Hercule and the Doctor

by Christopher Ruz Hayes-Kossmann

  "There were muddy footprints, big, man-prints. One of the neighbours saw a car. A blue rover. And some men, said they looked like immigrants. So they gave up on the house. I guess they'd call Interpol these days. Hunt for sex traffickers. All they did back then was knock on doors. Never found anything." I thought about what would have happened if the Doctor had been with me that day. We'd we have chased them down in the TARDIS, de-materialised their car. The kidnappers would've been Autons operating under commands from a nearby plastic consciousness. Or Sontarans collecting intelligence prior to a planet-wide invasion. Or robotic mummies directed by the malevolent god Sutekh, scouting a new location in which to hide their rotten master, and they'd taken Liz as collateral...

  Steve followed me into the bedrooms. A four-poster squatted beneath a plastic sheet. A closet in the corner draped in white, the hatstand like a solitary ghost. A painting on the wall of a placid stream winding through proper English countryside.

  Steve said, "Why didn't they tear this place down?"

  "Family history? It's hard to let go of grand things." The bathrooms were grey with dust. A skylight choked with leaves, a cracked porcelain tub. Wrought iron valves in the shape of children's hands. I imagined them grasping back, and shivered. "This is no place for a modern gentleman."

  "You really like the detective thing, eh?"

  "It grew on me."

  "Yeah. I understand. Like this." Steve tipped an imaginary hat. "Not like I wouldn't give my left nut to be any of the Doctors, but Baker just tickled me right. He always looked like a kid on a trip to the zoo, you know? Everything was exciting. Pertwee always had something up his arse and Davison was a boy scout, but Baker..." He sighed. "I met Baker once, you know."

  "What was he like?"

  "Angry. Pissed off at everything he wasn't." Steve kicked a suitcase and it slid away into the farthest corner of the bathroom. "Where else then? The basement?"

  I remembered those voices in the depths. But that was years ago, and anyone waiting down there was long gone or dead themselves.

  "Basement."

  We crept back down the coiled staircase, across the detritus of bongs and used condoms, to the little green door. It wasn't locked, but a thick patina of dust coated the doorknob; even the local teenagers had better sense than to descend into that darkness. I waved my penlight at the shadows. Wine-crates shattered into kindling, a pile of paperbacks gorged on mildew until they'd inflated like the hairless bellies of dead rats.

  Steve stopped at the top of the stairs. "Do we have to?"

  "I didn't know the Doctor was afraid of the dark."

  "Piss off, Poirot never was either."

  "Poirot holidays on the Nile and drinks blackcurrant cassis. He does not poke around in the dark and the dusty." But something else held me back. The memory of a small boy caught on the cusp of those stairs, and the banging below of angry men.

  "Would you hurry up? My fingers are dropping off."

  The stairs made sad keening noises beneath my weight. I swept the beam over the swollen paperbacks, the empty cupboard with the brass handles, the sink eaten through at the bottom with rust. Steve yanked the cupboard open and threw a hand over his mouth in disgust. I peered over his shoulder; a cluster of greedy black eyes stared back. Mice had built a nest in the scraps of a faded denim jacket, and now they chittered, pink worm-tails flicking to and fro.

  He slammed the door shut. "This is crazy. I'm going."

  "Give me a minute. Just one."

  "What do you want from me?"

  In the dim glow of the penlight Steve was looking less and less like the Tom Baker of my memories and more like another flaccid actor in a borrowed coat and home-made scarf. "A minute. That's all."

  Steve eyed me with something between pity and disgust. "Christ. Hurry it up, then."

  I skirted the basement, kicking over empty aluminium cans. I peered into the crawlspace beneath the stairs. Concrete slab and low plastic pipes. The crawlspace extended three or four meters back before ending in a pile of red brick. The police had looked here. They'd shouted Liz's name into the darkness.

  And yet, something called to me.

  I crouched low and stuck my head into the crawlspace. "Hello?" My own voice came back, echoing strangely, as if reverberating off panes of ice. "Liz?"

  Behind me, Steve said, "Mate, I'm going-"

  I don't know why I did it. Perhaps I knew that, if I resisted the pull, I'd regret it as much as I'd regretted running out of the house all those years ago.

  Belly pressed flat against the concrete slab, I left Steve behind and wriggled beneath the stairs.

  The dust made my nose itch, and I sneezed so hard that tears sprang to my eyes. I could see barely a foot ahead; the penlight beam was a tiny circle the size of a pound coin, playing over red bricks spilling mortar like moss. I passed a spiderweb big enough to snare a dog, threads slick and glistening. Pebbles skittered under my palms. I whispered, "Hello?"

  No reply. The crawlspace went on. The ceiling was so low that even when I wriggled on my belly the bricks scratched my spine. Could Liz have gotten this far, scared little girl that she was? The light shook in my fist. Dust fell in my eyes and in my hair. A spider skittered over my ear and I almost screamed. Far behind me, dimly, Steve said, "You coming out?"

  The light hit a tumble of bricks. A section of the foundations had collapsed, blocking the crawlspace. This was as far as the police had gone, all those years ago. I was about to back out when something beyond the rubble caught my eye. A flash of aluminium? "Hold on," I called. With the penlight gripped between my teeth I moved the debris aside brick by brick. It took a long time.

  There was something behind. A small chamber beneath the stairs, lightless and dry.

  I shuffled on, my trousers catching on the stone. A button popped from my shirt and vanished into the gloom. An inch further, one more, and I was through the heating tunnel and into that brick chamber. I stood, knees popping, took a deep breath of that stale crypt air, and passed my torch-beam across the walls.

  I saw.

  No. I couldn't. It was too much. I turned away and let the penlight play over the tiny chamber, the sloping dirt walls, rattling pipes running the length of the ceiling. How long had this room been forgotten? And she'd been waiting all this time, nobody daring to find her and help her...

  "I should have brought him before," I whispered. "I'm sorry. The Doctor would've fixed it. He always fixes it."

  The guilt was too much. I wanted to scream, to tear my hair, to beat my fists bloody on the concrete. Instead, I wiped my eyes and got ready to back out of the chamber.

  Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw the shimmers.

  Against the brick was a flash of black on black. Not an illusion, or a reflection of the pen-light on exposed wiring. It was a doorway hanging in the air, just tall enough for a man to crawl through. And on the other side...

  The Doctor said, "Don't touch it."

  I spun. I hadn't heard him enter, but there he was, so huge and bright he seemed to fill the room. His smile was perfect and his hat was floppy and I could sense every one of his many centuries lingering behind his old, dark eyes.

  This wasn't Steve any more. This was the Doctor of my dreams.

  He fluffed out his coat and threw his scarf over his shoulder and drew out his sonic screwdriver, and it hummed as he played it over the doorway. "Time gate," he said. "In flux. Left behind centuries ago, I'd wager, and somehow it's come to rest in... nineteen seventy eight."

  I inhaled sharply. "The year Elizabeth vanished."

  "Of course. Perhaps she crawled in here playing hide and seek. The ceiling collapsed behind her and there was nowhere to go but through. And where she'll end up..." The Doctor shook his head. "Poor, scared girl."

  "Could we go back?"

  "Goodness, no. We'd be crossing our own time-line."

  "You could go alone."

  "Mister Poirot, I just said-"

  "Have you been to Manchester before? In nin
eteen seventy-eight?"

  The Doctor shook his head.

  "So what'll you be crossing?"

  He smiled weakly, showing the gap between his front teeth. "Physics?"

  "Doctor," I said. "Please."

  "Well," he said, stroking his chin. "If you stepped through, you could emerge anywhere. Anywhen. But I suppose I could modulate the stream. You'll emerge at the last point of connection. Probably nineteen seventy eight, probably somewhere in the house. But who knows? Time gates wobble. It might spit you out into space."

  "I must try, at least."

  The Doctor nodded. "I admire that, Mister Poirot. Well. Shall we go together?"

  I nodded. The Doctor aimed his screwdriver at the gulf of black, and something in that abyss shuddered and froze. Side by side, the Doctor and I stepped into the portal.

  The world fluttered. Flashes of light and not-light. The walls bent around us, and the ground beneath our feet lifted and spun. I clung to the Doctor's arm and he whooped and laughed with his scarf flapping around his head, and then everything jerked to a stop and I found myself falling.

  We'd appeared at the top of the basement stairs and I didn't have time to catch myself. We tumbled together, the Doctor's scarf tangling around my arms and his heel catching me in the cheek. Then we hit the ground, and I disentangled myself, feeling my chest for breaks and bruises. "Anywhere and anywhen, but not on solid ground?"

  The Doctor groaned. "Time travel is not an exact science, detective."

  "When are we, then?" I hadn't seen much of the basement when I was eleven, but it seemed much the same. Empty wine crates in one corner, the tarpaulin beneath them heaped with dirt. A broken vase, a scattering of mouse droppings. The same pile of paperbacks, corners yellowed but still stacked flat. Everything as it had been five minutes before, but twenty years younger.

  "I think, detective," the Doctor said, "that we arrived just in time."

  He pointed. Pressed into the farthest corner, no more than a shadow against shadows, was a girl in a plaid dress. Her hair was tied up in a single dirty ponytail. A spiderweb was plastered over her nose and brow. Her eyes were wide and terrified.

  I froze, as if confronted by a startled doe in a country lane. Slowly, I went down on one knee and reached out to her. "Elizabeth? Is that you?"

  Liz gathered up her dress in her tiny fists, and I remembered how scared she'd always been. It was easier to remember her as an irritation clinging fast to my arm than a shrinking eight-year-old girl, following me not out of spite but loyalty.

  I swallowed hard. "I'm from the police, little one. My name-"

  She turned and ran, and I called her name, but she was too quick, scurrying into the crawlspace beneath the stairs. The Doctor was close behind, shouting, "Grab her!" My fingers closed around her ankle, but she pulled free, and was gone into the black.

  I cursed beneath my breath and peered into the crawlspace. "Elizabeth? Please..."

  The Doctor rested a hand on my shoulder. "You can't win every time, Detective."

  I clenched my hands into pudgy fists. "I could go after her."

  "And then? That time gate could spit you out anywhere. And would she know you, trust you? She'll be just as scared with you as without."

  "Can you bring her back?"

  The Doctor shook his head.

  "So she goes alone, again. She flies through time to God knows where and the children hear her crying for a hundred years. Is that the best we can do?"

  "I don't have all the answers. I'm a Timelord, not a master detective. Isn't this what you're best at?"

  I nodded slowly, pinching my moustache between thumb and forefinger. "It is a tricky question, and one that Poirot has never seen before. But there is always a solution, for he that is prepared to look, no?"

  From overhead came a creak of hinges.

  I looked up to the head of the stairs, where a small boy stood silhouetted against the evening light, and I knew what I had to do.

  "Harold?" I waved to the boy, smiling. "Hello? I am Detective Poirot, from Belgium. You may have heard of me? Your sister, she is stuck. I would get her out, but you see, I wouldn't fit, and my colleague..."

  The boy at the top of the stairs, that boy that once was me, looked at the Doctor with his jaw hanging low. "You-"

  "Yes," the Doctor said. He knew the game. "And now we need you to be brave, and fetch your sister out. You're a brave boy, aren't you? Here." He took the white paper bag from inside the dusty folds of his coat. "She likes jellybabies, doesn't she? Go on, take them."

  The boy crept down the stairs, clinging tight to the railing. He stood before the Doctor in stunned silence, and the Doctor placed the bag in his hand and closed his fingers tight around it.

  "She's waiting. Don't come out until you've found her."

  He hesitated at the entrance to the crawlspace, and looked back at us both for confirmation, eyes shining with tears, but in the end the boy went, the bag of jellybabies crushed in his little fist. I heard him coughing, and then the sound of brick shifting, and then nothing.

  I counted to five hundred, then knelt to peer into the shadows. He was gone.

  The Doctor rested a hand on my shoulder. "I don't know whether that was the right thing, Detective. But it's done."

  "Where will they go?"

  "There are things even I don't know. Wherever it is, they go together. Is there any better friend for a lost little girl than her brother?"

  He led me up the stairs. My hands were numb on the railing. We stood together by the basement door, and the Doctor waved his sonic screwdriver, muttering, "Somewhere here, yes, a little to the left, yes, thankyou. The residue of our time gate is still here. If I can tune it right-"

  The world lurched, and ten thousand days ripped past, and I felt hungry and lightheaded and nauseous for one glorious moment and then we were back, in the dark space beneath the stairs. I took a deep breath and sneezed, twice. I still held my little torch. The circle of light it cast was dim and getting dimmer.

  The Doctor hunched over to keep his head from knocking on the ceiling in that tiny room. He said, "Job well done, Detective."

  "And you, Doctor."

  He shook my hand. "Tell nobody."

  "Who would believe me?"

  The Doctor winked, and tipped his hat, and was gone. I was alone.

  I backed out of the crawlspace in a contrail of dust and spiderwebs, replaced the bricks, blocked off the entrance to the tomb, shuffled further, and emerged into the basement. I blinked, wheezed, beat my hands on my torn dress pants and sent up cumulus clouds of grit.

  Steve stood at the foot of the stairs, licking his lips. He tugged the ends of his many-coloured scarf and shuffled his feet. "Christ," he said, "you were in there long enough. Find anything?"

  I patted my pockets, looking for a cigarette, but all I had was my prop pipe. It was flimsy and weightless in my hands.

  * * *

  I didn't see Steve again. We exchanged numbers outside the Bonehouse, and he said, "I hope you figure it out some day. I hope she turns up." I nodded, and said to call if he wanted to get another drink. He never did.

  Our production of Alibi closed after a week. The audiences grew thin, and my heart wasn't in the lines.

  I went back to the Bonehouse, a month after I'd met the Doctor. I sat on the pavement outside and smoked a slow cigarette and watched the windows for any sign of movement. There was none. The place was as dead as it had ever been.

  I thought of the dessicated thing hidden in that tiny room, Liz curled up like she was sleeping, skin drawn tight, the silver bracelet still winking on her wrist. I imagined her last moments in that dark space; the bricks crumbling behind her, the air growing thin as she panicked. Probably unconscious before the police arrived. They flashed their lights into the crawlspace and saw only brick. They called and she never replied.

  I put her out of my mind. That was a different girl now, a different fiction. My sister wasn't dead and dried. I'd sent her to strange places with
the only companion she ever truly knew or loved. I'd given her an adventure.

  The wind whipped around the eaves and tore shingles from the roof. I waited to hear a little girl on the edge of the world call my name but wherever she was, she was silent, and had no need of me.

  Other Titles by Christopher Ruz

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