Camera Obscura - A Doctor Who short story Read online

you have a funnel, do you? And a cup of tea?”

  Clara and Mikey watched as the Doctor set up the battery at the end of Mikey’s bed. At the top of it he fixed the funnel and stuck his sonic screw driver on the side.

  “Does he actually know what he’s doing?” Mikey whispered to Clara.

  “I’m never quite sure,” she said, “I think he has a rough idea… sometimes.”

  “Perfect!” The Doctor said and stood back to look at his creation.

  “Clara, you and I will go and have a cup of tea whilst Mikey here performs his ablutions…”

  “My what?”

  Clara winked at him. “Get ready for bed.”

  “…and then we will be ready for them.”

  “You’re not leaving me alone with them – are you?”

  The Doctor placed a hand on Mikey’s shoulder. “We won’t. They won’t come out until dark and by then we’ll be ready!”

  Mikey lay in bed, blankets grasped in his fingers and pulled up to his chin.

  “Do I just lie here and wait?” he asked.

  “You have to,” the Doctor told him.

  “And where are you going to be?”

  “Waiting…” he looked around, “Clara you sit in the chair beside his bed, look like you’re sleeping or you might put them off.”

  Clara sat. “And where are you going to be?”

  “In the closet, all the beasties like a closet. I’ll sit in there and wait for them to make a move.”

  “Go through it again, Doctor,” Mikey asked.

  “You sleep, they come out of the shadows and think yum, yum, yum. They approach the bed to begin the feast and then I get rid of them.”

  “You’re not gonna let them eat me, are you?”

  “No!”

  Clara recognised that ‘no’ as the Doctor’s ‘no’ that usually meant he hoped for the best, but couldn’t quite be sure what was going to happen.

  Mikey lay back and closed his eyes. Then he opened one and looked at Clara. “Will you hold my hand?”

  She smiled and reached out to take his hand in hers. Then she sat back and closed her own eyes, ears prickling and listening for the slightest movement that wasn’t the Doctor tripping over a pair of shoes in the closet.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said quietly to the closet, “he’s asleep. I never thought he’d sleep.”

  The Doctor’s head appeared between the slightly ajar doors. “Of course he’s asleep. They’ll all be asleep by now. I can’t have them running around and interfering. Besides, he has to be asleep or they won’t come out.”

  “Doctor, did you drug Mikey and his family?”

  “That would imply the use of a drug… I merely helped their brain patterns calm down.”

  She shook her head, but said nothing. Mikey had loosened his grip on her hand, so she wrapped her arms around herself.

  Despite her intentions otherwise, Clara began to drift off and was woken by Mikey’s murmuring. Her eyes shot open. Mikey was asleep and in the first grip of a nightmare. At first, she couldn’t see anything, but then as her eyesight adjusted she began to make out the shadowy bird-like figures. They were clustered around Mikey and pecking into his flesh with their non-corporeal beaks. Like vultures, they tore their prey and threw their heads back to swallow what looked like silvery threads of spider webs.

  “Doctor…” she said quietly.

  “I’m calibrating…” he returned with a whisper.

  “Get rid of them, Doctor.”

  “I’ve got to lock on to their energy signature before I can… Oh…”

  “Doctor?”

  “Clara, are you ready to run?”

  “Run?”

  “Yes, run. Proceed with haste, move swiftly.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s one thing these creatures like more than potential.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Time travellers. I need you to distract them so I can finish calibrating to their energy signature. On my count, run through the house – lead them on a merry dance but end up back here – I need the battery. Run!”

  Clara leapt to her feet and flew to the door. As she did so, she felt the weight of a million shadows pursuing her. She headed down the stairs and ran in a loop around the lower floor, sometimes outrunning them, sometimes feeling the peck of a shadow bird on her soul.

  After two zig zagging loops of the ground floor she ran back up the stairs. The birds gained on her as they had no need for stairs and took the shortest route. She headed back into the bedroom as she felt them flutter around her face and heard the familiar buzz of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.

  “Out of the way, Clara!” he said.

  She threw herself to the floor.

  Green light filled the air above her.

  Twisting, she looked up and saw the shadows were now caught in the green light projected by the sonic screwdriver and gradually moving towards the Doctor who stood behind the battery. One by one the shadowy creatures were sucked into the funnel attached to the top of the battery. After some minutes all of them had gone.

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  “Is that it?” he scoffed, “I had to do some quite complicated mathematics to catch those beasties.”

  “But they’re gone, right?”

  “These ones are. There are probably more of them out in the world, but these ones were my problem and now they are no more.”

  “And Mikey?”

  “He’s had some potential stolen from him, they’ve been at him for days, but we’ve saved him from any further damage.”

  The morning sun hit the bedroom and Clara’s eyes opened just before Mikey’s. He stretched out and smiled.

  “I had a dream, Clara – a dream.”

  “No more nightmares?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. “That’s good. I’m glad. Doctor?”

  She got up and opened the closet door. There was no sign of him. Out on the landing she heard laughter and peered over the bannister. She couldn’t see anything, but it sounded like the Doctor’s laugh.

  Following the sound, she went downstairs and towards the kitchen. The Doctor and Mikey’s mother were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea.

  Mikey’s mother smiled. “Tea?”

  Clara nodded and the woman rose and went to the kettle on the stove.

  “You weren’t in the closet,” Clara said to the Doctor.

  “Why would I sleep in the closet when there’s a guest bedroom?”

  She stretched her back. “You might have told me. I ache all over.”

  “How’s Mikey?”

  “He had a dream.”

  “Mikey!” his mother called out of the door, “Hurry up – we need to drive to the airport and pick your father up in half an hour. He gets back from Germany today.”

  As Mikey appeared in the kitchen the Doctor ran the screwdriver over him, but said nothing. “Time to go, Clara. Young man, goodbye.”

  They said goodbye to the Kings and were shown out the front door.

  “Keep dreaming, Mikey,” Clara said and planted a kiss on his forehead.

  They were halfway down the path they had first arrived on, when Clara remembered.

  “We didn’t put the battery back in the car,” she said.

  “No time.”

  “We can’t leave it. We promised Mikey.”

  “No choice. Besides, we’ve just made that the most powerful car battery never invented. That car battery will probably never need replacing. It’s good for life now. Hold on.”

  “Doctor?”

  He put out his arm and pulled Clara close.

  “Here it is.”

  He reached up and felt around the air until his hand was seized by an invisible force which pulled them both up and sucked them into darkness.

  Clara landed on her knees this time. It was morning and the sun was just peeking over the crenelations of the Camera Obscura building.
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  “That was lucky,” the Doctor said, peering over the wall to the ground several stories below. “A slight move in the wrong direction and we could have landed there.” He pointed his screwdriver at the point they had landed. “One energy well all plugged up. Come on, let’s get back to the TARDIS before this place is swarming with tourists and Irn Bru.”

  They walked back to the park in silence, watching the sunlight begin to light up the city.

  “Will Mikey be alright?” Clara asked as the Doctor unlocked the TARDIS.

  “Oh yes, he did quite amazing things with his life before it was sadly cut short. You’ve probably heard of him.” The Doctor disappeared into the TARDIS.

  “Mikey King? I don’t think so.”

  He poked his head out of the door. “His father changed his name on his return from his trip to Germany. He was inspired to in tribute to a theologian he studied. Come on.”

  “Theologian? Who?” she asked as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

  “Martin Luther. Now come on Clara, don’t dilly dally. Places to go, people to see…”

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  I envisaged this as a script; some ideas tell you how they want to best be written and this was very visual in my head. However, the BBC no longer take on spec submissions and it’s impossible to get a script seen unless you’ve already had one produced, so I decided to turn this into a short story. I hope you enjoyed it.

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