Oh, it has always been there,’ said the Doctor. ‘And I was just the unutterable, awful fool who told somebody.’
Clara patted his hand. ‘But look at it now,’ she said, indicating around them. The fresh earth and new moss was soft under her bare feet. The tangle of growth meant the world was a riot of green and cherry blossom; long avenues of new fruit trees, some flowering, some alread
y dropping fruit, like all the seasons come at once.
‘This you can have,’ said the Doctor, handing her an apple, green and red. It was sweet and sharp all at once and its juices ran down her chin. ‘Anyone that lands here now… I hope there will be so many orchards, they won’t find that one in a hurry.’
‘That’s amazing,’ she said, looking round. ‘But what about all the monsters?’
The Doctor took Etienne’s controller from his pocket. ‘Quite handy having monsters you can turn on and off at will,’ he said. ‘Wish they were all like that. But there was only one monster, really.’
‘And the big snakes?’
‘Oh, they’re real,’ said the Doctor. ‘But hopefully now we’ve established an ecosystem, they’ll be able to survive in it without being half-starved to death and furious.’
‘Hopefully,’ said Clara, still eyeing the trees with some nervousness. But all she could see were brilliant parrots flitting from branch to branch and, from far off, something that sounded a little like the chattering of a monkey.
‘You brought monkeys?’
‘Come on,’ said the Doctor. ‘You don’t grow this many bananas without letting in a few monkeys. That’d just be selfish.’
Finally they reached the large crevasse again that split the world in two, but it was unrecognisable. Now, a massive waterfall, formed from all the rainfall, fell over the side, a rainbow prism dancing off it. Below were fresh waters churning and bouncing, and Clara thought she saw a trout leap high in the sunlight.
The Doctor nodded to the skeleton, who moved forward and, with one superhuman jump, the white lights of the Carnutium filament flickering up and down his frame, landed on the other side. Then another, and another. And they joined hand to foot, and on the near side, the other skeletons joined, hand to foot, then, astonishingly, one figure staying on either side as an anchor, the two sides swung like trapeze artists, until they caught and held hands, and made a bridge.
‘Oh my,’ said Clara.
‘Amazing stuff, Carnutium filament,’ said the Doctor. ‘He was a clever, clever chap indeed. Such a waste. But this is their last gift to us. And then we must set them free.’
The littlest skeleton was on the far side of the abyss, as the Doctor and Clara carefully picked their way across it. As he usually did, he ran to Clara for a cuddle, his mother not far behind.
Clara held him for a long time in her lap then stood up. ‘This is what you all want?’ she said.
The figures nodded, and those left behind on the far bank waved.
‘To return to the earth,’ said the Doctor. ‘Where good can be done.’
Clara bestowed one last kiss on the bare white skull. ‘Au revoir, mon bout-chou.’
Then the Doctor took the remote from his pocket, still glowing bright white, and hurled it with all his strength into the abyss. It fell so far that no one heard it hit the bottom, but instantly, as if someone had cut the strings, the bones all collapsed to the ground, and were still.
‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor, and Clara, too, nodded.
They covered what they could in fresh flowers as a burial mound, then continued on, through a beautiful avenue that now opened up through the forest, daisies and mushrooms and snowdrops flourishing at the roots, fresh green leaves on every twig and branch. Clara felt a movement in the branches to her right, but she did not turn her head. She did, though, take the Doctor’s hand.
The great expanses of sand had gone; instead, when they emerged from the forest, she saw they had been replaced by a wildflower meadow. Rabbits hopped through meadowsweet, sweet peas and waving daffodils. And straight across the plain, under a bower, Clara saw it, the TARDIS – the real, solid TARDIS; not an illusion this time, ringed round with newly sprung pink roses. She ran to it with a happy gasp, the Doctor very close behind her.
The Doctor plucked one of the beautiful blooms entwined around the door and, carefully, put it behind her ear. She flushed at his touch, then smiled.
‘Senorita!’ he said. ‘Shall we go somewhere awesome? With a name and everything?’
‘Heh. We should name this place.’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘We should not.’
Clara immediately plucked a rose of her own and, stretching up, tucked it behind his ear then put her hands on her hips and regarded the results with a disappointed expression.
‘Stick to hats?’ said the Doctor.
‘Definitely.’
‘Just as well I look so good in all the hats,’ he yelled, as he vanished inside the TARDIS.
Several minutes later he came back, with a small, heavy narrow replica of the TARDIS, about waist height, with a real telephone attached to it. Next to it was a sign that could be read in any language.
‘If you have crash-landed here, call this number. Advice and Assistance Obtainable Immediately.’
It looked incongruous in the beautiful meadow. But also somehow quite right. He disappeared back inside.
Clara peered after him, then turned around and glanced one last time at the buzzing, green, sunlit world around her, as a butterfly passed her by on its merry way, its cream wings fluttering happily.
‘I am… going to be fine,’ she said to herself. And she briefly touched once more the rose in her hair, then slipped inside the TARDIS herself as the butterfly rose on a zephyr in the suddenly empty air, and flew up again and again, higher than the greenest treetops.
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Published in 2014 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
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Copyright © Jenny T. Colgan 2014
Cover design: Two Associates © Woodlands Books Ltd 2014
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