The Eighth Doctor: The Magic of Time By James Fraser

Everything started to go wrong on the seventh of September 1890. Even though with every accident that we make there are at least a dozen different events you can trace it back to I knew in the final moments that this was when everything slowly began to go wrong. This night was meant to be the same as every other night. Someone would come to the shop, go home and would be dead before lights out. That was the system and the system worked. And then the next morning I would set out to find the body and things would be ready again for the next night. But the night before the show things took a turn for the worse as everything began to unravel. Luke Dotney was making his way back from the factory he worked at and decided to stop off at the new antiques shop. This was where everything began. You see the thing is that every worker who went to this factory said that their walk home was always uncomfortable and disturbing. The city of London is one of two halves; there is the sophisticated and accessible morning and also the dangerous and uninviting night which crooks and killers use as their playground for opportunity. Because of this the workers take any distraction or opportunity of time wasting they can get and when the matter of opening an antiques shop for our operations came about we thought there would be no better way of inviting people in than a place to avoid the long commute, in the place that is never robbed or broken into. This night was never meant to be any different from the others. The man came in as the many others did and selected the item he most fancied; a vase for only a matter of pennies. The money doesn’t matter as we give them away for pennies due to everything we sell finding its way back to us. But the night it happened, and the night Luke Dotney was found dead in his study after what seems like a fight that no one could have been there for. The last thing Luke heard was a cry of annoyance followed by a strong curse of anger before he completely blacked out. The police were left lost as there seemed to be no other cause of death than the vase he brought home that night. We knew that something would be coming for us. And we were right; because the next night was when the Doctor arrived.

Meanwhile, inside the TARDIS; the Doctor and Charley were standing by the console, as they often did, discussing the odds and ends of time travel. They were arguing over the TARDIS’ inability to take them anywhere traditionally adventurous and it was beginning to make the two of them look like they were afraid to leave the confines of Earth or rundown spaceships. Charley had grown up in a rich house with maids and servants attending her every need despite her tom boyish attitude making this a rather dull childhood. But her love of reading books about other worlds with malicious aliens that wanted to take over the Earth allowed her some sense of escapism and she had often fancied herself as being in the position of the adventurer. So when the Doctor stumbled into her life and saved her from the devastating crash of the R101 she thought she was finally going to see and experience the life of an adventurer for the first time. But despite seeing some sights that she could only begin to dream of they never seemed to be the traditional wonders that she had wished to experience. But instead of shouting and screaming or pestering the Doctor she trusted his judgement at being able to take her somewhere magical. It was only this time, the time in which he had told her to come to the control room for her dream trip of a lifetime, where she felt like the Doctor was doing this on purpose. For he had not landed the TARDIS on the beaches of a purple moon or the backside of a gigantic metal robot but had instead landed her in the middle of London in a time period just shy four decades before she was born.

‘Yes Charley! Dinner and a show, what better way to make use of a time machine. We have reservations for nine o’clock so go and get changed as quickly as possible.’

This somewhat annoyed Charley as she had been promised the trip of her dreams but had been taken somewhere merely around the corner from her own time.

‘Oh come on Doctor!’ She rarely held back what she was thinking about the Doctor. She was never afraid to say when he wasn’t being pleasant or decent and this was one of the things that made her perfect travelling material in his eyes. ‘We never go anywhere better than a street corner and not three hours ago you tell me to meet you for a trip somewhere beyond my dreams and we end up somewhere no further than where we typically end up.’

‘Well it is beyond your dreams and quite frankly beyond mine. I had to book the table three years in advance; it’s quite upmarket you know.’

‘Oh that is such an over exaggeration. Everyone knows you tip the door man to reserve you a table.’

‘Pardon me Charley but I tend to prefer to do things traditionally.’

‘Says the man who brought his own flask of tea to Queen Elizabeth the seconds celebration’

The Doctor pulled a lever on the console which probably didn’t do anything other than to suit a dramatic stance and turned to face Charley.

‘Alright then let’s make a deal. If we have the night out in town that I have planned, then I’ll take you to the Diamond Mountains of Alecto six. There is an army of looters planning on cutting the ridges off, and if we manage to stop them we are rewarded with a diamond pen from their gift shop.’

‘Further still if we have an awful time and we both hate it then you have to not only take me to the Diamond Mountains but you have to make the tea for the next fortnight.’

‘I do that anyway don’t I?’

‘Well then you’ve got nothing to lose.’ The two shook hands and Charley moved swiftly towards the door in the TARDIS’ wall in order to go and get changed. As he awaited her return the Doctor sat and thought about how likely it was for him to lose this wager. He thought about when he invited Charley to join him after he saved her from the crash and wondered if the woman she was then would have made a wager like this. Charley had saved possibly for the better but did he have the right to change her like that, or anyone. The Doctor shook his head, he often saved these thoughts for when Charley was asleep and he let the TARDIS float around deep space in which he let the thoughts he normally pushed to the back take centre stage. These moments of thought either ended up worsening the Doctor’s situation or in some cases improve them such as when he invented the solid gold phone which meant when the phone has passed its usage you could use the money the gold was worth to replace the phone. The thoughts started to plague the Doctor’s mind again and he thought it might be time to get the supplies ready for his chocolate stool but he looked up and realised that Charley was explaining her choice for her outfit which he had been drifting unthoughtfully throughout. He thought he might as well cut the story short as he had been paying so little attention that there was no point in even trying.

‘Yes you look lovely Charley should we get going then.’

Charley was stunned that it had taken the Doctor this long to actually stop the story as she had been pretending to go on about how important the decision of which frock she was wearing was in order to stop him getting lost in the depths of the TARDIS controls again. He had once spent so long mapping out the use of the controls that by the time he was finished the TARDIS had actually flown them there.

‘Yes let’s leave before you have one of your sudden changes of heart.’

‘I don’t have them that often do I?’

Before we can hear Charley answer the question the two of them have already left and headed-out into the streets of Victorian London for dinner and a show.

The Doctor and Charley walked down the street taking in the thick atmosphere and warm environment which was radiated by the people in fine clothing and horse and carriages. Of course this was not new to either the Doctor or Charley as the Doctor had visited this place several times on his many travels while Charley was born only less than fifty years afterward. But it never failed to please the two of them. Having got used to the dark spaceships full of killer cyborgs trying to convert them or even the version of Venice that made no sense to either of them they enjoyed the simplicity of trips like this. As they never failed to remind them of why they continued to travel; the pleasure of visiting places that were so stripped back in their complexity and showed humanity at their basic best and basic worst.

‘Where are we going then?’ Charley asked, not expecting a straight answer but probably something deep in a riddle.

‘I booked a table almost exactly thirty six months ago to the minute.

‘And how do you know it’s that precise?’

‘The TARDIS told me’

‘But the TARDIS hardly ever gets anything right’

The Doctor ignored Charley’s cruel remark and stopped dead in the street in order to sort through his busy coat and infinite amount of pockets for something he had written down not four hours earlier.

‘You’ve lost the receipt haven’t you?’

Just as she said this; the Doctor pulled out a bundle of ticket sized pieces of paper held together with a rusty and cheap looking black clip. After almost to minutes of searching his eyes lit up with joy as he came across the item he was looking for.

‘Oh well maybe I was wrong’ Charley remarked ‘You do keep receipts after all.’

‘Yes I knew I wasn’t far off the original reservation’

‘How far off was she? I don’t want to walk very far in what I’m wearing.’

‘Oh not far about three and a half days, the TARDIS is getting better at this.’

‘I knew it I knew that unreliable ship of yours wasn’t going to get us anywhere near where we needed to be’

‘It’s better than most of her tries’ The Doctor responded

‘And the TARDIS can’t take us that close to the current time can she?’

‘Almost definitely, you’re getting good at this I save countless techno jargon conversations whenever I take you anywhere’

‘Well it was fun while it lasted. Come on I’m dying for a cup of tea and you’re he one making them now’ Charley started that sentence intending to remain sounding disappointed throughout but she ended with a sound of joy in her voice as she had one up on the Doctor now.

‘Who’s to say the TARDIS was wrong in taking us here?’

‘You did, when you said that she had dropped us off three and a half days late’

‘Ah well the TARDIS is a very clever girl she wouldn’t do this deliberately especially not at the expense of me losing a wager. Well unless we’ve had a spat, which I can comfortably say we haven’t.’

‘Why are we here then?

Having finished saying this the Doctor pointed over at a poster on the wall which presented a figure dressed in black robes. He came off as a magician from contemporary times but was still plastered on several different and vintage looking posters that populated a dark red wall.

‘This man says that he has the ability to raise the dead.’

The Show of a Lifetime

Just before the curtain began to rise the Doctor and Charley ran to their seats having just collected their tickets. As they got comfortable Charley glanced at the Doctor expecting him to have brought something for them to eat during the show.

‘I don’t suppose you have anything to eat do you?’

‘You can’t bring your own food into a theatre. That kind of thing won’t be allowed for at least another two hundred years.’

‘Well you do owe me some food as we were supposed to be having dinner round about now.’

The Doctor glanced around the theatre as if he was about to make some sort of illegal transaction. Having surveyed his surroundings the Doctor took a plastic Tupperware box out of his pocket which was holding spaghetti and sauce complete with heavy silver cutlery. After handing this over to Charley; the Doctor then got out a long Toblerone which Charley recognised from their trip to Heathrow in the twenty seventh century and then in a dramatic flourish to finish off he handed her a box of Quality Street. ‘Satisfied?’ He asked her sarcastically. But Charley was too pleased with finally being able to eat to play the Doctor’s game of petty insults and just threw back a smug yes.

As the curtain rose the Doctor stared with fascination at the tall, dark figure that entered appeared on stage. He began by talking about a very clearly fake backstory about how his magic came about but the Doctor was more interested in deducing the elements of his clothing. The Doctor could often make easy deductions about people using lots of information but this man was no mystery. Down by the tail of his coat the Doctor could see a white wire reflecting in the light. At first glance this could be ignored but then he saw a bit of metal on the end. The Doctor recognised this technology from somewhere before. The man was wearing a pair of twenty first century head phones. Or at least he had them wrapped around his neck like teenagers from the time. This was no ordinary man he thought to himself. This was further proven by the fact he had finished talking about his oh so amazing backstory and was ready to pick a volunteer to prove his worth. The Doctor raised his hand as he was concerned about what the man was going to do to some of these people and thought it better if he was to be the Guinea pig in a possible fatal experiment. But alas the Doctor and Charley were ignored and a man in an expensive suit and top hat was brought to the stage.

‘Now I will prove that I can not only raise the dead but also alter the course of history’

The Doctor scoffed vainly. He had that approach for everything he did when he travelled across time but then he didn’t go around boasting about it. However as the Doctor thought this he watched as the magician hand the man in a top hat a red pill which for a second he thought he recognised. The man consumed the pill with a glass of water and collapsed to the ground. The entire audience gasped but no one more so than the Doctor who thought that he was witnessing the first chapter in a new serial killers spree. Without a second thought he ran down to the stage where the man had stopped moving and attempted to restart his heart but wasn’t given an ample opportunity to do so as the Magician had already brought a large mechanical box on wheels which the Doctor recognised from hospitals in the twenty first century, yet suspiciously it was not wired into anything as items from that time period would need to be, and started to shock the man’s body. This provoked a mass fear throughout the audience as people ran screaming or collapsed to the floor in shock. But after several shocks the man arose with a deep breath and those who managed to sit through the experience gasped with him before erupting with a mass of applause. However the only person awake and not clapping was the Doctor who was sat by the side of the stage in utter confusion as to what had just happened. The man had just used a defibrillator; technology that would not be around for decades to restart the heart of a man he killed and was now experiencing immense praise. His instincts were right, the TARDIS had taken him here with good reason and now he was going to find out what it was he was planning.

The Doctor grabbed Charley’s hand and ran out of the theatre. Charley was disappointed at this as she was actually starting to enjoy the show and expressed her disappointment to the Doctor who was both angry and determined while also somewhat pleased that his hunches were correct.

‘Oh why do we have to leave I was really enjoying that’

‘I knew the TARDIS had brought us here for a reason; that man is not of this Earth.’

‘Well neither are you’ Charley’s response hit the Doctor for a moment as tried to justify his presence but then criticise this magicians.

‘Well rather he is not of this time period either way we have to stop him doing whatever it is that he is planning’

‘Well who’s to say that he is planning anything maybe he just got stuck in this time period after some weird time thing’

‘No I don’t think so otherwise the TARDIS would not have dropped us of here, she’s very clever you know’

‘Well she’s rarely been very reliable before. You more than most should be able to know that.’

‘She very rarely takes me where I want go but always manages to take me where I need to go.’

‘That just sounds like an old man trying to prove that his ancient car is still in. Though let’s be honest Doctor even when you end up going where you want to go there’s still trouble you can’t pick up the milk without having to dramatically destroy an alien behind the counter.’

The Doctor ignored these remarks as his attention was drawn to a man wielding a bundle of newspapers advertising yet another grim murder that nobody on the streets of London would take any attention to, except for the Doctor. He grabbed the paper out of the man’s hands and quickly flicked through its pages reading its contents in less than a second.

‘What are you looking at Doctor?’

‘I think we may have found our first lead.’

The Doctor held the paper out in front of him with the words: MAN KILLED BY VASE? SCOTLAND YARD INVESTIGATES.

The Doctor was moving quickly down the road barely stopping to let anyone past and not giving any thought to Charley who was struggling to run at the speed he was walking at.

‘I don’t understand Doctor what has an over exaggerated murder of a man beaten by a vase got anything to do with a time traveller stuck in the past?’

‘All in good time Charley, ah here we are.’

The Doctor finally stopped walking as he halted outside of a house in the middle of the street. Using the sonic screwdriver he let himself and Charley in, re-locking the door behind him. The police had been and gone but the rest of the house had been left untouched; allowing the Doctor to search for what it was that he needed.

There was a red stain of blood where the man had been found and the Doctor got down on his hands and knees and attempted to deduce from the smell whether this had been an attack of alien intervention despite the open disgust of Charley who found this almost inhumane. However he didn’t find anything of note and began following the deductive instincts he held by moving around the room and gathering elements that could further his investigation.

‘Have you found anything then?’

‘Not yet no, I just have to keep searching’

Charley moved around the room and came across something of note on the desk. What she found was a box of receipts from the man’s various visits to places.

‘Unless I’m very much mistaken Doctor I do believe that Luke was a banker’

The Doctor shrugged this off with a casual ‘So?’ and carried on as if she hadn’t spoken.

‘But if he were to have been killed by an alien vase then the vase would be from a shop also not of this Earth.’

‘But there are countess antiques shops all over London the time it would take us to find it doesn’t even bare thinking about.’

‘But that’s my point Doctor. He was a banker; don’t they always keep the receipts?’

The Doctor pondered this for a moment before suddenly realising how Charley may have just worked this entire mystery out. ‘Oh I see’ he said solemnly, pondering the situation before jumping onto his feet in a moment of triumph

‘That’s brilliant Charley, of course the man, a banker, keeps records of everything he buys.’

‘Meaning we can find the shop he bought it from.’

‘Excellent!’

The Doctor started to run down the stairs flinging his coat over his shoulders which he had left by the door. Charley soon followed pleased that she had worked this out but still confused in other respects. But before she could say anything the Doctor had already opened the front door and began to run back down the street this time to the location written on the receipt they had found in the desk in the study.

The door had a creak as it opened and as the Doctor and Charley entered into the little shop on the corner the first thing the two of them noticed were the antique clocks that paraded the four walls of the shop. It seemed almost unbelievable that someone would decorate a shop with this many clocks without the worry that they would drive themselves mad with the constant ticking.

‘Well I can say with certainty that this is clearly a shop designed by a mad man. I can’t even sleep when I have one click on the wall never mind… twenty nine’

‘I still don’t really understand what we are doing here’

‘Shapeshifters Charley. They are integral to our investigation.’

Charley had about ten different questions related to the Doctor’s statement but she was interrupted by his likening of a ring placed on the desk.

‘Oh well look at this beautiful piece.’

‘Doctor what does this murder have to do with the magician?’

‘I’ve already told you about a hundred times’

Charley looked at the Doctor with her eyebrow raised. ‘Are you sure that wasn’t to yourself again Doctor?’

‘Probably, my mind has so many loose ends running about I tend to leave some hanging.’

‘I could have worked it out myself by the time you come around to explaining it to me.’

‘Go on then.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Charley knew what he had said but his arrogance often stopped him from ever coming close to saying it so she wouldn’t be surprised if he just misspoke.

‘You knew my methods Watson, apply them.’

‘Well you took me to a shop owned by aliens. The object that killed the man was also alien but in terms of connection between this and the Magician. I’m guessing he owns this shop. But then he isn’t alien himself, he can’t be because if he’s trapped here then an alien could have crash landed on any planet in the galaxy. The odds of landing on Earth are next to none.’

‘So he’s an alien time traveller trapped in the past.’

‘But if he has the technology to start hearts and resurrect the dead then I assume he wouldn’t bother to perform at theatres. If he needed money then he would have sold the tech by now so he just be using the fear of this time period to get people scared of him.’

‘And what would that achieve?’

‘Power. He wants to rule the world with modern technology. But what has that got to do with this murder? Unless…’

‘What if the technology wasn’t going to work?’

‘He’d need to test it out first. Doctor these aliens are shapeshifters aren’t they?’

‘Yes. I mean as glamorous as it is I don’t think any rags of aliens would choose to look like a vase.’

‘So he strikes a deal with them. Half the control of the world if he opens a shop with them and sells them out to people they can kill and claim the bodies for testing.’

‘Very good Charley. Excellent in fact.’

‘Don’t patronise me I worked it out way before you did. You were just waiting for me to tell you what was going on.’

‘Probably. Either way we still have the full picture.’

‘We just need some evidence now. It’s all academic until we can prove anything.’

The Doctor began walking around the shop taking in his surroundings. But he soon began to get frustrated as he couldn’t think.

‘Oh dear.’

‘What now? If there another thread to this?’

‘Nearly every item in this shop is owned by the Magician.’

‘Oh no. So everything is…’

The Doctor interrupted: ‘A shapeshifter. The clocks must be designed to disorientate us.’

Just as he said this Charley began to cough into her hand. But she had trouble stopping barely being able to get words out in between.

‘The… air… tastes… funny.’

‘They’ve started gassing the shop.’

Charley began to grasp for the door handle but could barely stand up. But the Doctors hand appeared out of the now colourful gas and opened it for her. The fresh air hit her like a smack in the face but it felt like such a relapse for her. She looked back expecting to see the Doctor there but all there was behind her was the dark green gas pouring out of the building like water out of a cup. The Doctor was still inside lost probably looking for the proof that the shop was being used for cruel experiments. The gas didn’t seem to affect him and soon enough he ran out of the shop not even stopping for breath with a dark brown bag in one hand and a Polaroid taken on a nineteen nineties camera in the other.

Having finally caught her breath Charley finally had the strength to question the Doctor about the contents he claimed from the shop. ‘What did you find?’

‘I found a row of dead bodies in the back of the room just as I suspected and quickly took a picture.’

‘Using that thing?’ Charley pointed towards the camera tucked in the Doctor’s apparently enormous pockets.

The Doctor ignored Charley’s question as he jumped upright with everything from the shop now sorted into his countless pockets and grabbed Charley’s hand bolting down the street towards the theatre where the deadly Magician was awaiting their arrival.

Sat in his dressing room Mark Robinson, or the Magician as he now called himself, sat staring into the mirror. A man who worked in the theatre knocked on his door, reminding him that the performance was starting in ten minutes time but the news almost completely went over his head as he was lost in thought. Mark had never intended to stay in this period of history, he had joined the UNIT scientific research team because he wanted to help the world into a technological golden age. But something had gone wrong with their experiment to transport living matter and he had fallen through their barrier and into the space between days; the space which occupies the spilt second between today and tomorrow. He saw many things through the cracks in the universe but every crack he looked through he saw an old fashioned air ship from the nineteen twenties and two versions of it, seemingly identical except only half of them had the image of two people flying away. By the time he arrived in the eighteenth century he had seen raw tile before his eyes and decided that he wanted to own it. He wanted to take his place at the top of the world and change time for his own purposes, because if time can be changed by that air crash then nothing is stopping him from doing the same.

There was a knock on the door again but this time Mark was aware of the disturbance to his train of thought. He almost forgot that it was time for his performance and was entirely focused on giving whoever was behind the door a piece of his mind for bothering him. But as he swung the door open his anger vanished as he felt something very different about the man facing him. He didn’t have the feeling of someone intellectually inferior looking up to him but rather someone on the same level as him. It was a feeling he had had only once while being here and it was a few hours earlier when some ridiculous man interrupted his trick to terrify the audience and bend them to his will.

The Magician has been standing for about a minute taking in all the strange feelings he got from the slightly out of time looking man that stood before him before he decided to say something.

‘And you are?’

‘I’m here to help.’ Replied the Doctor. He didn’t want to give anything about his identity away for as long as possible. He took this small interaction as an invitation to enter his dressing room where Mark was slightly insulted at how at hole he acted. Taking a drink out of the fridge and putting his feet up on the sofa tossing his bag to the side.

‘Can I help you with anything?’

‘Yes probably.’

‘I don’t do autographs.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’ The Doctor took a leather wallet out of his pocket and pushed it in the face of the Magician with a thought in his mind of an way out of here.’

‘You’re a time agent?’

‘If that’s what it says. You can’t be from this time period then if that’s what you associate with a way out.’ The Doctor then grinned, he was pleased with his managing to trick the mind into admitting they didn’t originate here. But his self satisfaction was short lived as Mark decided to question his credentials.

‘What are you doing here then? I wouldn’t think a time agent would have any business in such a dull time period.’

‘We picked up some strange time distortions from this area.’

‘Well I haven’t seen any.’

‘Well you wouldn’t have.’

This caught them both out for a second, Mark now had an idea of what this migraine be about before the Doctor decided not to give his cover away just yet.

‘Because they haven’t happened yet. They’re a few weeks away so we’ve come back to now in order to clear up any distortions to time oh order to stop it happening.’

While this sounded plausible to him, he didn’t want to risk anything and was already planning how to stop the prevention of his plan.

‘I’m sorry what did you say your name was again.’

He hadn’t expected to be asked but he didn’t think his name would mean anything to him and acted like it was a code name.

‘I’m the Doctor.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ The tables had been turned and the Magician knew exactly what was going on. ‘You’re not here to prevent anything. You’re the Doctor, the egotistical time traveller who acts like a moral do gooder on earth so he can have his god like powers validated.’

This came as a shock to the Doctor. He didn’t expect anyone to know why he was, it rarely came up if ever.

‘You know who I am?’ He dropped the charade in need of answers.

‘You’ve been around this universe so much and met to many people do you really think you didn’t leave an impact? Every villain is the hero of their own story, you would think it makes sense for some regulations being out in place to take you down.’

This stunned the Doctor. He had never really thought of his actions leaving marks in a way he never thought about what happened after he saved the day and left the world he saved behind.

‘And if you’re the Doctor…’ Mark started to wander around his own dressing room with a self satisfied swagger. If he could stop the Doctor, the man who started the recession on his planet which meant the time travel project was needed, then practically nothing stood in his way

‘And you’re not one for travelling alone are you? Who was that idiot girl I saw you with? Charley?’

‘You leave her alone.’

‘Or what. You’re entire plan relies on me not knowing who you are so I think it’s fair to say that o can do whatever I want. She’ll be the next of many to join the row of bodies I plan to use in order to experiment the capabilities of the shifters. Speaking of which…’ He started searching the room as if looking for something.

‘Then that must mean that you’ve brought something into here that might catch me in a trap in some kind of back up.’ He spotted the bag which the Doctor dropped by the side of the sofa.

‘Oh you really think I’m that stupid, you can’t use my own shapeshifters against me.’ He through the bag out into the corridor was a small sorry to the being he may have just hurt, before turning back to the Doctor. ‘Those idiot shifters have no power over me anyway. I only need them for the time being, when I have the power I need to make people worship me I can guarantee that they will be the first to go.

Even in moments of defeat the Doctor was determined to claim very win he could. ‘That’s a bit far fetched don’t you think? Getting a whole planet to worship you.’

‘Modern technology in the past Doctor. The superstition of this primitive time with its ape like levels of intelligence mean it only takes a simple defibrillator to make them think I’m a god.’

‘And you’re planning on destroying the shifters in order to achieve this?’

‘Amongst other things of course.’

The Doctor jumped up in satisfaction. ‘That’s all I needed to hear.’

‘Oh stop playing the fool Doctor. They don’t have alien enhanced hearing you know’

‘Oh you’re right, also about the fact that I used them as a back up.’ He started tugging on his damaged finger, pulling it clean off. ‘Except that bag was nothing more than a decoy. A back up for my back up if you will.’

The Magician stared gobsmacked at this before the Doctor threw him the ring.

‘They heard every word. I’d offer you help or a way home but you fell through time, you saw the collapsing of eternity. That’s not something that can be healed. I’m afraid it’s down to the shifters what’s going to happen to you.’

‘How did you manage to keep the ring on for so long they’re deadly.’

‘Simple. I’m not human. I just need a few hours and a bit of cream and my finger will be good as new.’

Before he could say anything Mark started to feel his hands tingling. He looked down and saw that his skin was beginning to crack due to the heat from the ring. He dropped it quickly but the ring rolled into his shoe and he was unable to remove it from himself.

‘You can’t just leave me to die, if anyone finds out about this you’ll own create more ripples that will affect more lives. You have power Doctor and you refuse to admit that you only use that power to benefit yourself even if it damages the lives of millions.’

The Doctor attempted to ignore his words but he couldn’t help but reflect. He had done bad things but refused to live up to the consequences. He shook this thought out of his head. He was doing the right thing; saving the masses and anything that happens to other people was nothing to do with him.

He turned for the door and as he was about to leave looked back at Mark who was in the floor, he wanted to help him but there was nothing he could do. He’d lost his humanity in trying to destroy it and that wasn’t the Doctor’s fault… not really.

Charley had spent the rest of the evening trying to distract the crowd and the people who work at the theatre from wondering about what was happening to the Magician. At first she tried to do magic by impersonating sole tricks she had picked up while travelling across the country, but this proved impossible as she did not have a live donkey to do the trick with and instead started telling stories, she did intend to make the audience laugh but not as much as they were. It was quite possible that Charley had just done the first ever stand up routine.

The Doctor emerged from behind the stage but saw how much Charley was entertaining the crowd so he snook of the stage without fuss and claimed an empty seat to watch her perform. He had enjoyed her jokes and performances, she made quite the comedian. He thought about after this taking her to see his old friend Tommy perform on stage or maybe even to Frankie Boyle, but only if he agreed to keep the skin suit on.

By almost one o’clock in the morning Charley had exhausted herself and the audience and bowed to their applause before meeting the Doctor by the entrance and walking out with him.

‘So what happened. Who was the Magician?’

‘Oh probably just some mad alien possessing a dead body.’

‘But why did it choose nineteenth century England to take over.’

‘I hear they have very nice cheeses in this century.’

‘Oh I wish you’d tell me the truth sometimes rather than those silly jokes.’

As they approached the street in which the TARDIS was parked the Doctor humoured Charley’s statements.

‘Well if aliens try to take over the world telling bad jokes has got to be at the bottom of everyone’s worry list, it’s the only chance I ever get.’

The two laughed together as they entered the TARDIS and flew away.