by Doctor Who
Rory twigged just in time. He ducked away from
'Amy' as she shimmered and rewove herself into Nathaniel Porter.
Porter grinned. 'Too late, Doctor. The Glamour is mine. And now it is time to embrace it.' He dropped his human disguise altogether, weaving again, this time into a copy of his original form, a Tahnn officer.
'The perfect spy,' he said simply.
Oliver hid his face in his hands and began sobbing uncontrollably, and Rory was beside him in a second, trying to comfort him.
'When did you infiltrate the Weave?' demanded the Doctor
'Oh, three years before they crashed on Earth,'
the Tahnn said.
'But you are one of the Weave,' Rory said. 'Tahnn can't do what you do.'
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'The Tahnn studied them for centuries. Do you really believe our science couldn't find a way of replicating their physical structure? I was a guinea pig, a volunteer who could have lived or died. I am the first Tahnn super-soldier, built to infiltrate and kill.'
'You... you were my friend...' said Old John, aghast.
'No,' the alien laughed. 'But you were willing to believe I was. The human mind is so easy to manipulate.'
'What about the Glamour?' asked the Doctor.
'How will you operate it?'
The Tahnn laughed at him. 'The Glamour isn't a device, Doctor. It's an ideal. A reimagining of life. A reshaping of reality.'
The corridor behind them all was suddenly filled with green sparkling light, that seemed almost alive as it wove around, as if searching for something.
Rory wasn't entirely sure what happened next.
This was mainly because the Doctor turned and threw himself at Rory and Old John, sending all three of them crashing to the ground.
Rory saw what looked like the air around them shimmer, like the haze of a mirage on the horizon, but close up.
He was aware of Oliver yelling close by and, in the corner of the room, the Tahnn soldier that had variously been Nathaniel Porter and Amy Pond seemed to just float into a billion particles, a look 200
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of pure surprise on his face as he simply dissipated out of existence.
Then Rory's view was utterly blanketed by the Doctor's body dropping over his face...
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14
In space, the Tahnn ship was approaching planet Earth.
The Primary barked orders, more out of fear than anything else, most of them unnecessary because the crew were well trained.
One of his advisers stepped up. 'Sir, we have lost contact with our agent.'
'Explain.'
'His life signs, they just... stopped.'
Another adviser piped up. 'Primary. I'm reading a massive surge in energy on the planet. It... it's Weave energy, sir.'
'Has the fool activated the Glamour before we got there?'
'Impossible to tell, sir. But it is being controlled...
somehow.'
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The Primary frowned. 'The Weave? They are supposed to be fractured, unable to control any of their technology...'
'No, sir, it's not the Weave. It's... it's a human!'
'Impossible!' The Primary stood up and pushed both advisers aside. 'You idiots cannot read the equipment properly.'
Then a voice spoke to them. Spoke to every Tahnn aboard the ship: the Primary, his advisers, his soldiers, his cooks and even his janitors. Every single Tahnn on the ship heard the voice.
'I can sense you,' said the voice. 'I can smell you, I can feel you and, oh my goodness, for the first time, it feels right. It is time to move on, to change my life for good.'
The Primary stared at his crew.
'I no longer want to feel, smell, hear, or sense you in any way,' said the voice. 'So I won't.'
Before the Primary could utter a single word, he, his crew and his ship, simply dissolved into molecules that drifted on the solar winds and then were gone for ever.
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He felt strange, like his body was thrashing about under its own volition, like he had no control over any part of it, but that quickly stopped and all he could feel then was the Doctor lying on him, breathing deeply.
After a moment, the Doctor moved. 'Rory, you OK?'
'I think so,' he replied. 'You?'
'Don't know,' the Doctor said. 'Don't know about anything any more.' He got up and sloped away, leaving Rory to look around.
What had previously been Oliver Marks's rather dingy set of rooms was now a beautifully ornate room with a grand piano in one corner. There were paintings on the wall of people Rory didn't DOCTOR WHO
recognise and shelves of what he could only guess were extremely expensive books. The tatty carpet had given way to polished floorboards he could see his face reflected in.
'Doctor?'
'I know, Rory,' was the response from the room's only other occupant.
The Doctor was standing by the French doors, which no longer looked out on slightly overgrown and unkempt greenery but instead on beautifully cut lawns, striped and with beautiful borders of flowers. A small fountain was in the centre and at the far ends where the fence had been giving way was now a gazebo and a high brick wall.
'The big willow tree's the same,' Rory said, joining him. 'So we've not travelled in time.'
'What makes you so sure...' the Doctor started, then looked at Rory as if, once again, noticing the young nurse actually had a brain. 'No, you're spot on. I missed that. Good one.' He patted Rory's shoulder.
'Maybe Amy's here,' Rory said. 'The real one, not one of these blasted Weave.'
The Doctor nodded slowly. 'I hope so.' Then he sniffed the air. 'Yeah, yeah, she probably is.'
'You don't think she is at all, do you?'
'Nope,' the Doctor confessed. 'Not remotely.
That'd be too easy.' He swung round to face the rearranged room and yelled at it. 'Too easy by far.
Come on, show yourself!' he bellowed.
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'Is that wise?'
The Doctor paused then shook his head. `Nope, probably not. Ever known me to be wise?'
'Well...'
'Really?' the Doctor sounded almost affronted.
'No one ever wants to be told they're wise, Rory.
Unless they're 90 years old.'
'You are ten times that.'
'Don't spoil my fun,' the Doctor said. 'Oi! Come on. Don't keep us waiting—'
The Doctor stopped as the door opened and a woman walked in.
'Oh hello,' he smiled. 'I'm the Doctor.'
'I know,' she said.
Rory realised she was the subject of one of the paintings on the wall and nudged the Doctor to draw his attention to the image in the really rather posh frame.
'Pride of place above the fireplace.' The Doctor stared at the portrait, squinting as he read the nameplate. 'It's better than the photo they hung in the old hallway,' he said.
Rory watched as the Doctor looked back at the newcomer in the doorway, whose red dress was in danger of falling and revealing more than it should.
He actually flushed with embarrassment and hoped the Doctor wouldn't notice, but the Time Lord was too busy offering the woman his hand.
'Mrs Porter, I presume.' He bowed slightly. 'An honour to make your acquaintance. We've... heard 207
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a lot about you. May I present Mr Rory Williams.
My friend.'
Mrs Porter spared Rory no more than a cursory glance, immediately focusing her attention back on the Doctor and starting to ease him towards the door.
Behind his back, the Doctor was gesticulating madly to Rory, pointing up and making circular motions.
It took a second before Rory realised he wanted him to look at all the paintings in the room. Either that or he wanted him to run in a circle, but he doubted that somehow.
Then the Doc
tor and the mysterious Mrs Porter were gone.
Rory checked the big painting of her, and sure enough that was who it said she was, although it was curious that it still gave no first name. How many people, he wondered, have their portraits painted and are then forever known as Mrs Porter.
Rory hadn't been travelling with the Doctor as long as Amy, but he had picked a few things up in that time. He knew a clue when he saw it. What it meant, right now, he had no idea, but something in the back of his mind told him that this was important. It could just be an affectation, but that seemed unlikely. Certainly for 1936. And the tree certainly implied this was still 1936.
Which was another clue. Why? Everything else in the garden had changed. Oh, it was the same 208
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garden, all right - different gardening job, but the shape and size was the same. Just like this room.
Same room, different contents.
Someone's idealised idea of what the Manse might have looked like in its glory days.
He wandered over to the other paintings, but none of the nameplates meant anything to him. Bar one. It was a small painting, which he hadn't even noticed at first because it was part of a triptych and was closed a bit, but when he opened it, a familiar face stared at out at him.
Amy Pond. Three Amy Ponds. The central one was as she was when he last saw her that morning, but looking very stern, as if the painter had caught her on a bad day. The left-hand one was Amy as he first ever saw her: about 8 years old, long red hair, freckles, holding an oddly shaped teddy bear that she had loved so much back then. On the right was another more recent Amy, but wearing white
- ohmygod, wearing a wedding dress. A nice one, too.
He'd never seen the dress she'd chosen for their big day.
That was meant to have taken place by now.
Before the Doctor re-entered her life. And Rory's life. And turned both their lives upside down.
Mr and Mrs Williams. Pond-Williams? Williams-Pond? Oh, the hours of discussion on that subject.
Well, maybe not hours, actually; more like minutes.
And not pretty minutes.
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Best not go there.
So anyway, why was there a set of Amy portraits hidden away in a dark corner of a huge room in this Manse that wasn't the same Manse he'd been in five minutes ago?
He glanced back out through the French doors at the big tree. The only remnant of the Manse he knew. Why? He tried to imagine it from earlier today, Oliver Marks sat in his chair out there, fearing... the return of the mysterious them. His post-traumatic stress disorder causing him so much distress. But it wasn't Rory's field of expertise, not in any way.
He simply didn't know how to treat it beyond basic TLC.
Why was the tree the same? Again that voice in the back of his head, telling him this was significant.
Same with the pictures of Amy. The sort of clues the Doctor would see and solve in a moment.
Except he hadn't. He hadn't even noticed the tree till Rory had pointed it out.
That was weird.
Weirder still, Rory noted, was that the door out of the room was gone and in its place was just more wall. The French Doors now had curtains drawn across them. He wrenched them back, expecting to see the garden. The pagoda. The tree.
Blank wall.
No, not blank - a painting shimmered into existence in front of him.
A painting of a tree. Not the willow tree from THE GLAMOUR CHASE
outside, though — this was an old greeny-yellowy tree, twisted roots above the ground. It was surrounded by others, but all blurred and out of focus, drawing attention to the main one.
'Great,' said Rory. 'Just what I needed.'
The Doctor walked along the polished, well-lit corridors of the Manse.
'Nice house,' he said. 'Yours?'
'In a way, Mr Doctor,' Mrs Porter replied, tossing her long blonde hair down across the back of her scarlet dress.
'Same layout, different coat of paint,' he said to his escort. 'Alternative world? Parallel reality?
Sliding doors existence? Or just a straightforward illusion?'
'I have no knowledge of these things you speak of, Mr Doctor,' Mrs Porter said in a tone that suggested she really didn't. She picked up the hem of her blossoming white gown. 'We should hurry; our host is most anxious to greet you properly.
He apologises that Chivers left you alone in the Withdrawing Room for so very long.'
'Chivers? Oh, right, the butler did it. And, obviously, I wasn't alone.'
'Really, sir? I saw no one with you.'
'Yes, you did. My second-best friend, Rory Williams. I introduced you to him.'
'I saw no one, sir,' said the enigmatic Mrs Porter.
The Doctor looked back the way they had walked 211
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and noted that there was only darkness behind. 'Like someone's not just shutting off the light behind us, Mrs P, but the whole world.' He stopped walking suddenly and, after a few more steps, Mrs Porter did the same.
'We really must move quickly, Mr Doctor, sir,' she said, straightening the apron on her black maid's outfit.
'Three changes of attire in three beats, that's a new one on me,' the Doctor said. He grabbed her arm. 'Focus, Mrs Porter. Focus.'
She stared into his eyes, then closed hers, and the Doctor watched as the maid's outfit reassembled into the tight scarlet dress of earlier.
'Whoever is manipulating the Glamour hasn't quite mastered it yet. Their concentration keeps slipping.'
Mrs Porter shrugged. 'This way, Mr Doctor,' she said and pushed open a door that the Doctor knew had previously led into the old dining room.
It was now a lavishly decorated ballroom. The room was the same size as before, but every time the Doctor looked in a different direction or at different people and things, just out of the corner of his eye, the room adjusted itself, rearranged, reformed to imply it was bigger than it was.
'Think,' he said to himself.
In his mind's eye, he could see the whole room and all the people in it, but not in the way the room wanted him to see it. Now he saw it as it really was: 212
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people and objects crammed together; a man in a nice suit, whose lower left leg was actually a small table, a lady sat on a chaise longue, although the lower half of her body was the chaise longue; and a young man in military uniform who seemed to be leaning against the fireplace, yet the whole right side of his body was actually the wall.
The Doctor closed his eyes, took a deep breath and allowed the unreality to flood into him again, and see the room, the furniture and the people as the room wanted to be seen. It was less confusing that way, and anyway he knew the reality now.
A man was seated at the piano, playing soundlessly.
'Nathaniel Porter?' the Doctor asked, guessing from the attentive way that the guests were hanging on his playing that he was their host.
The man turned. It wasn't Nathaniel Porter. It was Oliver Marks. Smiling.
'Doctor, you made it.'
'Just about, 011y. Not everything's quite as it was.
Or should be.'
'That's to be expected,' Oliver said, standing.
'Doctor, there's someone I'd like you to meet. Don't think you've met her properly before.'
'Another lady, Oliver? I've already had the pleasure of meeting someone I assume is the missing first Mrs Porter. Who next?'
A young woman in a short flapper skirt, diadem around her head and hair bobbed into kiss curls 213
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around her cheeks was suddenly standing next to Oliver, holding his hand.
'My wife,' Oliver said. 'Doctor, meet Daisy Marks.'
Two children seemed to detach themselves from Daisy's legs. They couldn't have been hiding behind her but something was skewing the Doctor's perspective. Of course, they'd been there all along, he just hadn't seen them.
'Dav
ey and Calleagh, meet the Doctor. A very old and valued friend,' Oliver said.
The Doctor closed his eyes, refocusing his mind -
trying to bring back the reality he'd seen of jumbled people and things, flesh and inorganics melded as one, a jumble, a mishmash of concepts and ideas.
He opened his eyes.
Blast it, the room was still as he didn't want it to be - perfect. Now with added children shaking his hand and curtseying.
'Davey, Calleagh,' he found himself saying, though every fibre of his being resisted. Why? Why was he getting drawn into this mirage? He needed something... something to pull him back to reality.
The crowd was parting, almost reverentially, as someone made their way through. Now what?
And then, facing him, tall, flame-haired, but wearing a blue duffel coat with a little bobble cap and mittens... Amy Pond.
'Amy!'
'Is that my name, sir?' she asked. 'I wasn't sure.
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Are you who I'm looking for?'
'Quite possibly, Amy, yes.'
'Are you the love of my life?' She held out her hand and the Doctor could see the engagement ring on it.
'No,' he said quietly. 'No, that's Rory. I think that may be who you are looking for. He's...' The Doctor went to wave in the direction of the hallway that Mrs Porter had led him down but it was gone.
As was the door Amy had walked through. 'He's elsewhere,' the Doctor finished. 'Tell you what, why don't you stay here and I'll see if I can rustle him up for you.'
'Thank you,' Amy said dreamily.
'Quite like you quieter for once,' the Doctor said, but not meaning it at all. What he wanted back was his Amy. Sparky, feisty, smart and clever.
'Doctor, do you like my world?' asked Oliver Marks.
'Not especially, 01ly. Bit chaotic for me.'
'I can't hear them any more,' Oliver said. 'I sent them away.'
'Did you? That's Glamour for you. Brings you exactly what you want and blow the consequences.'
'What consequences?' Oliver frowned. 'For the first time in ages, I feel brilliant.'
