She’d had an inkling from the start, but after that whole business with dropping in the day the Earth blew up, Charley was certain. The Doctor was trying to get rid of her. Why else would he ask her to endure that self-important bit of skin calling itself the last pure human, even for a few hours? There’d been something eminently satisfying in the fact that “Lady Cassandra” had turned out to be the villain in the end.
She didn’t know if it was conscious – if he really wanted her gone or just meant to push her away before she could choose to leave on her own – but his actions spoke volumes either way. A lifetime ago, she might have given in, too wounded by his rejection to understand the motivation behind it. Charley knew better now, and she was every bit as stubborn as any old Time Lord.
That was probably why they were currently having one hell of an argument in the parlour of a mortuary in Nineteenth Century Cardiff.
“They’re dying. This could save their lives. Save an entire species, and you’re being squeamish.”
“I am not ‘squeamish,'” Charley protested indignantly. “How do we know the Gelth can be trusted? Are they really as weak, as few as they say? We’ve only their word. It could just as easily be a trick, a prelude to an invasion.”
The Doctor frowned at her. “You don’t trust them, you don’t trust me – have you always been this cynical and I just missed it somehow, or is this a recent development?”
“Oh, let’s see now, shall we?” she answered, deeply facetious. “Disembodied aliens in need of a human conduit to cross a dimensional rift…what could I possibly find to mistrust? Especially once you bring the Time Lords into it.”
The Doctor squirmed inside that shell-like leather jacket of his, giving her some small satisfaction. She’d have been really angry if he failed to catch that particular drift. “It’s not the same.”
“Why?” Charley demanded. “Because this time the conduit’s not me? Because you’re carrying some great load of guilt over this Time War business? If you want to know what I think, I think these aliens have found just the right button to push to make you dance to their tune. And that, Doctor, is what frightens me.”
“Don’t I get a say, Miss?” Gwyneth’s voice snapped Charley for a moment out of her single-minded vision of the Doctor allowing an invasion he’d never forgive himself for. One that could cause a paradox even worse than her survival had: if these creatures came through, and if they weren’t as benevolent as they claimed, why, she’d never be born at all.
But that wasn’t a burden she ought to lay on the shoulders of a Nineteenth Century Welsh serving girl. Unbidden, a snatch of their conversation earlier, in the larder, came back to Charley.
“I bet you’ve got dozens of servants, haven’t you, Miss?”
“I did have, once,” Charley admitted reluctantly. Memories of Edith flooded her mind, making her shiver. “And I never saw them. Not really. Not the way I should have, until it was too late, and one had killed herself for want of kindness.”
She still blamed herself for that. Probably always would, unless the Doctor would agree to nip back and discover if their actions in Edith’s past truly had made a difference. Could that be why she felt so protective of Gwyneth?
Gwyneth was apparently reading her mind again. “I’m not her, Miss,” she pointed out gently. “I’ve had a good life, even considering. I’ve no wish to throw it away, but the angels need me.” She turned to the Doctor. “So tell me what I have to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” the Doctor clarified.
“They’ve been singing to me since I was a child. Sent by my mum on a holy mission. So tell me.”
Charley frowned. “And in all that time, you never once stopped to wonder if perhaps they were softening you up, making you sympathetic for just such a moment as this?”
Gwyneth shrugged. “Not really, no. How could anything that makes such beautiful music not be on the side of the angels?”
That hadn’t stopped Mama from declaring jazz music to be of the devil, Charley thought wryly. “I just wish there were some way to verify their story, that’s all. Is that so much to ask? If the Gelth have waited this long, surely a few moments more won’t make such a great difference.”
“The young lady does have a rather excellent point,” Dickens said. He had apparently recovered enough from the shock of discovering ghosts were real (well, sort of) to contribute to the conversation.
The Doctor scowled, looking from Charley to Dickens to Gwyneth and back before finally admitting, “The TARDIS data banks may have a history or some such. If it was in the Matrix before it went down, anyway.” He held up a cautionary finger in Charley’s direction. “But we’d best be quick about it.”
+++
“Good God in heaven!”
“Gracious! Why I never seen such a thing.”
“What is this ungodly place?”
Charley bit back a laugh. “It’s not ungodly, just a bit…unearthly is all,” she addressed Mr. Sneed first. “It’s the TARDIS, the Doctor’s ship. Come on, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I promise.”
Promise or no, she still had to prod the three a bit to get them though the doorway and into the console room proper. Once they were all inside, staring wide-eyed about them as Jonah might’ve in the belly of the whale if he’d had proper light, Gwyneth exclaimed, “Why it’s like a doorway to another world!”
“Not exactly,” Charley hedged. Somehow it didn’t seem a good idea to reveal to their guests that the TARDIS could, in fact, travel to other worlds. The Doctor, of course, was no help whatsoever, having gone straight to the console and begun tapping away at the computer keyboard that he’d attached to it at some point after her initial departure.
“The world is still out there, same as it ever was,” Charley explained, opening the door again just a crack to afford them a reassuring glimpse. “The TARDIS is just…bigger on the inside, is all.”
A rather dazed looking Dickens murmured, “Will wonders never cease?”
“I understand now,” Gwyneth stated solemnly, turning to look back at Charley. “Some of the things I seen in your thoughts. The great air ships, the metal monsters. The children who never were.”
The children who never were. Charley shivered. That was as apt, and as chilling, a description of the Neverpeople as any the Time Lords or Sentris had come up with for them. “Gwyneth, please,” she begged, her voice pained. “Stop. Believe me, you don’t want to see the rest.”
Gwyneth had looked into the Doctor’s mind and seen how he liked his tea this time around. It was a mercy she hadn’t found Zagreus in there. Or possibly worse, whatever it was the Doctor seemed to have become in the aftermath of Gallifrey’s destruction. Charley herself was still sorting out the answer to that one, and his general refusal to talk to her didn’t help.
Gwyneth shook herself and the dazed, faraway look left her face. Just in time, too, because the Doctor was going to hurt himself if he tried any harder not to react to the secrets she cast about so carelessly.
“Here we are,” the Doctor interrupted. “‘Gelth, the.’ From the planet Gel in the Haptid cluster.”
“And where’s that?” Charley asked, moving to his side to look over his shoulder at the screen. Not that it did her any good; the words were written in modern Gallifreyan, which despite her time with the Doctor still looked to her like a lot of random circles and lines.
“Other side of the universe, like I said.”
“And?” Charley asked pointedly.
The Doctor frowned. “Got hit by a chemical weapon at the height of the War, one that poisoned the atmosphere with unbreathable gasses. The planetary government had been mucking about with experiments designed to create a perfect soldier by converting the body to pure energy, so they were able to save the population by transforming everyone into this gaseous state.”
“Oh,” Charley stated in relief. “So, pretty much exactly what they told us.”
“There’s more,” the Doctor warned, and from the grim tone of his voice, she could tell it wasn’t good. “See, the one thing the Gelth government failed to do was to ask the people if they wanted to be turned into ghosts. A good number weren’t too happy about it. Demanded their leaders give ’em back their bodies. Only they couldn’t, because the bodies had all been burned up in the conversion process. Every last one of ’em.” He looked up at Charley. “You can guess what happened.”
She swallowed hard. “So now they want Earth to provide what their own world couldn’t.”
The Doctor nodded in confirmation. “And based on these figures, the population of Earth in 1869 is just about enough for each and every single surviving Gelth to have their very own walking corpse to animate. How they discovered the Rift, how they were able to anchor their end of it so it would always bleed through to this particular time, I don’t know. But you were right, this isn’t some errand of mercy. It’s an invasion.”
Strange how it took the Doctor admitting she’d been right to make Charley realise how very badly she’d wanted not to be. A heavy, uncomfortable silence fell between them, broken only after what seemed an eternity by Gwyneth’s voice.
“So. Not angels, then.” She sounded disappointed as well.
Charley didn’t blame her. She was doing a bang up job of ruining everyone’s day, it seemed.
“Not remotely,” the Doctor answered. There was still anger in his voice, though Charley was fairly sure that it wasn’t directed at her any longer. No, it was the Gelth who had incurred his wrath now, not only by having designs on his favourite planet, but in trying to use him to execute them.
“So, what then?” Mr. Sneed demanded nervously. “Tell us, Sir, you’ll not leave us to the mercy of these things!”
“‘Course not!” the Doctor sounded indignant at the very suggestion. “The Rift’s already widening. If the Gelth can’t get us to open it all they way for them, doesn’t mean they won’t find some other way of punching through. No, we’ve got to seal the Rift, at least temporarily.”
“How? What would you have us do, Doctor?” Dickens asked.
There was only one sure way Charley knew to close a dimensional doorway with a human key and, for rather obvious reasons, she didn’t like it one bit. Then the Doctor looked at her, and for one shining moment it was as though all the time apart had never happened. Without a single word passing between them, she knew: he wouldn’t give up or take the easy way out, not this time. He wouldn’t allow Gwyneth to be sacrificed unless there was no other option.
Fleeting as it was, that brief connection nearly made Charley’s heart turn over in relief. Perhaps the man she’d known – the man she’d loved – was still in there after all.
“First we need to find the Rift.” He turned to Mr. Sneed. “This house is on a weak spot, so there must be a spot that’s weaker than any other. What’s the weakest part of this house?” When Sneed just stared at him blankly, the Doctor clarified. “The place where most of the ghosts have been seen?”
Finally understanding, Sneed nodded. “That would be the morgue.”
Of course it was.
“Right.” The Doctor nodded. He had a thoughtful look on his face, one just familiar enough that it gave Charley another thrill of hope. “Once we’ve found the Rift, we’ll need to close it. But the Gelth aren’t gonna make that easy on us. They’re not going to just give up their one way out. And in the morgue, they’ll have dozens of corpses to animate and send after us if they think we’re not on the level. Which means figuring out a way to prevent them from using the corpses long enough to get the job done.”
Charley frowned. “Here’s what I don’t understand. As you’ve said, the Gelth aren’t likely to take any chances we might deceive them. So why didn’t any of them follow us back here to the TARDIS? If they heard any of our conversation inside, they have to know we’ve our doubts.”
Dickens’ head snapped up quite suddenly as though inspired with a thought for a new novel. “Gas! Doctor, you said they live in the gas?”
The manic grin reappeared. “Of course! Fill the room with gas, it’ll draw them out of the host. Suck them into the air like poison from a wound!”
“Only trouble is then we won’t be able to breathe,” Charley pointed out. “And I rather think porting a gas mask about might look a bit obvious, perhaps give the game away altogether. Particularly in 1869.”
As if to prove her point, Dickens looked at her and asked, “What, pray tell, is a ‘gas mask’?”
The Doctor shrugged. “So we’ll have to work quickly.”