Fic: What I Did on My Summer Holiday, by Jethro Cane (1/1)
Title: What I Did on My Summer Holiday, by Jethro Cane (1/1)
Characters/Pairings: Ten, the Master, Dee Dee Blasco, Biff Cane, Jethro Cane, Val Cane, Professor Hobbes, the Hostess, Sky Silvestry (Doctor/Master if you squint really hard)
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 3135
Warnings: Character death
Summary: There's something even scarier on board the Crusader 50 than the entity possessing Sky Silvestry.
A/N: Written for the Doctor Who Fic Bingo Ficathon, for which this was my card. My Bingo is the bottom row: AU, handcuffs, Bad Wolf, the Master, Midnight Entity. Set in an AU where Lucy Saxon is not such a good shot. Thanks to ladychi for the beta.
On my summer holiday, I killed someone.
You’ll assume that I didn’t mean to, or that it was an accident, but it wasn’t. The wolf came to the door and I let it right in. You think you wouldn't?
***
Jethro sprawled in his chair, one leg thrown up over the arm, head tilted back to count the dimples in the ceiling tile. He found himself counting things a lot, lately. The numbers pushed out all other thoughts. He’d always been bad at maths, and this was part of the appeal. It took a great deal of concentration to count the windows of a building, multiplying the number on each floor by the number of storeys to arrive at the total. It didn’t come naturally, but he could no longer trust the things that did.
The building climate control system turned off with a shudder, and the silence startled him out of his counting. Somewhere down the hall, a door coldly slid open and shut. Footsteps echoed, and Jethro made a final effort to arrange himself in the chair for projection of maximum levels of not caring.
Mr. Rawl entered the waiting room and extended a hand in greeting.
“Nice to see you, Mr. Cane,” Mr. Rawl said in an infuriatingly congenial voice. Infuriating because Jethro had never once, in all his years at school, seen Mr. Rawl be anything but congenial. He wondered about his home life, wondered whether he shook his partner’s hand and said, “Nice to see you!” prior to having very neat, very tidy, very polite sex.
Jethro stood, weakly shook the proffered hand, but said nothing. He shambled behind Mr. Rawl all the way back down the hall, through the sliding door and into an office dominated by an enormous desk.
“Do you know why Ms. Breen sent you to see me today?” Mr. Rawl said in that same officious tone while looking quite meaningfully at a piece of e-paper. Definitely not a trick question, then.
“I didn’t make it up,” Jethro said, just wanting to skip all of the preliminary bullshit about how shocked and troubled Ms. Breen had been by his essay. “How come every time I tell the truth, everyone else just tells me I’m ‘acting out,’ like I’m three years old and got my toys taken away?”
“Now, Jethro-can I call you Jethro?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Jethro, I want you to know that we care about you very much. If there is something you need to talk about, I’m here to listen.”
“I don’t have anything else to say about it,” Jethro said, shifting in Mr. Rawl’s uncomfortable office chair.
“You should know that I’ve already spoken to your mother.”
Jethro rolled his eyes. “Great.”
“She says that you had nothing to do with those deaths, other than as a witness. I’m sure that must have been extremely upsetting for you-”
“Shut up,” Jethro said, almost under his breath.
Mr. Rawl pushed back from his desk. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, and she’s lying.” He stood, rolled up the right sleeve of his shirt. “Do you see this?”
Mr. Rawl looked wary, like a man trying not to frighten small game before he can get a proper shot in.
“Look.” Jethro placed his wrist even closer to Mr. Rawl’s face, forced him to see the faint pink scar there. “I didn’t do this to myself, so you can put your self-harm pamphlets away. Whether you believe me or not, I have to live with this reminder. I do, not you, and not her.” He rolled his sleeve back down and turned to leave. “Thanks and everything, but I’ll let you know if I need your pity.” He pressed the button and the door slid smoothly open. “I’ll make an appointment.”
It was a pretty cool exit, that. But he didn’t feel cool. He felt like he was suffocating in a world more airless and hostile than the glittering surface of Midnight.
***
When the two men first boarded the Crusader 50 transport, Jethro thought that the shorter, quieter one seemed like he might potentially be okay. The other-the tall, bird-like one who couldn’t seem to stop talking for five seconds-Jethro made a mental note to avoid making eye contact with. That sort of person would look for any excuse to ask about how you were doing in school and what you were studying and whether you had a special little friend. He’d thought, initially, that this pair made an odd couple, one so cool and quiet; the other, jumpy and with a level of volume to his voice that betrayed trying just a bit too hard. But their eyes constantly darted back to one another, no matter where they moved about in the cabin. Jethro had figured that opposites do sometimes attract, and gone back to his music player without thinking much more about the mysteries of the heart. Looking back, he understood that they weren’t simply regarding one another but were really watching each other, like one does with a dangerous dog.
Just a couple of hours later, all of these remembered initial impressions seemed absurd. It wasn’t that they were wrong or right, but rather the thoughts and memories of a boy who no longer existed, about two men who were not at all what they had seemed.
Just a couple of hours later, three people were dead-one by his own hand.
***
“Six-six-six!” he said, gleefully, only to find the amusement dissipating rapidly as the woman on the floor fixed her cold, alien eyes on him and repeated: “Six-six-six!”
He thought he could feel her, reaching through him like a ghost, and stealing something very precious. Something he could never get back. The temperature in the cabin seemed to precipitously drop, and he shivered.
While everyone else continued arguing and panicking for a few moments, he noticed that the sandy-haired man, introduced earlier in the journey as Mr. Saxon, was the only one in the transport who had not uttered a word since the initial accident.
Throughout the mysterious knocking, the mad scramble to locate its source, and the horrifying discovery of the missing cockpit, Mr. Saxon had, in fact, barely moved from his seat. Jethro noted that the man’s eyes, however, were alight-though alight with what it was difficult to say. Intelligence, certainly. A keen interest, not so much in the facts of the event now taking place, but in the reactions of all on board to it. His steady gaze moved from passenger to passenger, watching with the same concentration as he’d watched the embarrassing antics of his friend, the Doctor, earlier. Mr. Saxon didn’t seem surprised by the bizarre actions of Sky Silvestry (or the creature who had once been Sky Silvestry). While his friend, who gave the impression of having seen quite a lot of the universe, had been reduced to gabbling and shouting by turns, he himself sat calmly, fingers steepled, mouth fixed into a faint smirk.
Jethro admired that sort of devil-may-care coolness under pressure, and had been observing carefully, taking notes for future use. Besides, it made him feel more secure, seeing that at least one person in the cabin wasn’t being made irrational with fear (which was, as usual, way more than he could say for his own parents). This impromptu study he’d been making is how he noticed that the first time Mr. Saxon broke his silence was immediately before the first murder.
“Professor Hobbes,” Mr. Saxon said, addressing the man who was quite doggedly insisting that there was no life on Midnight. “Professor Hobbes, perhaps you can remind me what exactly you’re a professor of again?”
“I don’t think he ever said,” the Hostess said, narrowing her eyes.
“What nonsense,” the Professor said, looking indignant. “I’m a senior lecturer on Radiographic Geology-”
“Well, you can say you’re anything that you want,” Jethro’s mum added, pursing her lips. “But you’re not really being much help now, are you?”
“All right, all right,” the Doctor said, putting his hands up just like one of Jethro’s teachers trying to get the attention of a rowdy class. “That’s enough. None of us have met before today, so let’s not start playing this game.”
The edges of Mr. Saxon’s mouth turned up just slightly. “Yes, sorry,” he said. “I’m sure Professor Hobbes has no vested professional interest in discovering a new form of life here.”
Everyone wheeled around to look at Professor Hobbes, while Mr. Saxon sat back down in his original seat.
“Is that what this is about?” the Hostess said, pointing a finger at Sky Silvestry speaking along with her every word. “You don’t want us to do anything about her so you can get all the glory for discovering it!”
Professor Hobbes took a few steps further back into the galley and gripped the counter with one white-knuckled hand “Don’t be stupid-there’s nothing to discover because there is no life on the surface of Midnight!”
Jethro’s dad drew himself up to his full height, something he rarely did unless he was about to administer a lecture or a punishment. “You keep banging on about there being no life, but look at her!”
“You want keep your prize even if it means letting that thing kill us all!” Jethro’s mother said, even as the Doctor was once again trying to get the attention of all parties and Mr. Saxon remained seated, watching.
And that’s really when it all started. Time lurched forward, skipping over whole minutes entirely. Jethro’s brain felt replaced by cotton wool and it no longer bothered him that the adults weren’t considering his opinions, because he didn’t have any opinions. There was just this buzzing in his head, and this numbness throughout his body.
The Doctor shouted, pointing a thin, accusatory finger at the lot of them-even at the Professor, who was not really helping his own case. Words ran over top of words, the paralysed woman in the corner somehow repeating all of them, even when everyone was speaking at once. Mr. Saxon remained seated and the one stray thought that Jethro managed to chase long enough for it to make an impression was that no one seemed to think it odd that this one passenger out of all them remained so passive. But then that thought was gone too, and Jethro thought perhaps he had blacked out for a minute. When he looked around the cabin again, his father was holding a struggling, spitting, cursing Doctor round about his scrawny waist, the girl called Dee Dee was tied to a chair and gagged with a scrap of seatbelt, and Professor Hobbes was just... gone.
The Doctor, once released again, flew into a right rage, which seemed to wash over Mr. Saxon like a refreshing breeze on a hot day. He relaxed into his seat even more, folded his hands in his lap, and closed his eyes- only opening them again when the Hostess began to shout right back at the Doctor, accusing him of being somehow associated with Mrs. Silvestry.
“I’ll send you right out that door, too-just like the Professor!” she said coldly, her voice shaking ever so slightly (a tremor not found in the echo coming from the corner).
Jethro saw Mr. Saxon’s eyes fly open at that, and he fixed the Hostess in a stare that was like the mounting pin to a stunned butterfly. She shut her mouth abruptly.
“The Doctor, of course, arrived with me. And we’ve no access to passenger records and background check information. Why would we? We’re just holiday-makers.” He paused, stood, and approached the little knot of squabbling humans huddled in the back of the compartment. “Not like you do. I didn’t even know her last name until you said it. Did you know her, Doctor?”
“Well, I-” the Doctor began, but didn’t get an opportunity to finish.
“If you knew there was something dodgy about her, why did you even let her on board?” Jethro’s father said, stepping away from the Hostess and towards the nearest door. “You’re hiding something, I can tell!”
Mr. Saxon walked back to his seat, passing, along the way, Dee Dee, still tied to that chair. He reached out and touched her chin, then wiped a tear off her cheek tenderly, pushing his bottom lip out in a pout that was either endlessly sympathetic or utterly mocking. It was impossible to tell.
The Doctor had begun to again lecture the assembled passengers on their shameful, rash behaviour and how they were letting their fear get the better of them and Jethro found himself nodding along. He didn’t want to think of himself as the type of person who would remain silent and indecisive at times like this. In the private stories he told himself about his own personal mythology, he was a rebel, an iconoclast-never a follower and never a mealy-mouthed yes-man. Jethro Cane did not nod along.
This trip had put the lie to that tale, all in an instant. He’d done nothing but tug at his hair and whimper as the Professor was sent, at long last, to make personal contact with the surface of Midnight. And he was doing nothing again as Dee Dee, now freed from her restraints (in hindsight he realised that Mr. Saxon had loosened them), flew across the cabin and attacked the Hostess. Tiny little Dee Dee would seem to be no match for the woman who had apparently been able to, at least briefly, overpower Professor Hobbes, but before anyone even knew what was happening, the Hostess was on the ground, not moving.
“What have you done?” the Doctor asked, incredulous, kneeling next to the eerily still Hostess. His words, and his alone, now echoed by Sky.
“It was an accident, I swear!” Dee Dee said, her panic rising even further. “I don’t know what happened! I think she hit her head-”
“This ends now!” the Doctor shouted, and Jethro had never seen anyone look so murderous, which was ironic considering the actual murders that had just taken place right before his eyes. “How are you lot going to explain this when the rescue gets here?”
Mr. Saxon calmly walked up behind the Doctor and placed a well-manicured hand on the man’s shoulder. Such a familiar, intimate gesture, but the Doctor himself stiffened at the touch. “You know how they are,” Mr. Saxon said, almost purring. “No control over their emotions. You’ve been hanging around them for too long.” He leaned in very close to the Doctor’s ear and whispered something that made the Doctor squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head vigorously.
“No. No, I will not. And don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been doing,” he said through gritted teeth. “Out of my way.”
The Doctor pushed past and went to kneel next to Mrs. Silvestry again, while Mr. Saxon shook his head sadly, letting out a little “tsk-tsk” sound. “I only wanted to help,” he said, flashing a sympathetic smile to Jethro’s parents and Dee Dee. It was a smile that said, “I understand” and, “Your secret is safe with me.”
***
It was Mr. Saxon that gave me the handcuffs. He told me that he only had the one set, and for me to decide how they could be used best. Why me? I think it was all part of his game, after seeing me so willing to go along with whichever way the wind blew, too afraid to even think a thought of my own. Besides, I could have put those cuffs on anyone in that transport, but what good would it have done? We were all equally murderers by that point.
And then everything changed again. Mrs. Silvestry rose to her feet, the Doctor was frozen to the ground where he had been kneeling, and Mr. Saxon became legitimately upset by the rising tide of opinion that it was the Doctor that now needed to be gotten rid of.
Funny how everyone had trusted that man so much when he’d been telling them what they wanted to hear. But then he started to sound more and more like the Doctor, talking about how they’d be sorry if she stole his voice next.
“What makes you so special?” Mum asked, in that way she reserves for people that she fears may genuinely be better than her.
I finally made a decision. I’d been beating myself up for lacking the bollocks to keep two people from losing their lives, but when it came my turn to choose, I chose another murder.
I know that using the cuffs to secure myself to the inside of the cabin when I opened the door makes me a coward. As much as I hated myself for what I had done (or not done) and what I was about to do, I still didn’t want to die. There was too much risk of me getting sucked out along with Mrs. Sky Silvestry as I grabbed her wrist and pulled her close, struggled with her frantic attempts to break free again. I could smell her perfume in those last seconds.
And then she was gone.
The force of the vacuum when the pressure wall collapsed had felt like it was going to rip my hand off. The edges of the metal cuff cut into my skin, and the first thing I felt when the door closed and I could think again was the blood, sticky and hot on my arm.
While we waited for the rescue transport, in awkward silence, Mr. Saxon sat next to me and looked at the little tea towel I was holding to soak up the blood on my arm. Embroidered on to it was a cartoon pig (who was wearing a boiler suit and painting a white picket fence) which I’d been making an attempt to not get blood all over, for some reason.
Everything I’d previously seen in him-calm, reason, sympathy, even worry for the well-being of the Doctor-was completely gone. His eyes were cold and empty, and he made no move to check my wound, or comfort me, or tell me that I did the right thing. He just leaned in close and, with his lips barely moving, said: “Now who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?”
At the time, I couldn’t figure out what he meant.
I think I know now, though.
The less you believe in evil, the easier it is for evil to walk right in and make itself at home. Go ahead and be arrogant in the face of things you don’t understand and see how quickly you become a pawn. The monsters will come for you, in the night.
If you aren’t afraid, you’re an idiot.
Characters/Pairings: Ten, the Master, Dee Dee Blasco, Biff Cane, Jethro Cane, Val Cane, Professor Hobbes, the Hostess, Sky Silvestry (Doctor/Master if you squint really hard)
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 3135
Warnings: Character death
Summary: There's something even scarier on board the Crusader 50 than the entity possessing Sky Silvestry.
A/N: Written for the Doctor Who Fic Bingo Ficathon, for which this was my card. My Bingo is the bottom row: AU, handcuffs, Bad Wolf, the Master, Midnight Entity. Set in an AU where Lucy Saxon is not such a good shot. Thanks to ladychi for the beta.
On my summer holiday, I killed someone.
You’ll assume that I didn’t mean to, or that it was an accident, but it wasn’t. The wolf came to the door and I let it right in. You think you wouldn't?
***
Jethro sprawled in his chair, one leg thrown up over the arm, head tilted back to count the dimples in the ceiling tile. He found himself counting things a lot, lately. The numbers pushed out all other thoughts. He’d always been bad at maths, and this was part of the appeal. It took a great deal of concentration to count the windows of a building, multiplying the number on each floor by the number of storeys to arrive at the total. It didn’t come naturally, but he could no longer trust the things that did.
The building climate control system turned off with a shudder, and the silence startled him out of his counting. Somewhere down the hall, a door coldly slid open and shut. Footsteps echoed, and Jethro made a final effort to arrange himself in the chair for projection of maximum levels of not caring.
Mr. Rawl entered the waiting room and extended a hand in greeting.
“Nice to see you, Mr. Cane,” Mr. Rawl said in an infuriatingly congenial voice. Infuriating because Jethro had never once, in all his years at school, seen Mr. Rawl be anything but congenial. He wondered about his home life, wondered whether he shook his partner’s hand and said, “Nice to see you!” prior to having very neat, very tidy, very polite sex.
Jethro stood, weakly shook the proffered hand, but said nothing. He shambled behind Mr. Rawl all the way back down the hall, through the sliding door and into an office dominated by an enormous desk.
“Do you know why Ms. Breen sent you to see me today?” Mr. Rawl said in that same officious tone while looking quite meaningfully at a piece of e-paper. Definitely not a trick question, then.
“I didn’t make it up,” Jethro said, just wanting to skip all of the preliminary bullshit about how shocked and troubled Ms. Breen had been by his essay. “How come every time I tell the truth, everyone else just tells me I’m ‘acting out,’ like I’m three years old and got my toys taken away?”
“Now, Jethro-can I call you Jethro?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Jethro, I want you to know that we care about you very much. If there is something you need to talk about, I’m here to listen.”
“I don’t have anything else to say about it,” Jethro said, shifting in Mr. Rawl’s uncomfortable office chair.
“You should know that I’ve already spoken to your mother.”
Jethro rolled his eyes. “Great.”
“She says that you had nothing to do with those deaths, other than as a witness. I’m sure that must have been extremely upsetting for you-”
“Shut up,” Jethro said, almost under his breath.
Mr. Rawl pushed back from his desk. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, and she’s lying.” He stood, rolled up the right sleeve of his shirt. “Do you see this?”
Mr. Rawl looked wary, like a man trying not to frighten small game before he can get a proper shot in.
“Look.” Jethro placed his wrist even closer to Mr. Rawl’s face, forced him to see the faint pink scar there. “I didn’t do this to myself, so you can put your self-harm pamphlets away. Whether you believe me or not, I have to live with this reminder. I do, not you, and not her.” He rolled his sleeve back down and turned to leave. “Thanks and everything, but I’ll let you know if I need your pity.” He pressed the button and the door slid smoothly open. “I’ll make an appointment.”
It was a pretty cool exit, that. But he didn’t feel cool. He felt like he was suffocating in a world more airless and hostile than the glittering surface of Midnight.
***
When the two men first boarded the Crusader 50 transport, Jethro thought that the shorter, quieter one seemed like he might potentially be okay. The other-the tall, bird-like one who couldn’t seem to stop talking for five seconds-Jethro made a mental note to avoid making eye contact with. That sort of person would look for any excuse to ask about how you were doing in school and what you were studying and whether you had a special little friend. He’d thought, initially, that this pair made an odd couple, one so cool and quiet; the other, jumpy and with a level of volume to his voice that betrayed trying just a bit too hard. But their eyes constantly darted back to one another, no matter where they moved about in the cabin. Jethro had figured that opposites do sometimes attract, and gone back to his music player without thinking much more about the mysteries of the heart. Looking back, he understood that they weren’t simply regarding one another but were really watching each other, like one does with a dangerous dog.
Just a couple of hours later, all of these remembered initial impressions seemed absurd. It wasn’t that they were wrong or right, but rather the thoughts and memories of a boy who no longer existed, about two men who were not at all what they had seemed.
Just a couple of hours later, three people were dead-one by his own hand.
***
“Six-six-six!” he said, gleefully, only to find the amusement dissipating rapidly as the woman on the floor fixed her cold, alien eyes on him and repeated: “Six-six-six!”
He thought he could feel her, reaching through him like a ghost, and stealing something very precious. Something he could never get back. The temperature in the cabin seemed to precipitously drop, and he shivered.
While everyone else continued arguing and panicking for a few moments, he noticed that the sandy-haired man, introduced earlier in the journey as Mr. Saxon, was the only one in the transport who had not uttered a word since the initial accident.
Throughout the mysterious knocking, the mad scramble to locate its source, and the horrifying discovery of the missing cockpit, Mr. Saxon had, in fact, barely moved from his seat. Jethro noted that the man’s eyes, however, were alight-though alight with what it was difficult to say. Intelligence, certainly. A keen interest, not so much in the facts of the event now taking place, but in the reactions of all on board to it. His steady gaze moved from passenger to passenger, watching with the same concentration as he’d watched the embarrassing antics of his friend, the Doctor, earlier. Mr. Saxon didn’t seem surprised by the bizarre actions of Sky Silvestry (or the creature who had once been Sky Silvestry). While his friend, who gave the impression of having seen quite a lot of the universe, had been reduced to gabbling and shouting by turns, he himself sat calmly, fingers steepled, mouth fixed into a faint smirk.
Jethro admired that sort of devil-may-care coolness under pressure, and had been observing carefully, taking notes for future use. Besides, it made him feel more secure, seeing that at least one person in the cabin wasn’t being made irrational with fear (which was, as usual, way more than he could say for his own parents). This impromptu study he’d been making is how he noticed that the first time Mr. Saxon broke his silence was immediately before the first murder.
“Professor Hobbes,” Mr. Saxon said, addressing the man who was quite doggedly insisting that there was no life on Midnight. “Professor Hobbes, perhaps you can remind me what exactly you’re a professor of again?”
“I don’t think he ever said,” the Hostess said, narrowing her eyes.
“What nonsense,” the Professor said, looking indignant. “I’m a senior lecturer on Radiographic Geology-”
“Well, you can say you’re anything that you want,” Jethro’s mum added, pursing her lips. “But you’re not really being much help now, are you?”
“All right, all right,” the Doctor said, putting his hands up just like one of Jethro’s teachers trying to get the attention of a rowdy class. “That’s enough. None of us have met before today, so let’s not start playing this game.”
The edges of Mr. Saxon’s mouth turned up just slightly. “Yes, sorry,” he said. “I’m sure Professor Hobbes has no vested professional interest in discovering a new form of life here.”
Everyone wheeled around to look at Professor Hobbes, while Mr. Saxon sat back down in his original seat.
“Is that what this is about?” the Hostess said, pointing a finger at Sky Silvestry speaking along with her every word. “You don’t want us to do anything about her so you can get all the glory for discovering it!”
Professor Hobbes took a few steps further back into the galley and gripped the counter with one white-knuckled hand “Don’t be stupid-there’s nothing to discover because there is no life on the surface of Midnight!”
Jethro’s dad drew himself up to his full height, something he rarely did unless he was about to administer a lecture or a punishment. “You keep banging on about there being no life, but look at her!”
“You want keep your prize even if it means letting that thing kill us all!” Jethro’s mother said, even as the Doctor was once again trying to get the attention of all parties and Mr. Saxon remained seated, watching.
And that’s really when it all started. Time lurched forward, skipping over whole minutes entirely. Jethro’s brain felt replaced by cotton wool and it no longer bothered him that the adults weren’t considering his opinions, because he didn’t have any opinions. There was just this buzzing in his head, and this numbness throughout his body.
The Doctor shouted, pointing a thin, accusatory finger at the lot of them-even at the Professor, who was not really helping his own case. Words ran over top of words, the paralysed woman in the corner somehow repeating all of them, even when everyone was speaking at once. Mr. Saxon remained seated and the one stray thought that Jethro managed to chase long enough for it to make an impression was that no one seemed to think it odd that this one passenger out of all them remained so passive. But then that thought was gone too, and Jethro thought perhaps he had blacked out for a minute. When he looked around the cabin again, his father was holding a struggling, spitting, cursing Doctor round about his scrawny waist, the girl called Dee Dee was tied to a chair and gagged with a scrap of seatbelt, and Professor Hobbes was just... gone.
The Doctor, once released again, flew into a right rage, which seemed to wash over Mr. Saxon like a refreshing breeze on a hot day. He relaxed into his seat even more, folded his hands in his lap, and closed his eyes- only opening them again when the Hostess began to shout right back at the Doctor, accusing him of being somehow associated with Mrs. Silvestry.
“I’ll send you right out that door, too-just like the Professor!” she said coldly, her voice shaking ever so slightly (a tremor not found in the echo coming from the corner).
Jethro saw Mr. Saxon’s eyes fly open at that, and he fixed the Hostess in a stare that was like the mounting pin to a stunned butterfly. She shut her mouth abruptly.
“The Doctor, of course, arrived with me. And we’ve no access to passenger records and background check information. Why would we? We’re just holiday-makers.” He paused, stood, and approached the little knot of squabbling humans huddled in the back of the compartment. “Not like you do. I didn’t even know her last name until you said it. Did you know her, Doctor?”
“Well, I-” the Doctor began, but didn’t get an opportunity to finish.
“If you knew there was something dodgy about her, why did you even let her on board?” Jethro’s father said, stepping away from the Hostess and towards the nearest door. “You’re hiding something, I can tell!”
Mr. Saxon walked back to his seat, passing, along the way, Dee Dee, still tied to that chair. He reached out and touched her chin, then wiped a tear off her cheek tenderly, pushing his bottom lip out in a pout that was either endlessly sympathetic or utterly mocking. It was impossible to tell.
The Doctor had begun to again lecture the assembled passengers on their shameful, rash behaviour and how they were letting their fear get the better of them and Jethro found himself nodding along. He didn’t want to think of himself as the type of person who would remain silent and indecisive at times like this. In the private stories he told himself about his own personal mythology, he was a rebel, an iconoclast-never a follower and never a mealy-mouthed yes-man. Jethro Cane did not nod along.
This trip had put the lie to that tale, all in an instant. He’d done nothing but tug at his hair and whimper as the Professor was sent, at long last, to make personal contact with the surface of Midnight. And he was doing nothing again as Dee Dee, now freed from her restraints (in hindsight he realised that Mr. Saxon had loosened them), flew across the cabin and attacked the Hostess. Tiny little Dee Dee would seem to be no match for the woman who had apparently been able to, at least briefly, overpower Professor Hobbes, but before anyone even knew what was happening, the Hostess was on the ground, not moving.
“What have you done?” the Doctor asked, incredulous, kneeling next to the eerily still Hostess. His words, and his alone, now echoed by Sky.
“It was an accident, I swear!” Dee Dee said, her panic rising even further. “I don’t know what happened! I think she hit her head-”
“This ends now!” the Doctor shouted, and Jethro had never seen anyone look so murderous, which was ironic considering the actual murders that had just taken place right before his eyes. “How are you lot going to explain this when the rescue gets here?”
Mr. Saxon calmly walked up behind the Doctor and placed a well-manicured hand on the man’s shoulder. Such a familiar, intimate gesture, but the Doctor himself stiffened at the touch. “You know how they are,” Mr. Saxon said, almost purring. “No control over their emotions. You’ve been hanging around them for too long.” He leaned in very close to the Doctor’s ear and whispered something that made the Doctor squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head vigorously.
“No. No, I will not. And don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been doing,” he said through gritted teeth. “Out of my way.”
The Doctor pushed past and went to kneel next to Mrs. Silvestry again, while Mr. Saxon shook his head sadly, letting out a little “tsk-tsk” sound. “I only wanted to help,” he said, flashing a sympathetic smile to Jethro’s parents and Dee Dee. It was a smile that said, “I understand” and, “Your secret is safe with me.”
***
It was Mr. Saxon that gave me the handcuffs. He told me that he only had the one set, and for me to decide how they could be used best. Why me? I think it was all part of his game, after seeing me so willing to go along with whichever way the wind blew, too afraid to even think a thought of my own. Besides, I could have put those cuffs on anyone in that transport, but what good would it have done? We were all equally murderers by that point.
And then everything changed again. Mrs. Silvestry rose to her feet, the Doctor was frozen to the ground where he had been kneeling, and Mr. Saxon became legitimately upset by the rising tide of opinion that it was the Doctor that now needed to be gotten rid of.
Funny how everyone had trusted that man so much when he’d been telling them what they wanted to hear. But then he started to sound more and more like the Doctor, talking about how they’d be sorry if she stole his voice next.
“What makes you so special?” Mum asked, in that way she reserves for people that she fears may genuinely be better than her.
I finally made a decision. I’d been beating myself up for lacking the bollocks to keep two people from losing their lives, but when it came my turn to choose, I chose another murder.
I know that using the cuffs to secure myself to the inside of the cabin when I opened the door makes me a coward. As much as I hated myself for what I had done (or not done) and what I was about to do, I still didn’t want to die. There was too much risk of me getting sucked out along with Mrs. Sky Silvestry as I grabbed her wrist and pulled her close, struggled with her frantic attempts to break free again. I could smell her perfume in those last seconds.
And then she was gone.
The force of the vacuum when the pressure wall collapsed had felt like it was going to rip my hand off. The edges of the metal cuff cut into my skin, and the first thing I felt when the door closed and I could think again was the blood, sticky and hot on my arm.
While we waited for the rescue transport, in awkward silence, Mr. Saxon sat next to me and looked at the little tea towel I was holding to soak up the blood on my arm. Embroidered on to it was a cartoon pig (who was wearing a boiler suit and painting a white picket fence) which I’d been making an attempt to not get blood all over, for some reason.
Everything I’d previously seen in him-calm, reason, sympathy, even worry for the well-being of the Doctor-was completely gone. His eyes were cold and empty, and he made no move to check my wound, or comfort me, or tell me that I did the right thing. He just leaned in close and, with his lips barely moving, said: “Now who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?”
At the time, I couldn’t figure out what he meant.
I think I know now, though.
The less you believe in evil, the easier it is for evil to walk right in and make itself at home. Go ahead and be arrogant in the face of things you don’t understand and see how quickly you become a pawn. The monsters will come for you, in the night.
If you aren’t afraid, you’re an idiot.