memoirsversefic

[memoirsversefic]

A Grievous Error in Memory: Chapter Two

Book One of the Series Memoirs of a Tourist

Characters: The Eighth Doctor, Evelyn Alvar

Rating: R (violence)

Contains spoilers for the Eighth Doctor Adventures book series

Prologue the First

Prologue the Second

Chapter One

Chapter Two

It was like she had vanished.

One second, the TARDIS scanners still registered the pale figure's flight path, and the next, it was as if she somehow slipped out of reach.  

"Out of reach of the TARDIS?" he murmured to himself.  "That's impossible.  Should be impossible."

Working feverishly at the controls, the Doctor was able to plot a mirrored course to the general location the figure had disappeared.  It would not be exact-- probably-- but it would give him a starting point.

The materialization circuits began their wheezing announcement of the ship's landing sequence.  A moment later, the Doctor had wrenched the lever to open the doors, and was darting through them, coattails flapping.  If he hurried, he might be able to find her.

He wasn't entirely certain why he wanted so badly to find this woman, beyond the simple, inherent curiosity and lust for adventure that drove most of his initial actions.  There was, in this particular instance, more to it than that-- a driving need that felt essential to the continuation of, well, everything-- but he was very much a make-it-up-as-you-go sort, and so had pragmatically determined that he would make it up as he went.

As he stepped from the TARDIS doors and into the cross-street, he noticed several things at once.

First was the sense of lingering dread.  It was a palpable thing, a psychic ichor, viscous and suffocating, but as he observed it, he saw that it was slowly dissipating.  Whatever had left it had gone.

Second, he saw that the lamps lighting the street were flickering and browning.  They, too, began to stabilize as he watched.

Third, he saw the body.

For a hearts-stopping instant, he thought the body was that of the pale woman, but as he drew nearer, he could see that it wasn't.  He crouched beside it.  The hair was dark, curly, peppered with grey.  The skin looked like ancient, crumbling paper, stretched dry and thin over jutting bone.  He could see the woman's clothing draped over her skeletal frame, folds of material meant for a much healthier, fuller figure than the one lying here.

If he hadn't known better, he would have thought she had been dead for some time, but she was not decayed.  Her skin was not decomposed.  Her clothing was well-worn, but not falling apart.  And, of course, Earth people didn't as a rule leave corpses to rot in the middle of their town streets.

It was her face, though, which gave him pause.  Even with the state of the body, he could clearly see the terror twisting her features.

"Poor soul," he murmured.  "What killed you, then, I wonder?"

He stood.  He would leave the corpse for the human authorities to collect and autopsy.  They probably wouldn't have the faintest idea what had happened to her, but he would be on the case either way.  

Looking about himself, he saw an automobile sitting at a nearby intersection, the driver’s side door ajar, headlights still blazing.  He was a bit surprised there was no traffic jam as a result, but decided it was probably quite late at night, and the town appeared fairly small, quiet.  He approached the car, bending over to have a look inside.  

The keys were still in the ignition.  Sliding behind the wheel, he turned the key, and the engine grumbled to life, sputtering a bit before rolling into a healthy purr.  He turned the key back so the car fell silent again.  

"Even odds this is your car," he mused to the dead woman.  "You tried to run, didn't you?  Why try to escape on foot when you could have driven away much more quickly?"

His eye fell on a handbag resting in the passenger seat, and he picked up the purse and rifled through it, retrieving her wallet.  He found the little plastic-encased card that humans loved to identify themselves with in this era, and read her name out loud.

"Leanne M. McCormick."  A sad smile touched his lips as he looked at the photo of the woman when she was alive and well.  She had curly black hair threaded with grey, hazel eyes, a few fine aging lines on her face, and she was wearing a blue button-down blouse with a small cross necklace at her throat.  "A pity I couldn't have arrived a bit sooner, Leanne.  I am sorry."

He took note of the address listed on the ID card, and then returned the ID to the wallet, and the wallet to the purse, and the purse to the passenger seat.  Everything would remain exactly as he had found it.

Sliding out of the car, he moved back to the side of the corpse, frowning down at her.  He wondered what her life had been like, what she had been like.  "Your death won't have been in vain, Leanne.  I promise."

Three days later:

Evelyn stood, a little awkwardly, in her lacy black dress and low heels, hands clasped around a little plastic cup bearing a neon-pink, frothy punch.  She watched, silently and off to the side, as Leanne's friends and family milled about in Leanne's living room.

Wakes, Evelyn thought, were always a bit morbid, a bit callous.  A party after a funeral.  Food and drink and conversation, however somber, however sad, survivors moving on while the dead rotted in the earth.  Or, in Leanne's case, in the county morgue, since she was still an open case.  Most of these people weren't even talking about Leanne, but about work, about children, about politics, about the weather, their voices low and stilted, as though reading from a pre-arranged script titled Appropriate Discussion Topics.  

Anything except Leanne.  Anything except how she died.

I suppose I can't really blame them, she thought.  She took a sip from her punch.  I didn't even know her that well.  But even I knew something was wrong.  

And something had been wrong.  Was still wrong.  She could see it in their eyes.  In their faces.  Drawn, haggard.  Dark circles under weary eyes.  Evelyn was no stranger to weariness, to weakness in her body, but what she saw in these people was different somehow.  And there was something else, something lurking beneath the surface, weaving around the room, something no one seemed to want to admit.

Fear.  She could feel it emanating from them.  These people were afraid.

"Everyone has bad dreams," she heard someone say, and turned her attention to a small group nearby.  The speaker was a young woman, Nattie Barber, Evelyn remembered.  A young mother.  She watched as Nattie wrung her hands in a slow, rhythmic cycle, again and again.  The young woman's eyes were shadowed, her features drawn in lines of fatigue.

"It's because of the divorce," Nattie said.  "I'm sure that's what it is.  Timothy started having them right after, three weeks ago.  Every night.  He wakes up screaming, and..."  She shrugged, and glanced over to the corner of the room where several young children were gathered and overseen by the watchful eye of a teenaged girl, who was reading to them from a story book.  Evelyn followed her gaze and saw the sandy-haired head of Timothy in the bunch.  "I guess it's the sleep deprivation.  I've been really jumpy.  Jumping at shadows.  I thought for sure I saw someone in his room one night when he... when he woke me up.  But you know... sleep deprivation..."

A man in a velvet frock coat stepped closer to Nattie, and Evelyn realized that he, too, had been listening to the conversation.  He gave the woman a kind smile.  "And what did this person look like?  The one you saw in your son's room?"  Nattie turned to look at him with a blank expression, as if she had only just noticed him.

Evelyn raised an eyebrow as she peered at the man.  He looked like someone who had stepped directly out of the pages of a storybook: curly auburn hair, an angelic, aristocratic face, and, perhaps most bizarrely, Edwardian dress.  He held Nattie's gaze for a moment before she finally shrugged and answered.

"It was nothing," she said.  "Just a shadow.  Like I said, I've been really tired..."

The man nodded patiently, and was about to speak again, but his eyes fell on Evelyn.  His head tilted a little as he looked at her, and for a moment the expression on his face was so intense that she wanted to run and hide.  An ominous feeling settled over her, not necessarily because of him specifically, but as if his presence, his arrival, heralded something else, something dreadful, something that would effect her directly.  Something there would be no escape from.  

But then he smiled a smile that was a little too charming, nodded at her, and turned his attention back to the woman.  The feeling lifted, and she wondered why she was being so dramatic.

"All right then," he said, continuing the discussion.  "So it was a shadow.  What did the shadow look like?"  He gave Nattie another disarming smile, looking into her eyes.  "Come on, do tell.  Won’t you?  I'm very curious."

"It was... a man in a top hat," Nattie said, and her voice cracked as she said it.  Then, as if trying to make light of it, she laughed, but the sound was short and brittle.  "Silly, I know.  Sleep deprivation does weird things to the brain."  

The way she kept saying the words "sleep deprivation" made Evelyn think of a talisman to ward off evil.  If I don't believe in it, it can't hurt me, she thought.  As if that would make something any less real.

"What have Timmy's nightmares been about?" Evelyn asked.  Nattie turned to look at her, and seemed surprised that she was even there.  

"Oh... I don't know," Nattie stammered.  "Whatever it is kids usually have nightmares about, I guess."

"Monsters?" the man in the frock coat ventured.

"Yeah..."  Nattie frowned at him.

"A monster in a top hat, perhaps?" he persisted.

That seemed to be a step too far.  Nattie's eyes narrowed, but Evelyn could see the fear there plainly.  "That's... that's not funny at all.  Just because I said... doesn’t mean... that’s just-- Whoever you are, you should--  Who are you?"

Hands clasped behind his back, he dipped his head, a curiously Old World gesture.  "I do apologize if I've upset you; however, I wasn't intending to be funny.  I'm the Doctor.  And you are...?"

"Going somewhere else," Nattie said, and true to her word, moved away from him, her group of friends following close behind.

"Well, that didn't quite go as planned," he said, and then smiled again at Evelyn.  "Are you planning on running away from me too?"

"Not just yet," Evelyn said.  "Why were you asking her those questions?"

"Why were you listening so closely?" he countered.

"Leanne was my friend."  It wasn’t quite as non-sequitur in her mind as it sounded when spoken out loud without context.

"Yes yes yes, but...?"

"But what?"

He moved closer to her and looked down at her face, studying her.  Evelyn felt uncomfortably scrutinized-- and seen in ways most people never saw her.  Not the real her.  "But... you suspect something's amiss here, don't you?" he pressed.  "It isn't anything you can put your finger on, really, but you know all the same.  You can feel it.  Can't you?"

"You'd have to be blind not to notice something's off," she said finally.  "Leanne... she died... I don't know how she died.  But there's an empty casket.  There's an ongoing investigation.  And... I've heard rumors..."  She trailed off, wondering why she was sharing these things with this Doctor character.

"Yes?" he prodded.

"I heard rumors that her body was... mutilated somehow..."  She shrugged.  "I don't know if that's true."

"Ah.  Yes.  I'm afraid those rumors are true," he said, and watched her, waiting for her reaction.

"And you know this how...?"  

He beamed at her, as if they were discussing his favorite film or book and not the death of a human being, and patted his coat pockets.  "A remarkably astute question.  As it happens, I am investigating her death..."  He slid a hand in a pocket and riffled around until he seemed to find what he was looking for, and withdrew a slim, black leather billfold.  He glanced at it briefly, arching a brow at it, before opening it and showing her the card inside.  

She reached out and took the billfold from him before he could flip it closed.  "FBI?"  Her eyes narrowed skeptically.  She wasn't sure what an authentic FBI badge looked like, but this guy did not seem like a fed. There was something about him that was too... individualistic.  "’Special Agent John Smith,” she read, then peered up at him critically.  “Who're you, then?  Agent Mulder?  Investigating the strange and bizarre?"  Suddenly, she flashed him a smile, all sweetness and light.  “Shall I call your superior officer to confirm that you are who you say you are?”

"Mulder?”  He looked momentarily confused as he took the billfold back from her.  “No, no, no, I said, I'm the Doctor.  Just the Doctor," he clarified, and glanced down at the ID before putting the billfold back in his pocket.  "But yes, I do investigate the strange and bizarre, rather a lot actually."  He studied her face again.  "And you are...?"

"Evelyn," she said.  She gazed at him for a long moment, and he gazed back, as if waiting for her to make the judgement call that she was trying to make.  He had, she noted, neglected to answer or even acknowledge her challenge about phoning his superior.  "You're really trying to find out what happened to Leanne?" she asked.

He nodded, more solemn now.  "I am."

She opened her handbag and removed a business card from her wallet.  "I want you to keep me in the loop, Agent," she said, handing him the card, letting her stress on the word agent speak for itself.  "I don’t know who you are really, but that is not a request.  I'll help you however I can.  You can find me here on most days--" she indicated the text on the card-- "somewhere between nine in the morning and nine at night.  I close most nights these days."

He accepted the card.  "'Evelyn Alvar,'" he read out loud.  "'The Wonderland, Antiques and Curiosities.'"  He looked back up at her and nodded again.  "How very curious indeed.  Thank you."

He slid the card into his pocket, and then, from somewhere outside, somebody screamed.

[memoirsversefic]

A Grievous Error in Memory: Chapter One

Book One of the Series Memoirs of a Tourist

Characters: The Eighth Doctor, Evelyn Alvar

Rating: R (violence)

Contains spoilers for the Eighth Doctor Adventures book series

Prologue the First

Prologue the Second

Chapter One

Leanne McCormick slid her exhausted body into the worn leather of her car’s driver’s seat and rested her eyes for a moment before inserting the key into the ignition.

The day had been a long one, a double shift at the Lucky Platter, and she’d helped to close so that had made it even longer. She just wanted to get home, wash the day off of herself in the shower, and crawl into bed.

Not that she’d be sleeping very well.  But, it was going to improve. Her psychiatrist had told her what she was suffering from: a condition known as sleep paralysis. The body, having fallen asleep, releases a chemical in the brain– not that she could remember the name of said chemical right now– that effectively paralyzes the muscles and prevents the sleeper from physically acting out her dreams. Only, sometimes, the mind wakes up, still half-dreaming, finds that the body can’t move, panics, and begins to hallucinate.

It was all very scientific.  Clinical.  Decidedly not... supernatural.

Not evil.

It was the equivalent of a waking dream, nothing more, probably brought on by stress and anxiety, which she was being treated for. It was all really quite normal, he’d assured her. Many, many people experience it. There wasn’t really a sinister, terrifying shadow-figure sporting an incongruous top hat, hovering over her threateningly and fixing her with a red-eyed stare– the only features on the figure that she could see– and leaving her feeling like her very life was being drained away night after night. No, of course not. That would hardly be rational. It was a nightmare. That was all.

She maneuvered her old Plymouth around the bending curve of Mossy Oak Lane, preparing to merge with Main Street. The street lamps lining the road were flickering, dimming rapidly for a moment or two before blinking out completely. At the same time, her car began to sputter, and an instant later, the engine died. Even the headlights faded into darkness. The vehicle rolled forward several feet before it came to a stop. Leanne went rigid for a moment as an unaccountable sense of dread washed over her, prickling at the hairs on the back of her neck, and for one terrible instant, she felt as though she were being hunted.

She shook herself and sighed, rubbing her eyes. Don’t go getting all superstitious now, she told herself, though the feeling of terror was still palpable. Cars break down all the time. She’d have to call her husband to come pick her up, she supposed.

A fluid movement ahead of her caught her eye. Leanne squinted, frowning, as she saw the shape moving towards her car. It was dark with the street lamps having gone out, but the moon was full and peeking out from behind the wispy clouds, and she could easily make out the silhouette of a shadowy figure.

A shadowy figure in a top hat.

Her heart skipped a beat and began thudding wildly in her chest. No, she told herself, struggling to mash her emotions back down into some semblance of calm, It’s just some person out walking. People do that.

The figure drew closer, and she saw the red eyes, blood red eyes gazing into her soul, and no of course not, she was just hallucinating, obviously, it was just a hallucination, or maybe she was actually dreaming, and oh God it’s walking right up to my car–

It’s going to kill me, she thought, she knew, and that thought galvanized her into action, sent her scrambling to unlatch her seat belt, to open the door, to flee on foot away from her car and the steadily approaching thing that was now pursuing her.

She ran. Casting a glance over her shoulder, she couldn’t see the creature, whatever the hell it was (It can’t be real, it can’t be, how can it be real–), and for an instant, she thought perhaps she had escaped it, or maybe it was never there to begin with and she was just having a psychotic break–

The shadow-figure in the top hat loomed before her, its red red eyes fixing her with a stare that felt like hot blood filling her lungs, and she froze, slammed to a stop because suddenly she couldn’t move, and suddenly her muscles were paralyzed, and she sank to her knees and heard a low, keening sound that she realized was her own terrified moan. And she could feel it drawing herself out of herself, could feel it pulling at everything that made her her, and she was becoming a wisp of nothing that would break apart and float away in the breeze, and it didn’t stop it wasn’t stopping oh God it isn’t stopping it was going to swallow her whole–

Leanne McCormick breathed her last, slumped sideways on the pavement, her features twisted in a mask of horror in a gaunt, skeletal face. The creature, satisfied for the moment, slipped without a sound back into the shadows, leaving the remnants of its meal lying in the road.

[memoirsversefic]

A Grievous Error in Memory: Prologue the Second

Book One of the Series Memoirs of a Tourist

Characters: The Eighth Doctor, Evelyn Alvar

Rating: R (violence)

Contains spoilers for the Eighth Doctor Adventures book series

Prologue the First

Prologue the Second

The Doctor was, he discovered to his chagrin, unaccustomed to solitude.

It was a strange thing to learn about one's self, when the greater bulk of one's memories consisted of wandering, alone and through linear time, across the surface of the Earth for one hundred years.  A time far more expansive than the time he had spent traveling with Fitz, Anji, and then later, Trix.

The years before all of that were dark.  Blank.  However, now he knew why.  It was a thing he did not enjoy contemplating.

They all were gone now, his friends.  All living their own lives, in their own world.  He realized that he had never particularly thought of them as a fleeting presence in his life, only because he wasn't given to such ruminations.  It was pointless really, dwelling on the inevitable, the contrast between his life and theirs.  Better, really, that they should leave of their own accord, where they could remain alive in his mind-- absent, but alive.  In a sense, this allowed them to live as long as he.  They would always be there, in their time, like the dancing figures on Keats' Grecian urn.  

They were the present presence in his life, while they were there.  Now they were not there, but they were alive, and he was alone again, and attempting to hold a conversation with an empty console room.

"That's that, then.  Another day, another mad computer overloaded by an unanswerable riddle."  He smiled a little ruefully, as if somehow disappointed by the ease of his victory. "Honestly, though, one would think such a blatant weakness would be noted more often."  His hands flew over the console, absently, setting the time ship into cacophonic motion.  The TARDIS, groaning, shifted herself between worlds, spinning through the crackling, screaming pressure of the Vortex.

He had set no particular destination.  He felt aimless, a bit turbulent, like the Time Winds that surged around the outer shell of the TARDIS.  He just wanted to move.  So move he did, in a whirl of rumpled green velvet and flyaway auburn curls, dancing gleefully around the console, flipping switches, punching buttons, spinning spinners. He hummed to himself all the while, an aria from a Venduvian opera that he could not quite recall the name of, because the title itself was quite protracted, the length of a small novel.  It was the fashion of the time and place; nobody could ever quite remember opera titles in that day and age.  Succinctly, it translated to something like The Death of the Mountain as Told By the Valley that Had Been Eaten By the Second Autumn Moon.

He had just reached the part of the aria where D'legsna kills Verid in a blaze of dramatic tenor when something on the scanner caught his eye.  A flash of billowing white, like a ghost.

A figure.  A... person.  A woman-- white hair, white skin, white dress, everything white, as if she had been carved from marble and brought to life, gliding on the Time Winds like a sylph.

The Doctor stared.  His aria stuttered to silence.  

He had no memories, and he knew why, understood that it had been essential.  But they did often leave inconvenient gaps in his mind, when he encountered something that he felt he should know about, but didn't.  What he felt now, on seeing this improbable woman not falling, but soaring through the Time Vortex, was not memory.  Not precisely.  It was something else, anchored in a different part of his mind, long dormant, and yes, forgotten, but undeniably there.

He watched the figure for exactly three seconds before it began to fade from view.  And, his jaw set and his eyes glinting with a mixture of curiosity and ferocious determination, his hands flew again over the controls as he commanded his ship to lock onto this figure's course and follow her to her destination.

Next Chapter: Chapter One

[memoirsversefic]

A Grievous Error in Memory: Prologue the First

Book One of the Series Memoirs of a Tourist

Characters: The Eighth Doctor, Evelyn Alvar

Rating: R (violence)

Contains spoilers for the Eighth Doctor Adventures book series

Other chapters:

Prologue the Second

Chapter One

Author’s note:  

This book has been a long time coming.  It’s had a number of false starts, a number of incarnations (much like a particular Time Lord), and even a number of different universes.  

Evelyn has stayed with me since her inception, ever a part of my dreams.  She’s here to stay, and though I’ve told bits and pieces of her story before, playing in the collaborative writing pool of the Tumblr roleplay community, I have always wanted to get out the full narrative, from her veiled past to her uncertain future, but it kept stuttering to a halt every time I tried to do so.  

I’m hoping this time will be different.

Memoirs of a Tourist is, at its heart, a Doctor Who story, because it does involve the Doctor quite directly, but it is more so the story of Evelyn Alvar, of her past, of her discovery of herself, of her journeys and perilous adventures.  

I am writing this as a sequel of sorts-- and do consider it an AU-- to the Eighth Doctor Adventures series of novels.  It will be spoiler-heavy, and will also contain the more “adult” themes of the novels (such as graphic violence and body horror), so beware.

Prologue the First

Evelyn Alvar was flying.

A part of her knew she was dreaming, that the part of her mind that drew her here was her dreaming-mind, though at the same time, it was real, and tangible, and she could feel the wind tearing through her wild mane as she hurtled through the Storm-Tunnel.

She had words for these things, phrases, because what else was one to do when confronted every night with a reality that defied conventional explanation?  The Storm-Tunnel, the Phase, the Shift, the Traveling.  Every night, a moment of pure ecstatic dive through a maelstrom, emerging in worlds magical and alien and beautiful (or ugly, sometimes they were ugly, and terrifying).  Every night, an exchange of one form for another.  She exchanged her wavy brunette hair with its practical shoulder-length cut for a waist-length mass of silver-white tresses, exchanged her nut-brown eyes for vivid, jewel-like purple ones, exchanged her pale but relatively normal complexion for a ghostly, marble-like tone, exchanged her comfortable pajamas for a diaphanous white dress-- always the same dress, never any other, as though her Traveling-self had been preserved in this form and wearing these clothes.  She never could quite understand this odd transformation.  It simply was.  It was a part of her.  Like the Traveling.

And it tore through her energy and her reserves of strength, leaving her breathless and exhausted, but she didn’t care.

She emerged in a desert.  She assumed it was a desert because it was cloudless, because the ground beneath her feet felt loose and fine like sand, because she could feel the dryness in the air like sandpaper across her skin.  The desert was blue.  Blue-tinted sand, blue rock formations, blue cliffs looming in the distance, a thousand hues of blue blending and swirling and merging together in an intricate dance, all beneath a deep amber sky and two golden suns that poured yellow light into the blue terrain until the desert looked like an ocean, translucent hints of turquoise and sea-green shimmering among the blues.

She could hear a beeping sound, insistent, electronic, distant.  

She didn’t have long, she knew.  She dropped into a crouch and reached down with one pale hand, touching the sand, letting it pass over and between her fingers.  It felt like warm velvet.  Her fingertips brushed against something rough, and she lifted it.  It was a piece of glass, natural glass blasted by the sun, and it looked like a nebula to her eyes, something celestial and made of stardust, whorls of every shade of blue imaginable curling and twisting and shimmering within its depths.  Carefully, she held it in her palm as she rose to her feet.  She could already feel the Shift beginning to take her, to pull her into the Phase, by which she would enter the Storm-Tunnel and return home.

Another heady rush through the eddy (and was that another flash of blue she saw, spinning past so quickly that it scarcely registered?), and everything began to fade.  The beeping was getting louder, as if it were right next to her.  She turned her head, felt the pillow smoosh and shift beneath it, felt the smoothness of the sheets beneath her body, and coaxed her eyelids to open.  Her bedside alarm was blaring.  One hand flopped loosely onto the snooze button, silencing the noise, and she took a breath, the familiar weakness flooding her body as she tried to adjust to her everyday form again.

It took her a moment to remember where she had been, and lifted her other hand to look at the chunk of alien desert glass she had taken home with her.  A soft smile touched her lips as she turned it over and over in her fingers, admiring the elegant patterns.