Doctor Who: Summer Falls

by Amelia Williams

  Armand looked unimpressed. He ran a finger along it and shivered. ‘What’s it painted on? It feels weird. Is that mould? Throw it away.’

  Kate had been hoping for a better response. She packed it back in her bag. ‘Are you still mending that bicycle?’

  Now Armand masked his sheepishness with anger. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he snapped. ‘The chain’s all sticky.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Kate, seating herself on the concrete in front of the corpse of the bicycle. She spun a wheel and considered it. ‘The problem is that you’ve been greasing the chain with cooking oil. Fetch me a bucket of hot soapy water and let’s see what we can do.’

  Some time later, Armand had got used to watching her work. ‘Have you always been like this?’ he asked.

  Kate considered the question and decided it was silly. ‘It’s like me asking if you’ve always been like you are.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re actually nice. But you go to a lot of trouble not to be. Has that always been the case?’

  Armand thought for a moment, then playfully splashed her with suds.

  ‘That proves my point,’ laughed Kate. ‘You’re trying to avoid answering. Is it because of the gossip about your father?’

  Armand didn’t try to hide his anger this time. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he growled. ‘Anyway, you haven’t got any friends.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ agreed Kate. ‘But as I’ve only just moved to this town it would be unreasonable to expect me to have any. But I am sure I shall make some.’

  ‘How?’ asked Armand.

  ‘By mending bicycles,’ said Kate.

  ‘This is quite a remarkable painting,’ said Barnabas.

  He had been working in his tent rather than in his museum. Kate found this odd, but was relieved to have been spared the walk.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about it?’ she asked.

  Barnabas swept back his tangled hair and peered closely at the painting. He sniffed it curiously. ‘You’ve cleaned it with washing-up liquid. And had cabbage for lunch,’ he announced. ‘Funny sort of canvas. Almost like tin foil.’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Interesting. But ooh, feels like static electricity, doesn’t it?’

  Kate nodded again.

  ‘If,’ sighed Barnabas, ‘static was a bit damp.’

  They stared at the painting for a bit.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ admitted Barnabas. ‘It’s by Mitchell. He was a local painter a long time ago. Supposed to have gone a bit loopy in the end. Curious.’ He regarded it again solemnly.

  ‘I think it’s a puzzle,’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, if you don’t look at the sea and the sky, but just at the painting. At the top is the lighthouse. The man’s holding a ring, the woman a key. They form a triangle. Perhaps it tells you how to find the objects.’

  ‘I suppose it might.’ Barnabas ran a thumb along the frame. ‘Is this the title?’

  Kate nodded. ‘I tried cleaning it with an old toothbrush but can’t make it out.’

  ‘A toothbrush, eh?’ Barnabas clucked disapprovingly and angled the frame to catch the light. Then his smile stopped and he looked solemn. ‘It’s called The Lord of Winter.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Kate.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Clearly the Curator did. ‘Why don’t we pop down to the museum and look at this properly? Before doing anything. Like, perhaps, trying to solve the puzzle. Do nothing, yes? I say – you haven’t shown anyone else this have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Kate. ‘Only a friend.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s all right then,’ said Barnabas. He was suddenly all serious and old. ‘It’s just… I don’t think that painting’s very nice.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Can you get that, Kate?’ her mother called down. ‘I am having a nap.’

  Kate ran to the door and opened it.

  Standing there was Armand’s father, Mr Dass.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Mr Dass muttered something.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked.

  Mr Dass’s eyes darted about nervously.

  Kate took him into the kitchen and put the kettle on the hob. ‘I am sorry about the mess,’ she said. She decided to use the time it would take the water to boil to learn new information. ‘We are still unpacking. And there are so many of Mrs Mitchell’s old things lying around.’

  Mr Dass muttered again.

  ‘What was she like?’ Kate prodded while she located mugs.

  Mr Dass stared at her.

  ‘She was your neighbour. Was she nice?’

  Mr Dass eventually managed a whispered ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, I am pleased,’ said Kate, pouring milk into cups. ‘I don’t like to think of living somewhere someone unpleasant lived. I have her bedroom. It’s full of her books. There’s even some of her clothes in the wardrobe. Mum says we’ll clear it all out soon, but I daresay we won’t get around to it. We never really do. We should have done it before we starting unpacking, but we haven’t, so it probably won’t happen. Sugar?’

  Mr Dass nodded. Kate worried that she was talking too much. She picked up her tea. It was too hot to actually drink, so she just pretended to sip it. She decided that if she made a little slurp it was quite convincing.

  Mr Dass spoke. ‘I would like to buy your painting,’ he said.

  Kate put her tea down. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘I will pay twice what you did for it,’ he said.

  ‘The painting is not for sale,’ Kate was firm. ‘And, your son owes me an apology. I told Armand as a secret. How disappointing that he told you.’

  ‘That’s not important.’ Mr Dass waved a hand, and strode towards her. ‘I really must have that painting.’ He was standing quite close to her and breathing very hard.

  Frightened, Kate wondered about running, but she was backed into a corner. ‘I do think I should ask my mother’s permission before making a decision,’ she said carefully, before calling ‘Mum!’ very loudly.

  But Kate’s mother showed no signs of coming.

  Mr Dass smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you will fetch me the painting now.’

  ‘No,’ said Kate.

  ‘Give me that painting.’

  Mr Dass’s hand clamped around her wrist.

  Kate was about to shout for help when something grey streaked through the kitchen window at Mr Dass.

  He reeled back, clutching at his cheek. The grey cat ran across the draining board, knocking over a mug.

  Kate’s mother appeared, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. ‘You woke me up,’ she yawned. ‘And look at the mess you’ve made. Oh, hello.’ She acknowledged Mr Dass with surprise.

  ‘Your cat attacked me,’ Mr Dass murmured.

  ‘Oh no,’ Kate’s mother shook her head. ‘We don’t have a cat.’ She paused. ‘Do we?’

  Kate, busy with a dustpan and brush, shook her head.

  ‘Well, there we are then. So nice to have met you. That’s quite a nasty scratch you’ve got. You should put a plaster on it right away. I would do it, but I’ve no idea where ours are.’ Kate’s mother swept Mr Dass out of the house and pottered back into the kitchen.

  ‘Do we like him?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think we do.’

  Kate emptied the dustpan into the bin and hugged her mother. ‘Thank you, mum. I do love you.’

  ‘I see.’ Kate’s mother patted her head and yawned again. ‘I was having such a strange dream. It was very cold and dark and…’ Her eyes alighted on Kate’s mug. ‘Oh, you’ve made me a cup of tea,’ she smiled. ‘How thoughtful.’

  That night, Kate dreamed again about the painting. She’d propped it up on the dressing table. It seemed oddly at home, surrounded by all Mrs Mitchell’s dusty objects and old trinkets. Kate drifted off to sleep wondering who Mrs Mitchell was, and imagining what she was like. Kate was just deciding that, overall, Mrs Mitchel
l was a kindly woman, if a bit serious, when she slept, and the dreams of the painting came.

  She was running up the steps round the outside of the lighthouse. They were frozen with ice and it was so cold. The steps wound up and around, up and around, but they didn’t seem to end. And there was a noise – over the roaring of the sea and someone calling her name, there was a scratch, scratch, scratching…

  Kate woke up. There was a scratching in her room. At first she thought of mice. Kate did not like mice. She flicked on the bedside lamp and dared herself to look at the source of the scratching. It sounded quite large, and she hoped it was not a rat. A mouse would be better than a rat, although still very hard to deal with. Perhaps she could just hide under the covers and hope that it would go away and…

  Kate peeped. It was not a rat. Or a mouse. It was the Curator’s grey cat. It was scratching at the floorboards and glancing at her. As though she should help.

  Kate slipped out of bed. Her room was freezing. She crouched down next to the cat.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  The cat did not answer.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  The cat did not answer that either.

  ‘You want me to lift this floorboard, don’t you?’

  The cat seemed to nod.

  Hoping that there wasn’t a nest of mice under the floorboards, Kate tugged at it. It lifted.

  Under the floorboard, snuggled under mounds of dust and old wiring, was a dirty old metal ring. Kate lifted it up and caught it in the moonlight.

  It was the ring from the painting.

  Kate’s mother had said that she was only to be woken in emergencies. She had previously defined an emergency as the house being on fire, and not Kate discovering an interesting new word or even inventing a new colour.

  Kate wondered if the present situation qualified as an emergency. She now owned a strange painting, one wanted by a man who may have been poisoning people. Kate wondered if Mr Dass had killed Mrs Mitchell. If so, was it because he wanted the ring she had found hidden under the floorboard? She remembered the Curator’s warning not to try and find the objects in the painting. But she hadn’t. It was all the cat’s doing. Mostly.

  Kate had poked around the space between the joists again and discovered an old envelope. Written on it in a jumpy hand were the words ‘Keep it safe. He must not find what the Cold Lady holds.’ Was this the ring? And was the ‘he’ Mr Dass? Was the Cold Lady the woman from the painting? So many important questions.

  But, on balance, these things had remained hidden for a long time so perhaps this wasn’t an actual emergency. Undecided, Kate stood outside her mother’s door and called her name a couple of times at a normal volume. If it really was an emergency, then fate would make sure that her mother woke up.

  Her mother did not wake up, so Kate decided to go back to sleep. I’ll sort it out in the morning, she thought. At the foot of the bed was the painting, the ring lying on top of it, and the grey cat curled up, as if guarding them all. Kate slipped between the covers, feeling the cat warm against her legs. She slept.

  Chapter

  3

  When Kate woke up, it was winter.

  She didn’t notice for a while. First she spotted the cat had gone. Then she realised how cold it was. She could see her breath fogging in the bedroom air. She got out of bed, startled at the icy chill of the floorboards beneath her feet. A hurried search for slippers was fruitless, and she raided Mrs Mitchell’s wardrobe for a very old-fashioned winter coat that reeked of mothballs. She put on three pairs of mismatched socks and stomped downstairs.

  Now above all, she’d like her mother to have made her a cup of tea. But there was no sign of her. Not in the kitchen, her napping chair, or even in bed. Perhaps she’d gone out. Kate peered out of a window.

  It was at this point that Kate realised that it had snowed.

  She looked at the snow. ‘That’s beautiful,’ she breathed. ‘But quite ridiculous. It’s September the third.’

  Despite her saying this, the snow stayed where it was. Inches of thick, proper, glorious snow, all the way down the garden, the road and into town.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Kate. ‘No footprints. So either Mum went out before the snow or…’

  But Kate couldn’t work out what ‘or…’ would be. So she made herself a cup of tea and then went on the hunt for Wellington boots and gloves.

  Kate crumped through the snow. It was all hers. All her life, she had wanted to be the first person to walk in the snow, but she had never managed it. No matter how early she woke up, someone had always got there first. But not now.

  It may have been the last week of summer but already Kate had made two friends, found a painting and a ring, mended a bicycle, and been the first person to walk in the snow.

  Kate rang Barnabas’s doorbell. He wasn’t in. She passed Armand’s house. It seemed empty. She did not want to ring the doorbell as she did not feel in the mood to talk to either Armand or his father.

  She walked down the road to find someone in the town. But all the streets she walked through were deserted. The houses were dark, the cars buried under snow. Even though it was daytime, the streetlights glowed faintly.

  It was silent. Utterly silent. Which was when Kate realised what was wrong. The sound that was missing. She ran down to the harbour and stared.

  The sea was frozen.

  Kate stood, watching the sea for a long time. She’d never seen anything so impossible, so beautiful. She looked out at the waves frozen into mountain peaks, stretching towards a distant, dark sky, and she felt afraid. She was alone in a world that was a dream.

  She thought she heard something. A distant shout, perhaps, echoing off the wall of water. She called out to it, but there was no reply. And then she noticed something.

  There were prints in the snow. Tiny prints. Paw prints. She ran after them, her boots sinking deep into the snow, going past the tiny sailing boats stuck to the sea, past a row of cafés and an old inn… to the harbour wall. Sat on the wall, looking out to sea, ears perked up, was the grey cat.

  It turned to look at her, unblinking. Kate had never been so glad to see anything in her life, and made to sweep it up. But it edged back.

  ‘Oh, cat,’ said Kate. ‘This is just impossible. I was upstairs. Asleep. Then this happened. It doesn’t make any sense. How can this have happened? Did someone do this?’

  ‘I did,’ the cat replied, much to her surprise.

  That stumped Kate for a moment. Eventually, she said, ‘I have two questions.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘How can I speak cat?’

  The cat yawned, considering. ‘It would be better to say that I can speak human. Next.’

  ‘And are you sure you did this?’

  The cat nodded. ‘Oh yes. I suggested you bring together the painting and the ring.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I wanted to make sure you did it.’ The cat shrugged a paw. ‘I wanted to see what would happen.’

  ‘What? Why would you do such a thing?’

  ‘I am, after all, a cat.’ The cat nibbled at its claws thoughtfully. ‘I work for no one. I was just curious.’ It worried away at a tough bit of fur. ‘And I do rather want to meet the Lord of Winter.’

  ‘Who?’ Kate felt very much out of her depth.

  The cat looked up, witheringly. ‘You are a slow purr. That’s what’s written on the frame of the painting. “When Summer Falls, The Lord Of Winter Will Arise.”’

  ‘But…’ Kate was annoyed – the cat had not answered her question, which was hardly playing fair. ‘Who is the Lord of Winter?’

  The cat emitted a short yowl of exasperation. ‘I’m not going to tell you everything, young kitten.’ And, with a shake of its tail, it vanished over the harbour wall.

  Kate ran forward with a gasp – but the creature hadn’t drowned. She could see it, darting between the icy foothills of the frozen sea, tail up, hunting.

  As the snow fell, the town
became more beautiful, still and silent. And yet Kate caught a sob starting at the back of her throat. Kate rarely cried. She plunged her hands into the snow on the harbour wall, feeling the chill spread into her bones. For almost the first time in her life, she had no idea what to do. Instead of coming out in their usual neat order, her thoughts were tumbling. She kept her hands pushed into the snow until her brain slowed down, until its one thought was ‘please can you take your hands out of the snow?’

  Kate did and immediately felt a little better. She was alone. All the grown-ups had gone. The only thing alive was a talking cat. And someone was coming, this mysterious Lord of Winter. The sky seemed darker now than ever. Perhaps it was nearly night time. Did that make sense? When had she woken up? Kate walked to the lighthouse at the end of the harbour. Remembering her dreams, she reached for the gate to the metal steps. Normally the gate was padlocked and a polite notice asked people to keep out and not to fish from the pier. Both padlock and notice were gone.

  This was an invitation either to open the gate or go fishing. Kate did not like fishing. The gate swung open with a creak, and she started up the metal steps. They wound up the building in a spiral, and she soon found herself breathless. As her heart started to thump in her chest she remembered her dreams. The steps had gone on endlessly, and something had been following her. She made herself stop and look back. Nothing was following her. And yet she felt as though the sky was watching her.

  With a push, Kate made it to the top of the lighthouse, bursting out breathless onto the roof. The platform around the light was icy and she skidded into the rail, flailing against it. She had a moment of panic and terror, gazing into the sea below, and then dizzily sank down onto the platform, grabbing the railing.

  This would not do. She stood up and faced the sea. It took her a while before she admitted that actually, she was just crouching, gripping the railing with both hands, but she was still trying. Up here, the silence wasn’t so absolute – a cold wind tugged at her hair, and she could just hear a distant cracking and splintering, as if of breaking glass. This puzzled her for a minute, until she discerned that the frozen sea was not totally solid, its sudden hills shifting and bumping against each other.