Chapter 3 (Scars)
Wherever Ace was it was cold. Cold and grey. And fuzzy. She frowned as she looked around herself. Everything was in black and white, but her surroundings were in a haze. It was like looking at something in soft focus. The Doctor was standing a few metres in front of her frantically looking around himself. He was shouting something, but she couldn't hear him. All she could hear was a faint rumble of gentle wind all around her.
Dudley came rushing past her and she could see him talking to the Doctor, but, again, she couldn't hear either of them.
"Doctor!" she shouted. Her voice didn't echo around the toilet. It seemed to stop dead as soon as she said anything. No reverberations or anything.
"DOCTOR!" she said again.
"He can't hear you," came the familiar, scouse accent.
She turned around. Standing there in a grey t-shirt and jeans was the friend she thought she had lost. He still looked the same as the day he had left them. His blue eyes twinkling and his blonde hair cut short. He smiled at her reaction to him.
"Hex! What happened?"
"Bet you thought you'd never see me again, McShane," he said.
"You can say that again. What the hell's going on around here?"
"Yes," said a female voice from back towards the toilet entrance, "because two's company, but three is most definitely a crowd."
Ace frowned. Standing there was a woman in her 30's in a black dress, her red hair tied back into a ponytail. She looked strikingly beautiful.
"Who are you?" said Ace.
The woman smiled and held out her hand. "Eleanor. Eleanor Wragby."
"Someone better tell me what's going on right now."
Dudley and the Doctor exited the toilet and returned to the bar area. The Doctor took his hat off, threw it onto the table, checked Ace's notes and then shook his head.
"Where did she go?" said Dudley, scratching the back of his neck and looking around the pub as if expecting Ace to suddenly reappear.
"Mr Fenner," said the Doctor, suddenly right in Dudley's face, "have there been any recorded disappearances in this pub?"
"Disappearances? No," said Dudley.
The Doctor groaned in frustration.
"No, wait a minute. There was something. A bit of a tall tale if you ask me, but might be of some use."
"Go on then," said the Doctor impatiently.
"It was in the paper at the time. Bit of a legend from this place. One the punters like to talk about.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said the Doctor, motioning for Dudley to carry on.
“During the war a young woman was in here. She struck up a conversation with this gentleman. He went to the toilet but when he came back out the people were dressed in completely different clothes. Looked like something out of the early 1900’s, ya’know, with bonnets and bow-ties. That sort of thing. He got spooked, ran back to the toilet, and when he got up the courage to come back out everything was back to normal."
"Interesting. It sounds like some sort of time slip."
"Well I don't know much about that, but she got curious and went to take a look for herself and never came back. Vanished without a trace."
"Fascinating!" said the Doctor. "Do go on."
"The police couldn't explain it. Neither could the poor chap. The weird thing is that nobody ever reported anyone missing. They didn’t even get her name. I was just a lad at the time."
"Keep going," urged the Doctor.
"Well that's it. It just became a bit of a legend of Gallows Inn."
The Doctor was lost his thoughts, nodding to everything Dudley was telling him.
"Do you think the same thing happened to your friend?"
"Both of them I'm afraid," said the Doctor.
"Both? Look, I may be getting on here, but I know how to follow the plot of reasonably complicated stories. You're not telling me the full picture."
"You say Ace was concerned when she saw the name Thomas and that phone number?"
"That's right."
"Thomas is likely to be my friend, Thomas Hector Schofield. We had a...falling out not too long ago. The name written in the soap in the sink was Hex, which is what Thomas likes to call himself."
"Hex! That's right," said Dudley, his eyes widening ever so slightly. "Hex was the name this Thomas gave to me. I told him it was a pretty daft name so he told me Thomas instead. He's the lad who came in here saying he'd lost a ring."
"Yes," said the Doctor, nodding. The pieces were slotting into place now.
"Look, Doctor," said Dudley, collecting his empty glass and Ace's half-finished drink from the table, "maybe you ought to tell me what happened to this Hex."
Two weeks ago
It was a couple of weeks back when we had our falling out. Hex had been travelling with us for some time and we had just left Victorian England. An alien - a Barabus - had invaded a children's orphanage and unfortunately three of the children were killed in a fire that the Barabus had caused.
We defeated the Barabus, made sure the other children were safe, and then returned to the TARDIS.
"Come on then, Doc," said Hex to me at the time, "let's get this old crate moving." Hex was very new to travelling in time and space and wasn't as knowledgeable on the do's and don'ts as Ace was.
"And where would you like to go next," I said to him.
"Anywhere but here," said Ace gloomily. "Come on, Professor, this place is depressing me."
"Your choice Hex. We could all do with a break."
Hex had looked a little confused with my suggestion of a break. "Well surely there's only one place we can go."
"Florana," I smiled, knowing full well that the sea on Florana would do wonders for my aching back.
"Florana? No, Doctor. We need to go back in time."
I was confused at Mr Hex's statement. "To what time period?" I opened up the input keyboard, reading to type in the time and coordinates.
"Just before the orphanage burned down."
"I beg your pardon?" I asked, confused. You have to understand that, as much as I like travelling with your species, Mr Fenner, I don't always understand how they work.
"We need to save those kids," said Hex, looking at me as if it was a given. As if it was the only thing that should be done.
"Hex," groaned Ace, shaking her head and looking at the ground.
"What? What's the problem?"
"Do you wanna tell him about the web of time," said Ace, leaning against the console and looking dejected.
"Screw the web of time," said Hex. "Those kids need saving. We've got a time machine so why don't we use it?"
"Mr Hex, there are some events in time that must happen no matter what. Those children, as sad as it seems, have died. They were always going to die and we cannot change that."
"They're just three little children," said Hex. "They can't surely have had that much of an impact on the timeline if they survive."
"Who knows," I said with a shrug, wondering if, in hindsight, one of them may have grown up to be the next Adolf Hitler or Davros.
"You can't just be that blasé about it!" said Hex to me.
This frustrated me. I, more than anyone, was truly devastated at the deaths of those innocents, but I was powerless to stop it. For a brief moment, I considered going along with Hex's request and saving them, but I had been involved in hiccups in time before and hiccups are always difficult to get rid of.
"It's not that the Doctor doesn't care," said Ace, looking at Hex sadly, "but things happen and things can't always change."
"Then what's the point in any of this?"
"Because," I continued, "you have to look at what good came out of this. The children that we did save from the alien. They are the positive that's come from the negative."
"I don't care," said Hex. "None of them should have died."
"Hex..." groaned Ace as Hex stormed off out of the TARDIS console room.
But as it turns out Hex didn't go to his room to sulk. Instead he went to a storage room beside the library. After his first trip Ace had shown him around and inside the storage room was a box of time rings. I’d done my best to collect them all up from the rogue Time Lords that were still out there. The less dangerous elements the better. Hex had taken one of these and re-entered the console room with a look of determination on his face.
"Mr Hex," I had said to him as he stood there with his arm outstretched, the brass bracelet around his wrist, "you don't even know how to use one of them."
"Ace told me that you just have to think about where you're going and you turn the dial and end up there. If you won't take me then I'll go it alone."
"But one kink in the time vortex can knock you off course. Even the most experienced time ring traveller can encounter problems. It takes utter, complete concentration."
"Will you take me back there?" said Hex, his hand on the dial at the top of the ring.
"I can't," I said.
"Hex, listen to the Doctor. He knows what he's talking about."
"Last chance, Doc," said Hex. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he was scared to use the ring, but he was also determined.
I shook my head sadly at him. "I'm sorry."
"Then this is goodbye. Doctor, I'm sure you have your principles, but I have mine." Hex look at Ace. "Don't become like him, eh?"
Ace didn't reply.
Hex gripped the dial tightly and turned. There was a blue flash of light and he disappeared from the console room.
In hindsight I should have checked on him. Ace had begged me to track him and find out where he had gone, but I was so frustrated with him that I believed that Hex had to understand the hard way. It was my intention to track him down in a little while and bring him back - or at least take him home - but we never got around to it.
Five Years Ago
Hex felt sick as he tumbled around and around through the twisting maelstrom of the time vortex. He couldn't get a grip on himself and he was starting to lose focus. He wondered how people could travel this way. He started to believe what the Doctor had said about kinks in time knocking you off course. It wasn't necessarily a kink - it was more of the fact that there was no way he couldn't concentrate on where he was going.
He reached out a hand and there was a flash of blue around him like a force field. The bubble he was in was protecting him from the effects of the time vortex.
He retched as he turned over and span around. It was like being in some giant, intergalactic washing machine. He managed to stop himself from throwing up, but now his head was pounding. He couldn't handle this anymore. He twisted the dial on the time ring and there was another flash. It felt like he was being sucked through a vacuum cleaner and he screamed. He tried to pull the ring off his wrist in desperation. As it slipped from his arm his heard a loud bang.
He then felt himself tumbling through thin air where he landed hard on solid ground. He tried to get his bearings. He was on a wet, concrete pavement and he had landed with his back against a white, stone wall. There was a slight drizzle of rain and it was night time. In front of him was the road and a church on the other side with various ancient gravestone dotted around.
He allowed his breathing to slow and jumped as a car flashed past in the rain, it's headlights illuminating him. If there were cars then he most definitely wasn't in Victorian England.
In a moment of panic his hand went to his wrist. The ring was gone with only a few scratch marks left where he had panicked and scratched to get it off. He closed his eyes and gently knocked the back of his head against the wall behind him in frustration. Now he was stuck somewhere else and in a totally different time.
He clambered to his feet and looked up at the building. A sign outside swung ominously in the rain. It was a pub - Gallows Inn - and the sign showed a picture of a green hill with wooden gallows sat on the top.
Very inviting, thought Hex. Another sign on the side of the door proclaimed that there were "ROOMS AVAILABLE INSIDE". He sighed. He checked his pockets for his wallet. The Doctor had given him a collection of coinage and notes from throughout Earth's history. He wasn't exactly sure when he was, but the tax disc on a nearby car said that the tax was valid until June 2002, so he couldn't be far off that date. He didn't have a lot of money, but he figured that he could get himself a cheap room at the pub and then hang about in the hope that the Doctor might come and find him. That’s if he was even looking for him.
He still didn’t want to think about the Doctor.
He went into the pub. It was quiet with only a couple of old men sat in the corner beside the juke box with a quarter of their pints each left.
The barman turned from cleaning a glass and smiled. "Hello young sir," he said with a cheery smile. "We'll be closing up soon I'm afraid."
"No worries," said Hex.
"You okay, lad?" said the barman.
Hex sighed. "Not really. Just got a lot on my plate."
"Anything I can help you with? The wife used to say that I was a good listener."
Hex looked around the pub. It looked cold and uninviting. He didn't really want to stay here, but he wondered that if he found the time ring he may be able to jump forwards or try and find the Doctor again.
"I don't suppose you've seen a ring around here?"
"A ring?" said the barman.
"Yeah. Well, it's more of a bracelet really. A big, brass bracelet that would fit around your wrist."
"I'm not sure," said the man. "But if I come across something like that then I can call you, perhaps?"
"Yeah, great."
"Is there anything else?" said the barman.
Hex sighed and closed his eyes. "I just fell out with some mates, that's all. I need to go back and say sorry to them. Sorry for being so stupid and walking out."
The barman smiled knowingly at him. "We all make mistakes, my young friend. I wish I'd patched things up with me brother before he died. I can't ever change that now."
"I don't know if I can go back either. Not without that ring."
The barman went under the bar and pulled out a notepad. "I'll take down your number and if I find this ring of yours I'll give you a ring." The man looked up at Hex and laughed. "Ring? Get it?"
"Oh yeah. Real comedian, mate," said Hex sarcastically.
The man cleared his through and returned to his pencil. "My name’s Dudley. What's your name, son?"
"Hex."
"Funny name isn't it? Is it a nickname? Hex?"
"Just put down Thomas," said Hex, irritation creeping into his voice. He pulled his mobile out of his pocket. The screen was blank. It must have been damaged during his fall. He gave the barman the number, not holding out much hope, and then had an idea.
I fell outside, he thought to himself. It can't hurt to take another look for the ring.
Hex made his excuses, thanked the barman and then left the pub. By now the rain had stopped and the ground was already beginning to dry in the wind. There was no sign of the ring in the street so he carried on walking until he reached a set of wooden gates set into an archway that led to the yard of the Gallows Inn.
He knelt down and put his head to the ground so he could see under the gates. His heart leapt. There it was! The time ring, rain droplets sprinkled on top of it, but still there next to a barrel.
He checked nobody was looking and then hoisted himself up and over the gate, landing with a splash on the cobbles the other side. He smiled as he knelt down and picked up the ring. He wasn't that comfortable about using it again, but he could at least try. He knew the TARDIS was in the vortex when he left it, so he hoped he might still get back there. He'd try and smooth out the disagreements about what had happened. He was about to put the ring on his wrist when he noticed something - it was shimmering. It was vibrating. The ring was getting warmer. It felt like constant static electricity building up through his fingers. He felt like it was being pulled towards the centre of the yard.
He threw the ring to the ground and it hit the ground with a flash of light.
And then Hex was gone.
Ace was sat on the floor whilst Hex leaned on the wash basin. The woman, Eleanor, was still beside the door. She had heard Hex's tale already, but wanted to hear it again. She was incredibly intrigued about where he had come from.
"So what happened when you got here?" said Ace.
"I freaked out. I shouted, but nobody heard me. The ring had disintegrated so there was no way out that way. Then Dudley came out and I tried to get his attention. I concentrated hard - like in that film from the 90's with that bloke as a ghost - and managed to push one of those barrels backwards and forwards."
"We've seen the video," said Ace with a grin. "Proper little poltergeist."
"It was hard work, McShane, I can tell you that. When the silly sod just went inside I got angry and thumped the barrel."
"He heard you," said Ace. She thought for a moment. "You slipping into this place must have buggered up his video tape. It lost a whole hour."
"After that I found my way inside and then met Eleanor. We've been stuck here ever since."
"But it's been five years, Hex!" said Ace. "At least five years since the barrel incident. Only two weeks since the orphanage for me."
"Yes, it’s curious," said Eleanor. "It seems time moves differently over in this...realm," she said, waving her hand about to find the right words. "What year is it now, young lady? It's difficult to keep track when you're stuck here."
"We arrived in 2006," said Ace.
"Would you believe that I've been here for 65 years?"
"What?!" splutted Ace.
"When I arrived it was 1941. I was in here having a drink with a young gentleman I had just met. He went to use the bathroom and returned with his face as white as a ghost saying he had seen the Edwardian days or some such nonsense. Well, I went to have a look myself and that's when I appeared here."
"Well boggling," said Ace.
"Indeed," said Eleanor. "I've been trying to find a way out ever since, but with no luck."
"But you said time moves differently?" said Ace.
"Yeah," said Hex. "I soon found out that. It seems when you come closer into contact with someone in the real world then time slows to a more steady, normal pace, but when they aren't there it speeds on. It only feels like about a month for me."
"Then we better get back to the bar quickly!" said Ace. "If it's true that time moves quicker when we're not near someone in the real dimensions, then we could be a few days away from the Doctor by now!"
To be continued...
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