Elphame Station (Eighth Doctor, Sally Sparrow)

[tardisgenmod]

Since there were no fics posted over the weekend, I shall be posting three fics for the next four days.

Title: Elphame Station
Author: uncledark
Recipient: st_aurafina
Rating: General audiences
Character(s): Eighth Doctor, Sally Sparrow
Summary: While exploring another ruined building, Sally Sparrow finds herself transported into a strange underground world, encountering an unfamiliar friend.
Notes: The story is set, from Sally's perspective, about a year after the events of the 2006 episode, "Blink." From the Doctor's perspective, it's the beginnings of his involvement in the Time War. Rassilon alone knows where that fits into his chronology. Thanks are due to my betas, slashpervert and brknhalo241.

Sally Sparrow spent her evening off trespassing amid the rubble. In order to make room for a new car-park, the council had knocked down two of the buildings just down the street. From the counter in the shop, Sally had been watching the place for days, learning when the workers would be gone, seeing when the place would be most deserted and least observed.

She loved old places, broken places, abandoned places. They made her sad, but in a strangely pleasant way. It was a kind of nostalgia, but not in the cheap, modern sense. The sense of sweet sadness, the comforting feeling that the past was not lost, hung about ruined places like mist on a river.

So Sally went in search of that feeling among closed graveyards and abandoned houses. She took her camera with her, to capture fragments of that feeling. Larry said she was crazy to do it, that one day some old house was going to fall on her if she kept doing it.

Sally wasn’t worried. After all, hadn’t time itself already fallen on her in some old house? Hadn’t time already taken her friend, Larry’s sister? So the house had fallen on her, in a way, more than a year ago. The abandoned places had struck at her and missed, and now she was safe.

Now, with a look to make sure the coast was clear, Sally pried one section of the fencing away from the other, and slipped through the gap into the construction space.

The brick sides of older buildings were exposed on either side, for the first time in decades. Graffiti and posters from before Sally had been born sent messages from her mother’s youth, words displaced in time. The cellars of the downed buildings gaped, half-full of debris and deep shadows.

Sally began to take pictures, moving carefully through the site, sometimes climbing up on equipment left behind to get a good angle. She worked her way around the perimeter of the site, taking close-ups of the old posters and most interesting graffiti, and then moved to the edge of the cellars.

"Oh, now that won't do at all," she said to herself. Looking at the too-dark pictures of the cellar-holes on the camera's digital display, she decided to risk using the flash. Someone on the street might see the light, and that she was trespassing, but she wanted the pictures.

The cellars were now great rectangles of black, lost in evening shadows. Sally pointed the camera, pushed the button, and filled them with a brief second of light. Bricks and pipes threw harsh shadows for a moment, and were gone.

"Hang on a moment," she said to herself. She'd seen something in the instant of the flash, as if from the corner of her eye. In the growing dark, she fumbled for the switch that made the camera play back images in its memory. The last several shots flicked by on the tiny screen, until Sally stopped the slide-show on the image she was looking for.

Set into one of the cellar walls was a door. A large, heavy, wooden door behind a rusty gate. The image was a bit blurry, but it looked like the door had been bricked over at some point, and uncovered by the demolition. There was a sign at the top of the gate, but she couldn't tell what it said from the photograph.

Sally took a torch from the pocket of her heavy, somewhat distressed coat. She played the light over the cellar until she found the doorway, back in the corner furthest from her. Either the workmen from earlier in the day hadn't put a ladder down, or they'd taken it with them, so there was no easy way into the cellar. However, there was a sloping pile of brick and rubble filling the near corner of the hole, offering Sally a way in.

"Mad," she muttered. "Completely mad."

She sat down on the edge of the cellar, swinging her legs in the few feet between the edge of the hole and the top of the pile. It wasn't too far to drop, just a couple of feet, and she was sure that she could pull herself back out again. Still, she didn't trust the debris to stay still under her feet. She stacked a couple of loose bricks on the edge of the hole, then wedged her torch in between them so that she could see her footing and still have both hands on the top of the cellar wall, just in case the rubble shifted.

The debris beneath her feet was loose, but seemed to hold under her. At least until she turned to retrieve her torch, when her foot dislodged a particular brick and sent the face of the pile sliding out from under her.

Sally fell on her backside with a strangled squeak, and rode the pile down to the cellar floor like a child sliding down stairs. Fortunately, she escaped with nothing more serious than some minor bruising and superficial wardrobe damage. Unfortunately, she was sitting on the floor of an old cellar, twelve feet below and five feet beyond the place where her torch stared down at her.

Standing, Sally thought about climbing out of the cellar right away. Her torch was still shining on the slope of brick and rubble. She'd be able to see well enough to pick her way, carefully, back up the pile and out. Seeing as she'd come down for clearer shots of the door, and seeing as said door was just a few feet away...

She'd clutched her camera to her stomach on the way down. Examining it in what torchlight made it so far into the cellar, it seemed to have survived the fall intact, and with less cosmetic damage than herself. She turned towards the corner, pointed the camera into the shadow about where the door ought to be, and pressed the button.

The image just taken showed that the door was there, behind its gate. Strangely, the floor seemed clearer the closer one came to the door. There was almost a path.

Sally didn't trust this too-inviting coincidence. The half-dozen or so ruined places she'd visited since the incidents at Wester Drumlins more than a year ago had been mundane affairs. Still, she had always felt a slight frisson of dread, as if some part of her was watching out for an intrusion of the bizarre into her life.

She turned back to the slope leading up and out. As she took her first step back, some of the rubble near the top came loose and started a small landslide. She had to skip back a few steps in order to avoid having her feet buried in dust and brick shards.

That slight frisson of dread had awakened, and was actively poking her in the back of her mind. She turned once more towards the door, because she wasn't comfortable having it to her back any longer. It wasn't that she had specific fears about it, or what might come out of it. Rather, she felt that it might change, or vanish, unless she watched it.

Feelings from the last time rose from her memory. Fear, confusion, the sense of being hunted by something just out of sight. "Right," she said, addressing the shadowed corner that held the door, "I have my eye on you. I'm sore and dirty and it's getting late and I have no intention of being swept up in whatever it is you're doing."

The moment after she'd said it, she felt foolish. She was standing in a ruined cellar in London, talking to what was probably an old coal room. Embarrassed at having been spooked so easily, she pushed her fear aside, taking several deep breaths to calm herself. It was only a door, after all.

Only a door. Fear ebbed and gave way to a strange sadness. It was only a door, what else could it be? A coal room, a closet? Just a box of brick and mortar, shut off long ago for fear the walls might not hold, or that someone might use it to break in.

It wasn't anything special. It wasn't a storybook wardrobe, or a magic blue box. It was just ... ordinary.

Sally hadn't realised what a sad word that was, "ordinary." Plain, common, mundane. Not-exciting, not-special. In that moment she realised that this was the other side of the sweet sadness she felt in old places. Sadness that some things were not only gone, but also that they'd never been.

Now it was sadness' turn to be shoved away and replaced by a kind of indignation. Hadn't she seen that wasn't always true? Hadn't she fled from stone angels and seen friends taken from her by time? Sometimes, some rare times, the miraculous does happen. If you look for it. If you don't blink.

Sally took another picture of the corner. Looking at it to get her bearings, she walked into the shadow. One hand holding her camera, and the other stretched out before her, she shuffled away from the torch light and the world above.

It did not take long for her fingers to touch rusty iron-work. She stepped back, aimed the camera before her, and took another picture. The angle was off, skewed upwards and to the side. The sign over the door was clearer, though, and it read "Elphame Station," in the manner of an antique Underground sign.

Switching her camera to the left hand, she reached out and felt the gate with her right. It seemed to be only a little wider than the door was, thick with rust, and with a latch-handle in the usual place. She tried the latch, which squealed in protest, but moved reluctantly. The hinges made an awful noise when she opened the gate, but moved.

Sally felt for the door handle, which was in somewhat better shape. She was surprised to find it unlocked, and the door swung smoothly inward. There was a flight of stairs, with a dim, blue light coming up from the bottom. With only a small, weak voice in the back of her mind wondering what she was doing, she stepped through the door.

The gate behind swung shut on its own weight, with screaming hinges and a clang. After a moment of panic, Sally found that the latch on this side worked as well as the other. Looking through the bars, she could still see the cellar, the pile of rubble, and the light of her torch. It all seemed rather eerie, framed in rusty bars, but it also had a reassuring reality to it.

She started down the stairs, and was only half-surprised when the door also shut itself. After the slam and click of the door and latch, it was very quiet. All the street sounds of London, above, were cut off, and for a while there was just the sound of her feet on stone steps.

Sally turned and took a photo of the door above. The camera saw a wide stair in a vaulted brick tunnel, with an old door at the top. Nothing unusual, once one accepted its basic existence.

It took longer to reach the bottom than she thought it might. For the longest time, the blue light at the bottom seemed to be moving away from her as fast as she was moving toward it. After a bit, she lost track of time. It felt the way it did when she was up far too late with a book, and found herself reading the same passage over and over, without noticing that it wasn't sinking in.

Eventually, she began to hear music. It was some kind of rustic trio, fiddle and flute and drum, with singing in an odd language she didn't recognise. It didn't help the growing sense of timelessness, as it seemed to be endless variations on a single song, looping around and back to its beginning and never quite stopping.

The vague voice in her mind that had earlier tried to warn against going down the stairs was even further away, faintly protesting that this was all wrong, that she'd best get back up the stairs and away. Soon the music drowned that voice out, and Sally reached the bottom of the stair.

The place did look like a tube station, in general plan. The final stair ended at an archway opening through a rounded wall, the wall curving away from the floor at her feet and around over a train-track. The track entered through a round tunnel entrance at one end, and exited again on the far end. That was the end of the similarity to any station Sally had previously visited, though.

For one, the walls were of red brick, without tiling or painting. The platform was of wood, and the blue light was coming from what looked like the unshielded flames of gas lamps. "Elphame" was painted on a sign high up on the curved wall, over a row of ornate brass-framed benches. The music came from a corner where a single busker stood, in shabby Edwardian finery, playing a fiddle. While she could not see the piper or the drummer, Sally could still hear them.

There were people, as well, or what Sally thought might be people. They were more like ghosts, really, semi-transparent and walking through one another. The platform was crowded with them, a spectral fancy-dress party with costumes of all ages. None of them payed Sally any attention at all. Some vanished or appeared above the tracks, as if entering and exiting trains she could not see.

She turned towards the busker, who had at least looked fully solid, and saw not the Edwardian fiddler, but what looked like a hippie playing a flute. Sally closed her eyes and rubbed at them, and upon opening them saw a woman in a simple dress playing a round frame drum and singing.

On impulse, Sally took a picture of the woman. On the camera's display she saw nothing. Or, rather, her camera did not see what her eyes saw.

The image on the digital display matched the station in only the vaguest of outlines. There was the curved wall, but it was tiled, where the tiles hadn't fallen off. The platform was concrete, and littered with dust and papers. A bare brick wall stood at the edge, where the track ought to be.

Sally had taken a picture of a perfectly normal, if abandoned, tube station. She turned and took a picture of the crowd, with a similar effect. Whatever was going on here, only living eyes could see it, it seemed.

When she looked back up, the music had stopped. The fiddler was there, glaring at her disapprovingly. Sensing that perhaps she'd outstayed her welcome, she turned towards the stairs, to find that the semi-translucent throng was thick between her and the archway. Some of the more solid individuals glared at her with expressions not unlike one gives to a cat which has just pissed in one's shoes.

Sally thought it was starting to look like that bit in the movie, The Two Towers, the one with all the glowing dead kings. It had been of fun, sitting in the theatre. It wasn't quite so much fun when the special effects are standing between her and the only exit.

There were a few beings in particular who were becoming more solid. They were tall and thin, dressed in a motley of strangely appropriate garb from different eras. Here was one with a modest Elizabethan ruff poking out over a leather motorcycle jacket. Another wore camouflage fatigue pants under a Napoleonic officer's greatcoat.

They stood still in relation to each other, like pantomime actors at zero. There was no obvious pattern to their stances, and yet it seemed deliberate, as if each inch between them meant something.

All of them had the same face, though, or so it seemed. Each had different hair, different jewellery, but underneath that each was perfectly symmetrical, with large, shining, black eyes. One stepped forward, though exactly how she moved wasn't clear. She was as tall as any of the men, and she looked Sally up and down, evidently not approving of what she saw.

Her costume gave the impression of a frilly, feminine gladiator. Bronze breastplate and greaves glimmered green and purple in the blue lamplight, and layers of ivory lace made tattered skirt and sleeves. A shining helmet was pushed back on her head, revealing that same, perfect face. She spoke.

Her voice came out like a chorus singing just slightly out of time with one another. At first Sally could not understand, as if each voice in the chorus were singing in a different, alien language. Sally shook her head, trying to communicate her incomprehension. One of the voices in the mix found a thread of English, and the others picked it up.

"That was very rude of you."

Sally blinked. "What?"

"You have violated the laws of hospitlity." Something in the armoured woman's manner seemed not entirely displeased.

Sally didn't underastand, and said as much.

The woman smiled, gesturing upwards. "We heard you, when you were above. We heard your wish, and we invited you in. We took you as our guest. And you violated our trust."

"I don't see how."

"You were granted leave to see us, not to keep us." She gestured toward the camera still in Sally's hand as she spoke.

"Are you talking about the picture I took?"

The strange woman smiled, as if encouraging a slow child. "Yes. The picture. You took." Her tone made it clear that she regarded this as a kind of theft.

"It's just a picture," Sally said. "It didn't hurt anyone. I mean, I'm sorry if I somehow offended, but let's be serious." She took the camera in both hands, not sure whether the now all too real figures would try and grab it.

"You took a piece of us," the armoured woman said. "We demand a piece of you in return."

Visions of blood flashed through her head, and Sally took a step back. "What do you mean, a piece of me?"

"Give us your name." The choral voice, up to this point just slightly out of harmony with itself, spoke the word, "name," exactly as one. Without knowing why, Sally went cold at that.

She took another step back, and bumped into someone. She shouted, but it came out in a squeak she would later deny having ever made. She whirled around, camera still clutched to her belly, to face this new threat.

The new threat was a man, an ordinary, solid man with long, wavy brown hair and kind, slightly distracted blue eyes. He smiled, then, in a friendly manner lacking any of the urgency Sally thought the situation demanded. "I wouldn't give them that," he said.

Sally heard something behind her, the clink of metal and rustle of lace. The man grabbed her by the shoulders and pivoted in a dance-like manoeuvre that ended with her falling to the floor and sliding several inches. Sally saw that the throng had, without any of them looking even an inch out of place in relation to each other, suddenly come to be immediately behind where she had just stood.

The armoured woman had lunged forward, one hand making a claw and slashing out where Sally had just been. Where her would-be rescuer was. The woman's fingers moved through his left shoulder, and he flinched, though it seemed more in discomfort or distaste than pain.

He calmed his face, and turned toward the woman. Sally was surprised to see that his black velvet coat was unmarked. He spoke, "Now that was hardly polite, speaking of offences. I'd done nothing to you, and yet you struck me."

The woman's face relaxed from the catlike snarl into its former, tranquil symmetry. "You have our apologies," she said.

"Well thank you," he said, pushing his coat open and sliding his hands into the pockets of his trousers. "That's hardly enough, however. You are the Host, here?"

"Yes," the woman said.

"And you have violated the laws of hospitality, in laying hands on a guest who gave you no cause."

"Yes," the woman said. She was very still.

"I believe, then, that I am within my rights to demand a boon?"

The Host's voice became slightly more discordant as she answered. "You are."

The man turned at the waist, giving Sally a grin, before turning back to the Host and saying, "Then I ask that you let this woman return to the world above, unmolested."

The laughter of the shining throng was sudden, almost breaking from their stillness, escaping, before leaving them again a perfectly ordered tableaux. Their postures had changed, though, and they all leant forward, as if they were about to pounce oh-so-gracefully on prey that had made some fatal mistake.

"I'm sorry?" the man said, a slight quaver entering his voice.

"She has taken from us, and we will have fair compensation of her." The Host smiled. "You can demand a boon for yourself, however."

"Ah, excellent." He took his hands out of his pockets and clasped them in front of him with a soft clap. "In that case..."

Up to that point, Sally had dared not move for fear of drawing attention to herself. The throng seemed ready to move, though, and she could feel their glittering black eyes on her. Upon hearing that the Host had no intention of letting her go, she had begun raising her camera, very slowly, to an angle that would get all of them in the shot.

Sally pressed the button. In the brief second of the flash, the throng shattered into a thousand shadows. The music stopped, and for a brief second the station was all broken tile and dust.

The man turned, and looked at her with shock plain on his face. "Oh, I wish you hadn't done that," he said.

Artistic brickwork covered the walls, again, and the musicians regained their groove. There was the sound of a train pulling into the station. Humanoid shadows moved from all over the platform, coalescing behind and around the man.

"Run!" he said, and then demonstrated what he meant. As he passed by, he caught Sally's left hand and half-dragged her to her feet. Sally wrapped her camera strap around her right wrist with a quick swirl of her hand and ran alongside him.

The train had indeed pulled into the station, but it wasn't the slightly blocky blue, white, and red she was used to. The engine was an antique steamer, stretched long and low to keep the smokestack from scraping the ceiling of the tube. A hopper full of wood followed that, and then a long train of wood and brass cars.

Conductors that looked altogether too much like the illustrations of train conductors in children's books were already closing the doors when Sally and her companion reached the train. The two made it into a compartment at the last moment, and the man pulled a green cloth shade down the window as the Host's hands scrabbled at the windows.

The train moved with a shuddering lurch, and they fell into bench seats opposite one another. Sally heard the hiss of steam and the chug-chug sound of the pistons quite clearly. It was all a little too much like a hyper-realistic dream. Under her free hand, the weave of the cloth covering the seat cushion was impossibly intricate, a brocade in miniature. She started to close her eyes, losing herself in the sound and the sensation...

"No, no, don't do that," the man said. "Stay with me. Look at my eyes."

Reluctantly, as if waking too early on a weekend morning, Sally opened her eyes. The man's face was serious, the blue eyes intense. She woke completely, dropping her eyes to break the gaze. "Are you really wearing a cravat?"

"What's wrong?" he said, with a tone of genuinely wounded dignity, "Doesn't it go with the coat?" He smiled, slightly, and chuckled.

"So," she began, "before I relax and feel lucky about my escape from certain ... Whatever it was I escaped ..."

"No," he said. "I'm afraid not. We're deep in the interstice now, and that's the realm of the Host."

Sally was sure she knew what the word "interstice" meant, but she'd never thought of it as a place where one could catch a train. That moment of almost-normality, sharing a train compartment with a fellow traveller, pulled her back from being mired in the strangeness of it all. She started thinking again.

"There are a thousand questions I could ask," she began. "But I suppose I'd better start with the obvious one. Who are you?"

The man leant back, and put his hands on his knees. "I'm the Doctor." He went on, as if anticipating the next question, "No, just the Doctor ..."

"No you aren't."

Her denial stopped him in mid sentence. "What? Excuse me," he said shortly, "But I've been me for much longer than you've known me, and I think I know who I am. Most of the time, at any rate," he finished weakly.

"No, sorry, I've met the Doctor, about a year back. You don't look anything like him." Sally hugged her arms to herself and started inching towards the inside door of the compartment.

"I'm quite sure I don't remember you." His voice took on a dreamy tone, and his gaze settled somewhere above her head. "Unless ... Oh, no. No, no ..."

The Doctor bounced to his feet, waving his arms as excitedly as the confines of the compartment would allow. "You've met a future version of myself. Don't let my appearance fool you, I change that every so often.

"I'm a time traveller. About a year ago, you met a future me, which is why I don't remember you. Look, I know it's rather complicated ..."

She quirked an eyebrow at him. "It's why you're useless at weddings."

"Yes," he said, "exactly. ..

"Did I tell you that?" he asked, looking vaguely worried.

"Yes." It was weird, but no weirder than the rest of her evening. "If you're the Doctor -- and understand that I'm not convinced -- Where is your box?"

"My ..." Confusion receded into something like relief on his face. "Oh, you mean the TARDIS. I've become, well, separated from her, temporarily ..."

"Again?"

For a moment, it seemed that he didn't understand what she had said. Then he turned away from her, and held up one hand to stop whatever else she might be about to say. "No, don't tell me any more. Knowledge of future events is a very dangerous thing. If nothing else, it spoils the surprise." He let his hand drop, and sat on his bench, crossing one leg over the other. "All right?"

"All right," she said. "I'm Sally, by the way. God, it feels odd, introducing myself to you again."

"Look," he said, "let's not talk anymore about ourselves. I'm guessing that our meeting, the one in your past, was our first. I shouldn't know anything about you, if that's going to go off as you remember it."

"I see. So, let's talk about the situation, then." She tried to find a good way to phrase it. "Just what the hell is going on here? Who was that? Why don't they want their pictures taken?'

"In order?" he asked. "We are in a dimensional interstice, a place where possible realities that have not manifested overlap each other and gain a certain degree of semi-reality. That was the Host, the native intelligence. They're mostly composed of information and probability, you see, so freezing some of their information into a static form, as with a camera, is like taking a chunk out of them."

"All right," Sally said. "Confusing conversation and weird, threatening alien things. I'm convinced. You're the Doctor."

"Thank you," he said with evident relief.

"Now, could you go over that again?"

"All right." He paused, staring at the shaded window, but clearly not looking at it.

"Time goes backwards and forwards, yes?" She nodded. "It also goes side-to-side, slightly. Well, sort of. It vibrates, like a plucked string. Or, it can. In places."

"It's wibbly-wobbly?" she offered.

"That sounds rather odd, but I suppose it works." He went on. "Some places in space and time are fixed. Events can unfold in only one way, because that's all the universe has room for. Other points are more fluid, with any number of possible variations, some more probable than others.

"But not all of the possibilities for those kinds of, um ..." he stopped again, to search for another word.

She said, "Timey-wimey?"

"I wouldn't have put it that way ... Oh. I did, didn't I. You're quoting me."

She smirked. "Yes."

"Blast!" he said. "You see what I mean about the dangers of fore-knowledge? You got that from me, and now I got it from you. And now we'll never know if I would have come up with it on my own.

"Where was I?" He looked and sounded lost.

Sally sighed. "Possibilities, probabilities ..."

"Ah, yes," he said. "Thank you. Not all the probabilities for any given space-time event can manifest in reality. Usually, almost always, only one. But, sometimes, in some places, the other probabilities don't just fade away. They overlap, reinforcing each other into a kind of semi-reality, and anchoring themselves to some part of physical reality.

"So the tube station you saw there, wasn't really there. It was something woven together out of all the possible stations that could have been there, but weren't."

It started to fit together in Sally's head. "And those people ... They were the same. Woven out of all the people who could have been there, but weren't."

"Yes," he said, excited now. "But don't make the mistake of thinking that they're just shadows of real people. They aren't human, they're something entirely other; Something more, and at the same time, less. At any rate, they're native to the interstices, and they're very formal and picky about manners."

Strangely, the explanation didn't make Sally feel all that much better. "But why did they come to Earth?"

"Hmm? Oh, they didn't. They've always been here."

"Now, wait, why haven't I heard of them before now?"

His face took on a sly look. "How do you know you haven't?"

"I think I'd remember something like this."

"What, like a beautiful, mysterious people, living underground ..."

What he was saying finally dawned on her. "Oh, no."

"Yes."

"Fairies?"

The Doctor jumped a bit at that, and looked around as if to make sure they were alone. "Don't call them that. They hate it."

"Why?" Sally had got over name calling quite a few years ago.

"Well, all they are is information, bound up in repetitive loops. Habits and memories, binding scraps of second-hand reality together. For them, names have power. They're one of the linchpins that hold them as stable as they are."

"And by taking their pictures, I stole some of this information." Sally wasn't sure she understood it, or agreed that it was as big an offence as the Host seemed to think, but at least she knew why they were angry with her.

"Exactly." The Doctor opened the blind on the window, and looked out into what seemed to Sally to be a tunnel through swirling purple mist. "We're in the deepest part of the interstice. Soon, we'll be in a new place, ruled by another Host. You should be safe, then. And we should be able to get you back into solid reality."

"What about you?"

"Oh, there shouldn't be any problem for me," he said. "That Host owes me a favour, remember?"

"No. I mean, where are you going?"

He turned away from the window. "Oh, that. I've business in the interstice. Trying to gather allies to help me with a project I've been given." His voice had gotten darker, harder, as he spoke about something he clearly didn't like.

Sally stopped asking questions, then, to give herself time to digest the answers she'd gotten. They rode along in a pleasant silence for some time. She had no idea how long, and thought that it would have been the wrong way to look at it, anyway.

She was just about to close her eyes and try and get some rest when there was a great crash from further up the train. The air was filled with an unearthly howling, and things seemed altogether less pleasant than just a few minutes previous.

Standing, she opened the door leading from their compartment to the narrow hallway inside the car. Down at the far end of the hall, clawing at the red carpeting and with the curve of its bristling back brushing the oil lanterns hanging from the ceiling, was the largest dog she'd ever seen. It was black as night, except for its eyes and the insides of its ears and mouth, which burned with the same blue flame as lit the Elphame station.

"Doctor ..." she said, quietly.

The Doctor leant halfway out of the compartment, pushing her into the hallway.

"Oh no," was as far as he got with whatever he was going to say. At that point, the dog sniffed, and looked up, having caught their scent. "Sally," he said, "Run."

Sally raised her camera, as if to take a picture of the dog.

The Doctor turned and shoved her further down the car. "No," he shouted. "Just run!"

She did, quickly reaching the end of the car and throwing open the door at the end. There was a little balcony at the end of the car, facing another, similar balcony on the front of the next car. There was a gap in the railings, and a bronze chain connecting the two balconies.

The door slammed behind her. "Jump it!" the Doctor yelled.

She did, painfully aware that there was nothing beneath the train but more of that strange, purple mist. It wasn't that far, though, and the train was moving smoothly. She made the leap rather easily, threw open the door on the next car, and ran into it.

The Doctor was close behind her, doing something to the door handle with a buzzing tool of some kind. "Don't try the camera trick again," he said.

"Why not? It seemed to work well enough on the platform." Sally hated having no option but running.

"Yes, but we aren't on the platform anymore, are we? There was a real abandoned tube station under interstice then. There is no foundational physical reality under the train. If you made it disintegrate while we're in transit, where would that leave us?"

The Doctor finished whatever it was he was doing to the door. "That may not hold it," he said, before being interrupted by a crash against the door.

The dog was big enough to straddle the gap between cars while it battered at the door.

"Right," Sally said. "Next car, then." She took flight down the hallway, and was out the far door in moments.

This was when she found that they were in the last car of the train. Behind them was nothing but the mist, filling in the tunnel behind the train, giving her no sense of distance or orientation.

"Ah," said the Doctor from behind her. "End of the line."

Together, they turned to see the dog-thing padding slowly down the hall, as if it knew its prey had nowhere to run. The Doctor leant tiredly against the frame of the open door.

"What is it, Doctor?" Sally asked.

"It's the Host, or part of it, anyhow." He stood, suddenly. "That's it. I have an idea." He stood as tall and wide as he could, arms akimbo, feet planted. The great, black dog, as if sensing resistance, began a growl that made windows rattle.

"That's enough of that," the Doctor said. "You owe me a boon, and I know what I want."

Having finally reached the end of the hall, the dog sat on its haunches, its glowing eyes on the level with the Doctor.

"I ask that you not touch, hinder, or otherwise molest me for so long as we are within the bounds of your authority."

"Um, Doctor," Sally said, "That's a dog."

"I've known some exceptionally intelligent dogs in my time," the Doctor said. "And this is more than just a dog. This is the Host itself," and then to the dog, "Aren't you?"

It nodded, slowly and somewhat reluctantly.

"And since the Host has chosen to manifest in this shape and size," the Doctor explained, "there's no way it can reach past me to get to you. And once we are in the realm of another Host, it won't be able to act against you until it can convince the other Host to allow it. Rules of hospitality, and all that."

The black dog turned, which was a remarkable enough sight in such a tight hallway, and stalked away, gradually fading from sight. The rest of the ride passed uneventfully, although the Doctor remained standing in the doorway, and Sally remained on the balcony, just in case.

After a time, the train pulled into a huge, round chamber, the floor of which was criss-crossed with tracks. "We seem to be in some sort of central station, probably a manifestation of the interstice interacting with some other kind of space-time anomaly. I'll have to remember to come back here and investigate, some day."

Sally looked around, taking in the profusion of trains and tracks and galleries, and a single spiral staircase in the centre of it all. "I suppose I'll have to climb that to get out, won't I?"

The Doctor looked at the stair, and at the place in the roof where it seemed to enter into daylight. "I'm afraid so."

He moved out of the doorway to stand next to her on the balcony. "I think this is farewell, Sally. Next time I see you, it will be for the first time." He was smiling a bit sadly.

She wasn't quite sure how to manage this parting. He would certainly see her again, yet she might never again see him. In the end, she decided it was best to be simple and direct.

"Good bye, Doctor."

The stairway did not take as long to climb as she feared. Soon enough, she found herself standing off to one side of a slightly bowl-shaped, paved plaza. A double row of lighted columns ran the length of the place, and she stood near the base of a mirror-panelled tower that had water cascading down its outer surfaces.

Looking across the end of the plaza, she saw a building that looked like a capsized barge made of copper plates. Cut into the end facing her were words, some in Welsh and the some in English. The English read, "In these stones horizons sing."

"I'm in Cardiff?" she said aloud to herself. "How the hell did I end up in Cardiff?"