Extraordinary - Chapter Six

It was snowing when the Doctor left the TARDIS. Big, soft flakes that drifted lazily down from the leaden skies and settled on his hair and eyelashes and shushed gently over the shoulders of his long, brown coat.

For a moment, he hesitated in the doorway of the time machine. Usually, he loved snow. But now, when he saw it, all he could think about were the icy white drifts that had been banked up against Captain Adelaide Brooke's house the night she took her own life.

Ironic, that falling snow would now always make him remember the dry, shifting red dust of the planet Mars and the people who had died there.

Staring across the street at the little antique shop, he forced the memory to the back of his mind, locking it away with all the other things in his past that he couldn't bear to examine too closely. Instead, he tried to imagine what Allie would say when he showed her her first supernova. Despite his previous misgivings, a warm feeling of anticipation rose up inside him at the thought of having her company in the TARDIS. It was always brilliant, starting out with a new companion, especially one who had never been into space before. He had so much to show her, so much knowledge and experience to share. And in return, he got to see it all afresh, through her eyes – to experience the miraculous wonder of the Universe all over again, the sheer joy of it serving to keep his encroaching darkness at bay.

And this time, he would do it right. If he persuaded Allie to come with him, he wouldn't lose her, like he had lost all the others. He wouldn't distort and destroy her life. This time it would be different. He would protect her and keep her safe, no matter what it took.

In the distance, the tolling of a bell interrupted his musing, and his shoulders tensed, thinking the cloister bell had started up again. But then he recognised that the sound was a carillon of church bells ringing out across the city. With a twinge of dismay, he realised that meant it was a Sunday morning. His own words to Donna, spoken not all that long ago in the Library, flashed through his mind: No, I never land on Sundays. Sundays are boring. For once, it seemed he had broken his own rule.

His hearts sank. The snow-covered streets were almost deserted. Chances were, Allie was probably still tucked up in bed at home and he had no idea of her address. Of course, it would be easy enough to find out. The TARDIS computers were extremely efficient at that kind of thing. But he wasn't sure she would appreciate him doing that. Humans got a bit funny about their privacy sometimes.

But then the door of the shop caught his eye. It was halfway ajar, which seemed odd on such a cold day. Obviously someone was about. And, unless the shop was in the process of being burgled, that someone could only be Allie. Perhaps she was in the back room and the front door had blown open.

He wandered across the street, whistling tunelessly, his hands buried deep in his pockets. Despite his relaxed appearance, all his senses were on high alert, focused on the doorway of Allie's shop. He wasn't sure exactly what he would do if there were burglars inside, but he'd cross that bridge when he came to it. He was confident he'd think of something, he always did.

However, before he reached the door, there was a loud roar behind him as a motorcycle swept into the curb, fishtailing slightly in the snow. The rider was wearing a dark, featureless helmet, a black leather jacket and torn blue jeans. Jumping off the bike, he pulled off the concealing helmet, revealing a tangle of shaggy blonde hair and an anxious-looking, unshaven face.

"Larry Nightingale, as I live and breathe!" the Doctor exclaimed in unaffected delight. "Long time, no see! So how's the novelty mug business treating you?"

"Doctor! Thank God you're here!" Larry blurted out, hurrying towards him. "Is she all right?"

A premonition of disaster trickled down the back of the Doctor's neck. "Is who all right?"

"Allison Castiel! Have you seen her?"

"Allie?" the Doctor repeated, not liking the urgency in the other man's voice. "No, I haven't seen her. Why wouldn't she be all right? What's going on?"

"She was on the phone to me and something cut her off, in mid-sentence!" Larry said. "I think the statue may have got her."

"The statue? What sta- " Abruptly, he broke off. "Never mind, tell me later."

Quickly, he pushed the door of the shop fully open and burst inside. "Allie? ALLIE! It's the Doctor! Where are you?"

But he received no reply. The room was completely empty. Nothing had been disturbed and the only thing he could see missing was the big terracotta warrior that had stood beside the sales counter. He hurried forward. Allie's keys were on top of the counter – he recognised the yellow smiley keyring from when he had visited earlier. And a low, steady beeping noise was coming from the phone, where the abandoned receiver hung down nearly to the floor, dangling loosely on its cord. There was no sign of Allie anywhere.

Worry tore at him, as he thrust open the door into the back room, still hoping he would find her there, even though every instinct was telling him he wouldn't. A quick exploration soon proved that she was nowhere on the premises.

"It's happened to her too, hasn't it? She's been sent back into the past, like Kathy."

The Doctor whirled around, to find Larry standing behind him. The young man's eyes were wide with shock, his face taut with horror.

"I think you'd better tell me exactly what's been happening."

"It's my fault!" Larry replied, an edge of hysteria creeping into his voice. "She was scared, she came to me for help, but I didn't do anything. And now she's gone!"

The Doctor gripped him by the arm and gave him a vigorous shake. "Listen to me, Larry. If I'm going to help her, I need to know what it was she was scared of. Now, focus, and tell me!"

"Right, right. Focus!" Larry closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to control his panic. "She came into my bookshop yesterday. She was terrified. She thought I might know how to contact you. There was this big statue, in her shop..."

"A terracotta warrior?" the Doctor cut in.

Larry nodded miserably. "Yeah, that's the one. Said she nicknamed it Charlie. Anyway, her ex-boyfriend got murdered the night before, and she had it in her head that the statue had something to do with it. She said she couldn't tell the police because they wouldn't believe her. She was worried something bad might happen, because she'd sold the statue to some old lady and the couriers had already taken it away. I told her all about the Weeping Angels and what happened to Kathy and Billy Shipton. And I gave her my mobile number, in case something else went wrong. Then this morning, I got a call from her, and she was having this huge panic attack, because the statue was back in the shop, as if it had never been away. Then the call cut out - she just stopped talking in mid-sentence, as if something had grabbed her. I jumped on the bike and came straight over."

Reaching into his pocket, the Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and started scanning the area behind the sales counter. "No recent temporal disturbance. Whatever that thing was, it wasn't an Angel - it hasn't sent her back in time."

"D'you...d'you think there's a chance she's still alive then?" Larry ventured.

"Yeah, 'course there's a chance! We just have to find her, that's all!" the Doctor snapped, refusing to accept that he might have already lost Allie before they ever really began. Thinking back to both his previous visits to the shop, he gave a growl of frustration and ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. "How could I have missed it? Why didn't I realise it wasn't an ordinary statue? I was standing here right next to it! Unless... it was somehow dormant."

"Allie said it had been in the shop for over two years, without a problem," Larry said helpfully.

Frowning, the Doctor began to pace back and forth, muttering frenetically to himself. "Two years, two years, two years. So what changed? What was different about the last few days?" Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks, realisation dawning in his eyes. "Oh, of course! I'm getting old and stupid! Not just stupid, exponentially more stupid! Stupid to the power of stupid! It was the Rift energy! Countless molecules of Rift energy floating around the shop, oozing into the air out of those African artefacts!"

Larry looked at him blankly. "Rift energy?"

"Yeah, heaps of it, and whatever that statue really is, it just got an unexpected wake-up call from dormant to extremely active!" the Doctor said. "Did Allie say anything else about Charlie? Anything that can help me identify what it really is? C'mon, Larry, this is important, think!"

"I don't..." Larry began, his face a picture of concentration. "No, wait! There was something. A word. It suddenly appeared out of nowhere, she said, carved into the statue's head. At first it was tiny, but then it kept getting bigger and bigger."

"WHAT WORD?"

Larry screwed his eyes tightly shut in an effort to remember. "It was... it was... like, a name... starting with 'E'..." His voice trailed away and then his eyes sprang open triumphantly. "EMET! That was it!" Then all his elation fell away as he saw the grim expression on the Doctor's face. "Erm...that's not good, is it?"

"Good? It's about as far away from good as we're likely to get!" the Doctor answered. "We have to find out where those couriers took Charlie. Maybe we can trace him from there."

Larry leaned over and grabbed a piece of paper from a spike beside the cash register. "This help?"

The Doctor took it from him and grinned. It was a consignment note, made out to Mrs Janice Neeson, for delivery of one terracotta warrior, listing her full address.

"Oh, yes! You know what, Larry?" he said exuberantly. "Now I can see what Sally Sparrow likes about you! Come on, let's go!"

He ran back outside the shop, with Larry following close on his heels.

"But I only brought one helmet for the bike!" the young man protested.

"Never mind that!" the Doctor called back over his shoulder, as he sprinted past the bike and across the street towards the waiting TARDIS. "We'll take my motor! Allons-y!"

---

The first thing Allie saw when she opened her eyes was a dead body.

She had to admit, the 'opening her eyes' part was great, because it meant that, groggy as she was, she was still alive, something she hadn't been at all sure she would ever be again.

But the whole 'seeing the dead body' thing was not so great.

Mrs Neeson sat opposite her on a comfortable-looking couch. She looked as if she had just been about to indulge in a little snack. There was a cup and saucer on the small table in front of her, together with a small plate of biscuits. Allie felt a shiver up her spine at the macabre scenario – seated where she was, it was almost as if she had just sat down to have afternoon tea with the elderly lady. But even at first glance, it was more than apparent that Mrs Neeson would never have afternoon tea with anyone again. Her head had been twisted around at such an unnatural angle that it was almost back to front, her dull eyes staring unseeingly up at the ceiling.

Allie turned her face aside, her stomach heaving at the dreadful sight. She had seen dead people before – her own aunt, for instance, just over a week before. But Aunt Vanessa had looked relatively peaceful and serene. Mrs Neeson's twisted form looked ugly and grotesque.

Keep calm, she told herself, closing her eyes and drawing in long, deep breaths in an attempt to control her rising panic. Unflappable, that's you. Unflappable Allie Castiel, the Doctor said so. Now's the time to prove it!

Somehow, just thinking about the approval in the Doctor's warm brown eyes steadied her. From what she had gathered, he dealt with situations like this all the time. If he was here, he would know what to do. So, maybe, if she tried very hard to think like him, she could figure it out too. For a start, he wouldn't give up. He wouldn't sit here with his eyes tightly shut like a big baby. He would look around and try to get some idea of exactly what was going on. After all, you couldn't expect to arrive at a solution to a problem, unless you knew what the problem actually was.

Heartened by her own logic, she cracked open her eyes. Her wrists were tied tightly to the chair arms with some rope and she couldn't move, no matter how hard she tried. Her neck felt a little bit tender where Charlie had grabbed her, and her head was aching like a bitch, but otherwise she appeared to be unharmed. Fear clutched at her at the memory of the malevolent, blood-red eyes glaring at her back in the shop, the stone hands reaching for her throat. At the time, she had been sure that Charlie was about to strangle her to death. But instead, he had tightened his fingers on the base of her neck with surgical precision, rendering her unconscious instead, a great well of blackness swallowing her up even before she could scream.

The Vulcan Nerve Pinch, she told herself incredulously, gently flexing her aching neck muscles. Like Spock does on 'Star Trek'. Who knew that would actually work?

She had been talking to Larry Nightingale on the phone. A small spark of hope exploded in her chest. Larry understood about moving statues. Maybe he would guess what had happened. Maybe he would come to find her. But then the spark fizzled out as quickly as it had come. Larry was a nice guy and all, but she wasn't convinced he was knight-in-shining-armour material. And she couldn't afford to sit here waiting like a damsel in distress either, just on the off-chance that he might turn up. Somehow she had to sort this out herself.

Forcing herself to relax, she looked around the room, trying to take everything in at once. It was obviously somebody's living-room – the late Mrs Neeson's, she supposed. Everything was dim, with none of the electric lights switched on, the only illumination coming from the grey daylight seeping through the partially drawn curtains over the French doors at the end of the room. Nevertheless, Allie was still able to see that the small space was crowded almost to bursting with furniture and knick-knacks. Glancing around at the cluttered display, she found herself wondering sourly how many other antique store owners Mrs Neeson had made miserable, before recalling that the lady in question, however unpleasant, had been horribly murdered, and then feeling deeply guilty.

The air was cold, almost frosty. Allie could make out a fireplace to her left, but the fire had burnt right down into dusty, grey ash. Going by that, she guessed that the old lady had been dead for quite some time, probably since the previous day.

Probably since the couriers dropped Charlie off at her house, she realised with another wave of horror.

Then, almost as if thinking his name had conjured him up, she picked out the dark figure standing motionless in the shadows.

Despite her resolve to be brave, a shudder wracked Allie's body as she imagined the statue creeping up behind Mrs Neeson as she enjoyed her afternoon tea and nearly wrenching her head from her body.

"Ch...Charlie," she quavered, licking her dry lips. "Charlie? Is that you?"

There was no answer, just the eerie sound of the wind blowing down the chimney. Allie could feel her heart pounding as if it wanted to leap out of her chest.

"Charlie, I know you're alive. I know you can move," she tried again. "Can you speak?"

Again, there was no reply or acknowledgement from the dark figure.

"I'm cold and I'm hungry, Charlie," she added, striving to keep her voice reasonable. "And I'm really scared. You killed Terry, didn't you? And you killed Mrs Neeson. Why did you do that?"

For a few moments, silence continued to reign, and she began to doubt whether the statue was capable of communicating at all. But then, with a suddenness that startled her, two fiery eyes blazed out at her from the darkness.

"Pro-tect," a dark, rusty voice intoned.

A tremor that was half fear and half excitement ran through her veins. "So you can speak! Please, you have to tell me what this is all about."

"Pro-tect," he said again, slowly and deliberately. "Pro-tect."

Frustration hammered in her brain. "You keep saying that, but I don't understand!" she cried, her voice starting to rise. "What does it mean? Why have you brought me here? Are you going to kill me too? What exactly are you trying to protect?"

There was a heavy grinding noise, like stone being dragged across stone, as the statue's head turned to pin her with its red-hot gaze.

"Pro-tect...you."