Title: Angels of the Silences

Author: E.A. Week

E-mail: eaweek at hotmail-dot-com; I'm also on LiveJournal as eaweek.

Summary: The tenth Doctor goes undercover at a small American college to unravel the mystery behind a brutal murder, but he's not the only incognito time-traveler on campus.

Category: Doctor Who.

Distribution: Feel free to link this story to other websites (blogs, LJ, Facebook, whatever), but please drop me at least a brief e-mail and let me know you've done this.

Feedback: Letters of comment are always welcome! Loved it? Hated it? Send me an email and let me know why!

Disclaimers: Copyrights to all characters in this story belong to their respective creators, production companies, and studios. I'm just borrowing them, honest! The story title and all chapter titles are shamelessly stolen from Counting Crows.

Story rating: This story is rated M for language, sexuality, and adult themes.

Possible spoilers: This story takes place after the fourth season of the new Doctor Who series.

CONTINUITY DISCLAIMER: PLEASE READ THIS. This story was first written and posted in 2008. Since then, seasons five and six have rendered some of this content non-canonical. Please don't write me or leave reviews for this story telling me I "messed up" something regarding characters and events that took place following season four. I like this story as it stands, and I'm not going to make myself crazy trying to perpetually retcon it to fit into the show's evolving canon. –EA Week, 6-30-11

Prologue

August and Everything After

Two events shocked Charles Holland on that late summer day, and Lucille Cavanaugh's murder was the least of them.

After talking to the police, he and his wife Anna had retreated to Tomasso's, their new favorite restaurant, that charming Italian trattoria in the center of town. They sat in numb silence, listening to the musical splash of water in the wishing well, only breaking out of their stupor to order food and coffee.

Part of his anguish was personal. He'd known Lucille for over thirty years; she was one of his best friends and most trusted colleagues. Petty aggravation compounded his grief: classes at Ethan Allen College would begin in less than a week, and hiring a competent biology instructor at the last moment—at a small, rural college—would prove challenging, if not impossible. He knew he should start searching right away, but the damned unholy speed of it all had left him too stunned to speak, let alone act.

A waitress brought out their food, and Anna murmured a quiet thanks. Charles poked at his plate, unable to muster much appetite.

Movement distracted him: Tomasso swept past, beaming, escorting a customer to a table on the other side of the dining room. Charles glanced up, then did a double-take, eyes goggling behind his bifocals.

"Oh, my God," he blurted.

"What?" asked Anna.

Charles couldn't stop staring. "That man," he said.

"Who?" Anna turned her head to follow the line of her husband's gaze.

"That one over there, with Tomasso." Charles lowered his voice. "I know him."

"Oh?"

"He was a friend of my father's. I met him when I was ten, at Dad's lab in Palo Alto."

Anna turned back to Charles, eyebrows raised in skepticism. "He can't be more than what, forty? How could he have been your father's friend?"

"It's him… I know it's him."

"Charlie… you must be mistaken."

Charles kept staring across the room, dazed. When the newcomer drew out a pair of black-rimmed glasses to study a newspaper, Charles felt his skin break out in crawling gooseflesh.

"Jesus," he whispered. He got to his feet, unsteady, and despite Anna's quiet, sharp protest, made his way across the room.

It felt like a window had opened straight into the past. The man hadn't changed in the slightest; he even wore the same suit Charles remembered: bright blue, with a pattern of burgundy pinstripes. On the seat beside him lay folded a tan overcoat; Charles could just see a bit of the indigo lining. The freckles, the thick eyebrows, the long hands—everything was exactly the same.

Noticing Charles at last, the man looked up, his gaze mild and curious. He didn't speak, so Charles screwed up his courage and said, "Doctor?"

"I'm sorry; have we met?" Even the voice was just as Charles remembered it, a pleasant, youthful tenor.

"Oh, my God. It is you." Charles slid into the seat opposite the Doctor, glad to be off his feet. "You probably don't remember me. I'm Charles Holland—we met in my father's lab back in fifty-eight—"

"Charlie Holland!" the man exclaimed in such a loud voice that a couple of diners nearby turned their heads to stare. Offering a hand to Charles, the Doctor said, "Of course I remember you!" He beamed a wide, happy smile. "How are you, Charlie?"

"Not as well as you, by the look of things," Charles responded, his laugh shaky. "How did you—do you mind if I ask what's your secret?"

"Oh, you know, diet and exercise, vitamins, sunscreen." The Doctor waved off the question with a breezy gesture of one hand.

Tomasso's pretty daughter appeared then with a tray on her shoulder. She set a couple of dishes on the table, glanced at Charles, then at the Doctor with a pointed, questioning look.

"It's all right," he murmured, smiling. "Thank you."

The girl departed. Charles sat watching the Doctor eat, still trying to absorb the staggering implications: this man didn't seem to have aged a day since 1958.

The Doctor handled his utensils like a European, using the knife to push food onto the back of his fork. "This is delicious," he said. "Try some?"

"No, thank you." Charles lowered his voice. "You're not any older."

"Oh, I am," the Doctor smiled, and there was something in his eyes that chilled Charles to his core. "I'm much older." He patted the newspaper folded beside him. "Are you the Charles Holland mentioned in this article?"

Charles picked up the paper, a late edition of the town crier, with a headline story on Lucille's death.

"Yes," he said. "That's me. I wish it wasn't."

"Academic Vice-President of Ethan Allen College? You've done well for yourself, Charlie."

"Thank you. That's Anna, my wife, over there."

"Hello!" The Doctor waved at Anna; she gave him a faint smile and an incredulous nod in return. "Any children?"

"Two. They're grown up, now."

"Grandchildren?"

"Not yet."

Growing serious, the Doctor said, "What happened to her?"

"I wish I knew. Doctor—Lucille didn't have an enemy in the world. Why would anyone—how could they—she was a scientist, an old woman for God's sake—" Charles stopped; he could feel himself shaking.

"She was in the wrong place at the wrong time." The Doctor put a gentle hand on Charlie's arm.

"I talked to the police. Nobody knows what happened. They found her body in the woods, just—just dumped there, like a bag of garbage."

"I'm sorry. Cause of death?"

Fighting tears, Charles said, "Someone used a knife on her. She was mutilated." He got control of himself. "She was naked, but the police said there was no sign of sexual assault. They have to wait for test results, obviously, but they don't think she was raped."

"I'm sorry."

"Could you—can you—I know you helped me father with whatever it was—that thing—"

The Doctor shook his head. "That was something fairly extraordinary," he said. "This sounds like a homicide—sordid, but it's best handled by your local police."

"It's not ordinary," Charles insisted.

"What makes you say that?"

"Listen to this."

Charles pulled out his cell phone, dialed into his home voice mail, and handed over the phone. He watched the Doctor's face as the message played out. Charles didn't have to listen in: he had the message memorized.

"Hello, Charlie, it's me. I need to speak to you as soon as possible. There's something going on, something that I think impacts the entire town. I'd go to the police, but this is such an unusual thing, I'm not sure what they'd make of it—" A brief laugh, then Lucille had continued, "I know you'll think I'm out of my mind, Charlie, so I'd rather talk to you about this in person. Please call me as soon as you can. Or stop by my house—I'm not sure if I trust the phones any more. All right, goodbye now."

The Doctor frowned at the cell phone for a moment, then replayed the message. "You have no idea what this was in reference to?"

"None. We hadn't spoken for a few weeks. Anna and I were out playing golf when the message came in." Charles winced. "I had my cellular turned off. I could kick myself for it, now."

"Don't. You had no way of knowing. Did the police hear this?"

"Of course. I'm sure they must think she figured she was on to a child pornography network or something. They're looking at her computer as well."

"What kind of research did she do?"

"Field biology. Animal behavior. Ornithology."

"Nothing dangerous or controversial?"

"No, nothing."

The Doctor thought the situation over. He glanced around the restaurant and said, "Is there anywhere we could go that's more private?"

"Sure," Charles exhaled. "My house—it's a five minute drive from here."

He went and collected Anna, introducing her to the Doctor. Anna left money on the table for their barely-touched food, tossing some loose change into the wishing well on her way out.

(ii)

The Doctor declined a ride back to the house, saying he'd meet up with them there. He must have flown, because when Charles and Anna arrived, they found him in their garden, examining the late summer flowers.

Inside the house, Zulu set up a loud racket, but the Doctor won him over with a few words and a friendly scratching. The big dog fell quiet, and his tail began to swish back and forth as he sniffed the newcomer's hands.

"There's a good boy," the Doctor said. "I know, I smell a bit odd to you, don't I?" He asked Charles, "Rhodesian ridgeback?"

"He's three," said Charles. "Our first grandchild, Anna likes to say. Don't let all the barking fool you—whenever we have a thunderstorm, he hides under one of the beds. Can I get you anything to eat or drink?"

"No thanks, I'm fine."

The Doctor made himself at home in the Hollands' living room, flopping down into one of the big chairs.

"You said the body was mutilated," he began. "In what way?"

"Cuts on one arm," said Charles. "And a big one to the throat. That's what killed her. That's all they know, without an autopsy."

"Had she been acting strangely prior to her death?"

"Not at all," said Charles.

"What about the town itself, the college? Anything out of the ordinary? Even the smallest thing might mean something."

Charles sat for a few moments, searching his memory.

"Nothing," he said at last. "At least, nothing that comes to mind."

"Anna?" the Doctor said.

She shook her head. "If anything, it's been even more sleepy than summer usually is around here."

"We don't even offer summer courses," Charles laughed. "The college runs on a skeleton crew. There were a couple of conferences in June and July, but it's been deserted since then. Most of the faculty and staff take vacation time. It's busier now—we're getting ready for the school year."

"Have the students come back yet?"

"In about five days," said Charles. "The res life staff are back on campus."

The Doctor rubbed his chin for a moment. "No cults, nothing like that?"

"Not that I know of," said Charles. "I've lived in this area for decades now, and we've never had anything more unusual than some pagan tree-huggers. A couple years back, some of them were found dancing naked in a field at the summer solstice." He laughed. "That's about as scandalous as it gets."

"Did you actually see the body?" asked the Doctor.

"Enough for me to identify her," said Charles. Even the memory made him feel sick. "They just showed me her face."

"Where's she being kept?"

"The medical examiner's office."

The Doctor stood. "I'd like to have a look."

"You can't just walk in there," Charles protested.

Flashing a grin, the Doctor said, "I can walk in anywhere. Come with me." Anna began to protest, but the Doctor said, "We'll be back in five minutes." He pointed to the grandfather clock, whose hands indicated 6:25 PM. "Literally, five minutes."

Charles followed the odd man out of the house—not to the driveway, but to the garden.

"Where're we going?"

"This way." The Doctor vanished around the back of the tool shed. Feeling uneasy now, Charles followed. He blinked, staring up at a tall blue box, about the size of a phone booth.

"How'd this thing get in my yard?"

Grinning, the Doctor opened one of the doors with a key. "Come on inside."

Dubious, Charles followed, and once through the doorway, he made an inarticulate noise, grabbing onto a nearby railing for support. "My God!" he blurted. "What the hell is this?"

"Welcome to the TARDIS." The Doctor shut the wooden door and bounded to the center of the vast room. Charles stared around, unable to take it all in: the curved, soaring pillars, the glowing lights, the endless preponderance of unfamiliar machinery.

"What—how does all this fit into that box?"

"Relative dimensions. Now, hang onto something." The Doctor flipped a few switches on the circular control panel, and the entire structure began to shake in violent tremors. Charles tightened his grip on the railing.

"What's happening?" he yelled.

"We're moving!" After a moment, there was another mighty rattle and thump, and with a shudder, the incredible machine went still.

"Here we are." The Doctor brushed past Charles and opened the door.

Outside lay not the sunny garden, but a darkened room. The Doctor switched on a flashlight, casting the yellow beam around. Charles spotted scientific apparatus, gleaming metal. The air was cold, redolent of formaldehyde.

"We're in the morgue?"

"Just a quick hop."

"How'd we get here so fast?"

The Doctor ignored the question. He left the door of his machine standing open and strode across the darkened morgue, heading straight for the refrigerated body drawers. Charles followed, turning back to stare behind him: just a plain blue wooden box on the outside—but inside, so much more. His mind reeled from the staggering implications.

"Your father never told you, did he?" The Doctor was opening drawers one by one, pausing at times to unzip body bags. "Lucille, is that her name?"

"Lucille Cavanaugh." Charles hovered back, not watching. The sight of morbid flesh didn't bother him; he only hated looking at the husk of his dead friend, no longer lit from within by Lucille's intelligence and spirit, the empty shell a mockery of the woman she'd been. "My father never told me what?"

"Anything about me."

"Just that you were a scientist, and those two women were your assistants. One of them was a doctor, I remember that. She was the first black person I'd ever met."

"Really?"

"Whitebread suburbia in the 1950s," Charles laughed. He looked at the clock. "It says 2:30—it must be broken."

"No, that's right. We've come forward in time, to the small hours of tomorrow morning."

"Oh, please."

"It's true." The Doctor glanced back over his shoulder. "I'm an alien, Charlie. An alien who travels in time and space."

"Do I look like some kind of…" Charles trailed off, turning to stare at the blue box. "In that thing?"

"Yes."

"You travel in time as well as space? In a wooden phone booth?"

"A police call box," the Doctor huffed.

"What—why—" Charles began to sweat. "But you—you—" Pieces came back to him, memories of how excited his father had been by the Doctor's presence, his constant references to "that amazing man," how he'd liked and admired and almost worshipped the stranger in the brown coat.

"Why'd Dad never tell me?" he asked.

"You were a child." The Doctor had found the right drawer. "He might've thought you'd be too excited to keep it a secret. I'll need a light over here," he said, changing the topic without preamble or apology.

Charles found a light on a stand and pushed it over, trying not to look too closely. The Doctor adjusted the light and bent over Lucille's body, examining her left arm with a slender metal tube that glowed blue at one end. Charles jolted, remembering the thing from those memorable few days so long ago: a sonic screwdriver, the Doctor had called it, a nifty gadget that he'd used for just about everything.

To distract himself, he asked, "What happened to your two friends?" He recalled that he'd liked the young black physician, who'd talked to him about science, more than the loudmouthed, bossy redhead, who'd reminded him too much of his fifth grade teacher.

"They went back to London." The Doctor drew from his pocket a pair of 3-D glasses and perched them on the narrow bridge of his nose.

"Could you get any less high-tech?" snorted Charles.

"There's bite marks on her arm with a kind of residual energy on them… but nowhere else on her body."

"What kind of energy?"

"The energy that's present when something crosses a dimensional wall." The Doctor straightened up and stood for a moment with his chin thrust forward, sucking his teeth while he ruminated. "Strange," he muttered.

"Bite marks?" Charles shifted on uneasy feet.

"Oh, yes. These little triangular marks near the inside of her elbow. Very faint, as if whatever bit her didn't have much strength. The rest of the damage was done with a knife." The Doctor looked grim and said. "But there's no energy traces on those cut marks—only in the bites." He removed the 3-D glasses and returned them to a pocket. Charles remembered how the Doctor had carried an endless assortment of items in those pockets, a source of continual delight to him as a child.

"So, what bit her?" Charles watched the Doctor zip up the body bag and push the metal drawer closed.

"Good question." The Doctor gestured Charles back into the blue box. "Something with teeth but not much strength, something that hopped into this reality from another dimension…"

"Another dimension? Are you kidding?" But a second look around the interior of the incredible machine convinced Charles that his father's friend was serious. "Okay, you're not kidding. I guess I better get used to that. So, she was killed by an alien?" Despite the events of the previous spring, Charles felt like an idiot even asking the question.

"Possibly. It also might be a terrestrial species from Earth's past." The Doctor pulled some levers on the control panel.

"Like a dinosaur?" Charles shouted above the noise.

"If that were the case, I'd expect to see more damage, not just a couple of nibble marks."

"A baby dinosaur?"

Laughing, the Doctor said, "Any reports of strange reptiles in town?"

"I don't know… maybe that's why Lucille wanted to talk to me."

"It's possible, but…"

"But what?"

"I've observed a lot of dinosaurs, Charlie—I know what a carnivore's attack looks like. Whatever killed Lucille, I don't think it was a dinosaur."

"You've seen dinosaurs?"

"I've never had a traveling companion from Earth who didn't want to go back and have a look at them."

"Why didn't you tell me that when I was ten?" Charles almost shrieked. "I'd have demanded a tour!"

The Doctor grinned and a moment later, the vessel came to a rumbling halt.

"Here we are." The Doctor opened the door to the box and gestured Charlie outside.

"So, why don't you go back in time and figure out what killed Lucille? Or hell, just go back and stop her from dying?"

"I can't do that," the Doctor said, standing outside the door. "Some events are fixed; others are in flux, and your friend's death, sadly, is a fixed point. Besides, I've been in town a few days, and if I went back, I'd risk running into myself, which is a paradox and causes all sorts of problems."

Charlie's shoulders slumped. "I guess you can't go back and undo every shitty thing that's ever happened in this world, can you?"

"This or any other world," the Doctor said. A profound sadness lay behind those words.

They were back in the Hollands' yard, the garden bright and sun-dappled, sweet-scented, such a change from the dark, gloomy confines of the morgue that Charles stood blinking in shock for a few moments.

Inside the house, the grandfather clock had just struck the half-hour. Both hands pointed down: it was 6:30, exactly five minutes after they'd left. Anna stared at the two men, but said nothing; she'd grill Charles later.

"Was anything unusual found among Lucille's effects?" The Doctor settled himself once again in the armchair. "Any notes, files on her computer, things like that?"

"If there were, the police didn't say anything to me. And they wouldn't, if there's anything they need to keep as evidence. But Lucille's office is a rat warren—so's her house; her work was her life. If she'd scribbled a note to herself, anything like that, it'd be like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

"What about her family?"

"She has two kids, both living out of state. Her husband died fifteen years ago. Her kids will have to go through her things and sell the house." This thought caused a fresh wave of grief to wash over Charles, and he struggled to keep his composure.

"You know them well?"

"Pretty well."

"Ask them to tell you if they find anything out of the ordinary."

"Sure." Charles asked, "So… do you have any idea who killed her? Or what?"

"No." The Doctor looked abstract, far away. "I need to think about it. My greatest worry is that whatever killed her could strike again, with as little warning. And if it crossed a dimensional wall to get here, that could be dangerous for any number of other reasons."

Inspiration struck Charles. "If you'd like to go undercover for a few months, I have the perfect alibi for you."

"What's that?"

"I need a biology instructor to replace Lucille. Three courses in the fall and three in the spring, plus some thesis advisees. They're smart kids—they won't give you any trouble."

The Doctor grew cagey. "That's an entire year."

"Eight months," Charles countered. "September to May, with a month off at Christmas. You haven't aged a day in fifty years—please don't tell me time is an issue for you."

The Doctor looked taken aback.

"We can pay you—"

"I don't need money."

"Well, at least a living stipend. You can live in one of the college-owned apartments for nothing. Hell, you can even use my old Honda for the year if you need a set of wheels. And it would put you on campus, in town, right in with Lucille's colleagues, people who knew her. You could hardly ask for better cover."

"No committees," the Doctor said. "I'm rubbish on committees."

"All right," Charles laughed. "No committees. You'll do it, then?"

"One year, no more."

Charles took his feet. "Thank you," he said. "I can't thank you enough." Growing awkward, he asked, "What should people call you? I can't exactly introduce you as 'the Doctor,' can I? The campus is full of people with doctorates."

The Doctor stood and took Charlie's hand. With a firm shake, he smiled, "Dr. John Smith, pleased to meet you. When do I start?"

To be continued…