Chapter 2 (Stories)
Try as he may, Dudley had been unable to explain the mysterious disappearing hour from five years ago, nor the faint figure that had only appeared for the first few frames at 1am.
Ace, always a tough, strong young woman, had actually felt pretty chilled by the video and felt anxious as they returned to the bar.
"Can't believe I didn't spot this before," said Dudley, pouring himself a brandy and downing it in one gulp.
"Fair do's Dudley, it was five years ago," said Ace.
"And the figure only appears for a few frames," said the Doctor. "Unless you had paused the video right at the start you never would have noticed."
"So what do you think happened?" said Dudley, sitting back at the table with the mysterious strangers.
"First you need to tell us a little more about what else has been happening here," said the Doctor.
"Not much after the barrel. Not at first anyway. It was a curiosity to me and the rest of the bar staff but we soon forgot about it, as you do." He leaned back in his chair and scratched at his bushy, white moustache. He had become so used to things going on in the pub that he never really gave much thought to the individual cases.
"I'll come clean with you, Mr Fenner," said the Doctor, leaning forward across the table. "I've been watching over this place for some time. Since that first incident actually."
Ace frowned. "And you never told me?"
"When I say watching over it, I actually mean tracking the incidents." He turned to Ace. "The TARDIS picked up a disturbance in time back on November 4th 2001 and I kept an eye on the timeline until things started to occur more frequently."
Dudley held his hands up. "Hold on a minute. Disturbances in time? And what's a TARDIS?"
"All in good time, Mr Fenner." The Doctor got up from the chair. Ace got up to join him but he put a hand on her shoulder for her to sit back down. "You stay with Mr Fenner. He's got a lot of incidents to recount." He turned back to Dudley. "Do you mind if I take a look around?"
Dudley was unsure, but this man seemed to know something. No amount of psychics, mediums or priests had helped him so far. What was one more eccentric pottering around going to harm? "Knock yourself out, mate."
"Thank you," said the Doctor, jamming his hat back onto his head.
"Be careful, Professor," said Ace.
"I always am," he said as he disappeared to the vicinity of the rest rooms.
Ace watched him disappear into the shadows and then turned back to Dudley. She brushed the hair out of her eyes and then smiled. "Now, Dudders, tell me what else has been going on around here."
The Doctor exited the main bar area and walked slowly down the corridor that led towards the toilets. The old floorboards creaked under him and before he reached the entrance to the male toilets he stopped. He stood listening for a good few minutes. He could hear Ace and Dudley talking back the way he had come. To the left was a very short staircase leading only a couple of metres up the wall to a small, wooden door. He walked up the steps and tried the old, brass doorknob. It was locked. He considered going back to get the key off Dudley, but decided against it. It was best to keep the old man out of this. It was probably a store cupboard or something.
He was about to turn and leave when he heard the slightest creak from the floorboards behind him. He turned but there was nothing there.
"I know you're there," said the Doctor. "I know you can hear me." He stepped down the staircase and back into the corridor. "I'm not going to hurt you."
Nothing.
The Doctor sighed, waited a few moments and then made his way to the male toilets.
Dudley was on his second whiskey while Ace furiously wrote things down in a notepad she had pulled out from the rucksack.
"First things first," she had said to him. "I know this might be a tough question, but have you got any reason to suspect that this could be your wife?"
"What?!" spluttered Dudley. "How did you know I was married let alone that she'd died."
Ace pointed to his wedding ring. "A wedding ring but no wife about. Even if you didn't live here, you'd have gone home by now if you had anything to get back to."
Dudley was lost for words. He had never even considered that it could be his wife haunting the place.
"You keep turning the ring on your finger as well. You miss her."
"I do," Dudley said, not meaning to have said that out aloud.
"We all miss someone," said Ace softly. "But it's not her, is it?"
"I don't think so," said Dudley. "And why would she be here anyway? She’ll be up there with her old sister enjoying a whiskey.” He smiled at the memory of her.
Ace smiled. "So after the barrels, what happened?"
Dudley took a deep breath. "The bar staff started hearing footsteps in the corridor towards the toilets. Heavy steps as well. Sometimes running and scuffling sounds." He looked back towards the shadows. He thought he could hear the Doctor talking to someone.
"Ignore him," said Ace. "Go on."
"Some of the customers used to throw 1's and 2p's into the urinal and at the end of the night we'd fish 'em out and clean 'em up."
"That's disgusting," said Ace.
"It all went to charity though," said Dudley. "Sometimes customers would say they'd thrown the coins in and the coins had flipped back out at them. Spooked a few of them I can tell you."
"Then there were the toilets flushing by themselves, the taps turning on. One night I locked up and one of my pumps was pouring out beer."
"It could have been a fault," said Ace.
"Have you ever pulled a pint, love?" said Dudley with a laugh. "You need to put force into them to get them to pour." Dudley noticed Ace's glass was empty. "Did you want another?"
"Yeah, go on," she said. She leaned in. "Pop a drop of vodka in it, yeah?"
"Won't your uncle be mad?"
"I'm a grown woman, Dudley," she said. "Just one isn't going to hurt anyone."
The Doctor stood in the toilet looking down at the urinal. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet and he turned around in a full circle, taking in the surroundings - the white and black tiled walls, the slightly damp floor, the battered door leading to the single toilet cubicle and the faint smell of urine mixed with cleaning chemicals.
"Come on," said the Doctor. "Why would you want to hang around a smelly old place like this?"
Still nothing.
"You've been scaring the bar staff out of their wits with your games."
Silence again.
"Stop being a coward!"
The Doctor's voice echoed around the toilet and as if the punctuate the Doctor's taunt, his hat flew off the top of his head, landing underneath the sink.
"Oh, very clever," he said darkly. He crossed over to pick it up and as he got back up the tap turned on, splashing cold water over his coat. "Parlour tricks!" he said with a laugh.
The tap switched off and his hat was snatched from his hands, this time landing in the watery sink.
"What's the purpose in this?" said the Doctor, grabbing his hat and patting it down. "I've come here to help you; come to release you, but you have to cooperate with me."
The Doctor's attention was drawn to something else - on the side of the sink was a squeezy bottle of soap and very slowly the soap was drip-dripping out into the sink.
The Doctor frowned and picked up the bottle, opening the top and pouring everything into the sink, creating a gloopy, green mess.
"Go on then," he said, looking down at the liquid soap.
Slowly but surely, as if being written by an invisible finger, letters started to form in the liquid soap.
Ace was feeling a little more relaxed as she wrote in the notepad about Dudley's exploits in the pub. Now she was getting to know the man, she was actually enjoying his company. Beneath the tough exterior there was a jolly old man locked away. A man that had run away to hide after the death of his wife.
"By far the worst time," said Dudley, "was when I had decided to let out some of the rooms upstairs. We would have a member of staff working at night time if we had anyone staying over. One night - must have been about 3 years back - he said one of the people staying here - a business man I'm led to believe - came running down the stairs in just his boxers and a vest, his face as white as those walls there."
Ace took a sip of her lemonade and vodka and nodded for Dudley to carry on.
"He reckoned he'd spotted a woman sat beside the window on a chair just staring at him. He closed his eyes, opening them and she was gone. He tried to get back to sleep when he felt these cold hands around his ankles, trying to drag him down the bed. He jumped up and legged it down into the bar. Didn't even stop to go back and get his things. He demanded a taxi out of the town and back to where he came from and we never heard from him again."
"Well freaky," said Ace.
"Actually," said Dudley, looking distant, "Now I come to think about it, there was something else that happened the night the barrels started moving. The first incident."
"Okay, well anything you remember might be important."
"This young guy came here. He looked a bit glum, talking about a ring he had lost."
Ace frowned.
"Said he needed to go back and say sorry to his friends and that he regretted walking out on them."
Ace eyes shifted from side to side, thinking.
"I told him I didn't know where the ring was but if we found it we'd let him know. Took a telephone number and then he cleared off. Never saw him again. Or his ring."
"Do you have the telephone number?"
"That I do."
"After five years?!"
“Never get rid of a phone number.”
Dudley got up, went behind the bar and pulled out his large, leather-bound notepad. He brought it over to the table and opened it up to the back, revealing faded writing on scruffy lined paper. He looked down the list and spotted the number he was after. "Here you go. Thomas his name was."
Ace looked at the name and then the number. Her eyes widened in disbelief as she bolted from the table and made for the toilets.
“What?” said Dudley, frowning as he watched Ace go. “Did you know him or something?”
The Doctor stared down at the words "HELP ME" that had been written in the pool of soap. He frowned and then messed the soap up again, erasing the words.
"Who are you?"
Slowly the words began to spell something else out.
H
The Doctor's eyes narrowed.
E
He shook his head in disbelief.
X
His eyes stared straight down at the word: HEX
"Hex?"
Ace yelled and barged through the door. She skidded to a halt on the wet toilet floor. The Doctor was momentarily stunned to see her.
"It's Hex, Doctor! It's Hex!"
The windows shattered, the taps burst into life, water gushing from them. The Doctor ducked out of the way of the splintering glass...
And then Ace vanished in a flash of light.
To be continued...
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