Walls

I was working at a hospice in East Berlin on the Christmas Eve when the wall came down.  I think I’d made a point of coming to Germany because it was the place that would most upset my family.

I was caring for a man called Felix Morgenschein.  He was very old, though nobody seemed to know exactly how old.  And he didn’t have long, though nobody seemed to know exactly how long he had.  But everyone who went into his room could feel him dying.  It was like there was a ticking clock somewhere in the room, and it was slowing down.  It wasn’t a bad feeling.  It felt like a countdown to a well-deserved rest.  It seemed to merge with the approach of Christmas.  I don’t celebrate Christmas of course, but I was surrounded by people who did.  I was young and new to the job, and secretly scared of the very people it was my job to care for, of their pain and their demands, and of being unable to help them.  But Felix required very little help.  Felix was kind and comforting, as if it was his job to care for me.

It was in the old days, as I say, back when the state - for all its faults - provided adequate medical care for everyone, and nobody faced a cold and lonely and painful death because they didn’t have the money.  It was before the East Germans had that kind of freedom.

Felix talked a lot, when he wasn’t too tired.  He seemed to want to talk.  I did a lot of sitting next to him, holding his papery old hand, listening to him talk.  Coming from anyone but him, I would have doubted the stories he told me… but Felix gave off straightforward honesty like a radiator gives of heat.  It was the honesty of an earnest child.  In many ways, despite his great age, there was something boyish about him.

He’d been in the First World War.  He’d been one of the soldiers who played football with the British in the Christmas Truce of 1914.  He’d sung ‘Silent Night’ in German alongside Tommies singing it in English.  Disillusioned with the war, he’d deserted from the army not long after.  He’d travelled.  He’d come back to Germany after a while and rejoined the army just before the end of the war.  He never explained to me how that had worked.  He’d led a mutiny in his regiment.  He’d kept the mutiny going until the armistice and then headed back to Germany without permission, taking advantage of the official paralysis after the Kaiser had fled from his own people.  He’d gone home and found that his parents had both died of influenza.  He’d found his sweetheart, who had promised to wait for him, and met her husband and their young son.  He’d apologised to her for disappearing, and wished all three of them well.  And then he’d headed for Munich and been one of the founders of the Bavarian Council Republic.  Though disgusted with war and with killing, he’d fought the White Guards and the Freikorps up to the very last moment, and then fled - somehow escaping with his life.  He’d gone to Berlin and joined the SPD, and then become disillusioned with their commitment to the Russian line, and split to join Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Spartacists.  He’d been in street battles with Stormtroopers.  He’d been one of the last people to see Rosa and Karl before they were murdered.  When the Nazis took over, he’d fled from the country, only just escaping capture.  If they’d caught him, he’d have been sent to Dachau.

I told him about my grandparents, who’d been in the Warsaw Ghetto, crammed into one of the houses by the wall.  I told him about how my uncles and aunts had fought in the rising, and died.

Felix moved to Britain after escaping Germany.  He told me it had seemed natural to go there, as his greatest friend - with whom he had travelled after deserting from the Great War - had been “British… in a way”, whatever that meant.  I often asked him about this friend but he was always vague… though it became clear to me, from little hints and slips, that she had been a woman.  He’d joined the RAF, and had fought for the Allies, but had deserted - again - after refusing to take part in bombing raids over Dresden.  Then his life seemed to become hazy to him, as if he could remember the early years clearly but the later years were out of focus.  He never explained to me how he came to be living in East Berlin at the end of his life.  But there he was.  And he knew he was at the end.  He was not scared.  Looking at him, I found it hard to believe he had ever been scared of anything.

On the Christmas Eve when the wall came down, I arrived at Felix’s room at the start of my night shift and found a woman sat next to his bed.  For some reason, I did not go straight in and announce my presence.  I lingered behind the door and listened.

“They’ll fit.  Trust me,” she was saying.  She spoke in perfect German but her voice was English.

“But why, Doctor?” Felix was asking, in the plaintive tones of a child.

Doctor?  I didn’t know of any female Doctors working in the hospice; certainly not any English ones.

“Because I want you to get up and come with me.  One last time.”

“I told you a long time ago… no more travelling, not your way.  I want to get there on my own.”

“And I’ve respected your wishes.  I’m not inviting you on a trip.  Just a little walk.”

“Doctor,” said Felix, “I’m too tired, and I’m in a lot of pain.  I don’t think I could stand for very long, let alone walk.  And I don’t want to go too far from my lovely morphine.  To tell you the truth, I think I’m addicted.”

I was touched by his sheepishness about the obvious.

“Addicted to not being in pain?” asked the woman rhetorically, “Good for you.  But don’t worry about any of that.  Just sit up and put these boots on.  Do as you’re told for once, you awkward old cuss.”

“I don’t understand,” wheezed Felix, and I heard distress and exhaustion and pain in his voice, and realised how much he hid from me.  Somehow, he didn’t even try to hide anything from this Doctor woman.

I went into the room and they both looked up at me.

“Ah, you’ve decided to come in and ask me who I am,” she said, sounding amused.

She was thin, a youthful forty, with straight strawberry blonde hair cut pixieishly around a small face, out of which looked two sceptical but humourous dark grey eyes.  She was wearing a ridiculously inappropriate scarlet velvet frock.  She looked like she’d come straight from a Hollywood musical of about thirty years before, except for the scuffed trainers on her feet and the preposterous old top hat perched on her head.

Felix was lying back in bed as usual but seemed to be trying to rise.

I approached him to soothe him but he held up his hand.

“It’s all right Adina,” he said hoarsely, sounding pained and anxious - and yet also excited, “this is a friend of mine.”

Well, I won’t go into the details of the conversation.  I said all the usual things, the professional things you’d expect.  Every sensible word of mine was batted back at me by that infuriating woman, always charmingly, always in such a way as to confuse me and blast me off my train of thought.  She pressed ahead relentlessly in her determination to get the old man to put on the pair of dirty, battered, mud-caked old army boots she was holding.  There seemed to be no getting through to this woman that the whole thing was ridiculous and unfair, though she obviously understood every word I said.  She just made it clear to me - sweetly, amusingly, bizarrely, unanswerably - that she didn’t care.  I flailed to counter her leaps of logic and her oblique non sequiturs, but I got nowhere.  And somehow I never left to call for help ejecting her as an intruder.  It was like I was mesmerised by her brazenness.
Eventually Felix took pity on me and intervened, saying, laughter coming back into his cracked voice, “Doctor, stop it… Adina’s a nice girl… she’s my friend and you’re not to tease her.”  The woman seemed slightly chastened, but soon rallied, impishly holding the boots out to Felix again and saying “I’ll go easy on her if you put these on, you old fool,” to which Felix laughed and sighed and shrugged, and started getting up again, though he winced with the effort.

“Help me Adina,” he said, and - though I don’t know why - I slid past the Doctor and started helping him to sit up in bed and swing his legs around.

Of course, once the boots were on everything changed.

“Put the TV on,” said the Doctor as Felix danced around the room, “you need to see the news.”

As it happened, it was at that point that one of the other nurses ran in and breathlessly asked us if we’d heard… stopping in her tracks when she saw Felix sweeping me into a waltz.

We got to the wall about an hour later, Felix in his pyjamas and dressing gown, scampering ahead of the Doctor and I, jumping in puddles, laughing like a kid.

“You understand that this is only temporary,” the Doctor had said as he’d hugged her, “the effect of the boots will wear off in a couple of hours.  Then they’ll just be boots again.”

“How did you find them?  I thought I’d lost them forever!”

The Doctor just smiled.

“I thought you told me once that this happened in early November,” said Felix as we started making our way through the crowd.

“It did, originally.  November 9th.  Next year.  I pushed it forward a bit.  Did a bit of editing.  Couldn’t hurt.  Didn’t want you to miss it, and you stipulated no more trips, so…”

Felix gawped at her.

“Besides,” she said, “I’ve always thought it should’ve happened at Christmas.  Remember I told you once that if there’s one thing Germans are good at, besides critiques of political economy, it’s Christmas.”

“Some might say that critiques of political economy are what got Berlin into this mess,” I remarked, deciding not to think about the implications of the rest of their conversation.

“Yes, and some people say that other people shoplift because they’ve got bad blood.  You always want to be careful of people who think life is a vast straight line of falling dominoes.  Felix and I know how much more complex it is than that.”

Felix, meanwhile was making for the wall.  The crowd parted for him, as if recognising someone with priority.  He was handed a pickaxe by a girl with frizzy hair and a flushed face.  He began swinging it at the wall.  He swung it like a man of twenty.  Chips and slivers, and then great chunks, began flying off it where he was attacking it.  The Doctor and I watched him from the back of the crowd.  She grinned indulgently, like a parent watching her child playing on the beach.  Her grin was so wide, I thought her head might split in half.  It was impossible not to smile with her.

Felix was dancing along the top of the wall by the time she turned to me, touched my arm, and said:
“Be sure to get him back into bed within an hour or two.”

“I will,” I said, understanding that she was going.

And then, somehow knowing that she was the person to ask, I nodded towards the increasingly ragged, mobbed, swamped wall and said: “All this… it’ll be all right, will it?”

“It’s a wall,” said the woman, “and like any wall there are good and bad things on both sides of it.”
I could tell that was all I was going to get.

By this time, Felix was leading the crowd in a performance of ‘Silent Night’, conducting them from his perch on top of the wall.

“You will help him, when the time comes, won’t you?” asked the woman.

“I will,” I said again.

And to my surprise, that strange woman hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, and whispered “Bless you,” in my ear.  And then she was gone, like mist, into the jigging and cheering crowd.

Felix was back in bed a couple of hours later, flushed, grinning, tired.  He died the next day, unconscious, holding my hand.  Somehow, the boots disappeared.  I thought they must’ve been tidied up and thrown away by one of the attendants.  All his things were thrown away.  He had no living family.

I saw the Doctor again a couple of years ago.  Christmastime again.  It’s strange how many Muslims celebrate it in Gaza, in solidarity with the Christians who will show solidarity with them.  It’s not unlike Christmas in East Germany, where people did it for their own reasons, partly political.  I was at a hospital near another wall, tending the survivors of the latest bombing raid.  I was writing an email to my sister, who was proud of me by then, though she didn’t dare tell my brother-in-law that we were in contact.  I looked up from my laptop and saw that woman, the Doctor, not a day older, dressed in an astrakhan coat this time, still wearing that stupid top hat, walking through the ward.  I ran out but she was already gone.  When I got back to my laptop, the boots were sat next to it.

I still have them, and the mud of Christmas 1914, and the dust of the wall, is still clinging to them.

Appeals to Authority

Following the stoically mute Karkus, Felix and the Doctor found themselves in a seemingly endless grey corridor.  It felt like miles of the same tiny patch of space, extruded into infinity. 

"Why do we spend so much of our time in corridors?" asked Felix.

"Because we spend so much of our time fighting institutionalised hierarchies," said the Doctor, "and institutionalised hierarchies depend upon armed force and bureaucracy.  Both of which require staff, and therefore also functional premises in which staff can operate."

"Oh," said Felix, "yes, I see."

He didn't pursue it.  Things had gotten quite socratic enough today already.

*

At the Doctor's command, the Karkus had demanded admittance to the castle.  The great door had swung open for him, a grudging note in the creaking of its iron hinges.  The Doctor had wanted to have a few words with whatever jobsworth owned the voice from behind the door, but there was nobody there when she looked.

"Obviously such a minor character he never even got a physical description," she said, "which explains the insecurity."

Then she had turned to the Karkus and demanded that he tell her about the prison.  He had tried to deny knowledge, but so half-heartedly and guiltily that it was almost funny.  It took little more than a sigh of irritation from his new Mistress to make him crack.

"Lead us there," the Doctor had commanded.

So the strange little band had made their way into the dark corridors of the castle.  They passed through a lazily-planned labyrinth, past cells in which razor sharp pendula depended menacingly over tables with shackles at each corner, past a courtyard in which a pair of feet stuck out from beneath a gigantic plumed helmet...

"How did you know he was involved in the prison?" Felix asked the Doctor.

"Just the sort of thing he'd be involved in... until the heroine turns up and makes him come over to the goodies."

"Do these fictional people not have free will?" asked Felix.

"Well, that's a tricky one," said the Doctor.  "It could be argued we only have free will because all possible choices come true in some world or another.  Brigadiers and Brigade-Leaders, you know."  (Felix didn't, but he let it pass.)  "The people of the Land of Fiction have their variant iterations, just as we have ours.  But they also have creators."

"So do we have a Creator," said Felix.

"That's debateable," said the Doctor, "but I think a nice Catholic boy like you would want to say that our notional Creator gives us free will, yes?"

"That's what the Church tells us," said Felix.

"Is that an appeal to authority?" asked the Doctor.

"No," said Felix, slightly stung, "I'm simply citing wisdom with which I happen to agree."

"Well, in any case, the creators of fictional people definitely don't allow them free will.  They make them do as they're told.  They leave them no choice.  But then there are those variant iterations.  Re-interpreptations.  Reboots.  And then there's fan-fic, of course.  Endless numbers of people expropriating characters from their creators and letting them run wild.  But is that freedom, or just a new master?  And are you yourself free if it's actually a separate version of you getting to enjoy all the other options?  Maybe we are the freed characters of a benevolent tyrant while they, the fictional, are the unfree characters of a huge democratic committee.  Which is worse?"

"But is this place not where the fictional come so that they might enjoy free will?" asked Felix, "after all, when they are here they are no longer trapped inside novels and motion pictures and fairytales.  They are here instead."

"You make it sound like this is the world beyond the garden," said the Doctor, "like they've fallen and been expelled."

"Could it work that way?"

The Doctor looked at him thoughtfully.

"I've seen evidence that could go either way," she said, "I've seen characters here who seem to do whatever they like.  I've also seen characters who can't do or say anything their creators didn't write."

"But that sounds exactly like our world to me," said Felix.  "I've known people who never obeyed an order in their lives, who seemed constitutionally incapable of obeying orders.  I've also known people who complied with every request made of them as a matter of course, and never questioned it."

"Good point," said the Doctor, "so have I.  There was even a time... long ago... when I was like that myself."

"You?" asked Felix, almost spluttering.

"Oh yes," said the Doctor, making a face of distate, "I was such a good boy for so long."

"But these people... the people here... Can they choose one path or the other?  Are they choosing whether to be free or not?"

"Can one choose to not be free?"

"Choosing to not be free is just choosing to do nothing," said Felix, "choosing to be acted upon rather than act.  Freedom is action."

"What about negative capability?"

"That's a different thing."

"I suppose that might be true here," said the Doctor, "for the fictional people."

"It might be true everywhere."

"But does that mean that slaves choose slavery through apathy?  Because I've always thought slavery had more to do with chains and whips."

"What about the Karkus?"

"Oh there's all sorts of implied consent going on with him," said the Doctor good-humouredly, "It's part of the character.  Truth is, he wants to play the game he plays.  It's part of why we love him despite the fact that technically he's a villain.  His heart's visibly not in it.  He's always dying to be conquered."

"Or is he just a character who obeys rules written by someone else?"

"He's written with the choice built in."

"Like us," said Felix, with a flourish in his voice to show that he felt he had won the argument.

"Maybe," said the Doctor again, "but that still implies that when real people become slaves, it's somehow their choice."

"There's a sense in which every slave has the choice to not be one," countered Felix, "They just have to choose the whips instead.  Maybe the noose.  Not easy.  But possible."

"Easy for us to say.  We're not facing that choice."

"It's still a choice though.  Just as we have the choice, the freedom, to hurl ourselves off cliffs if we want to."

"Monstrous freedom, as Sartre might put it..."

"Ahead of my time again?"

The Doctor ignored him this time.

"...like the monstrous freedom exercised by a soldier clambering over the top of a trench," she continued,  "counterposed with the choice of a soldier to not obey orders.  To desert.  And risk everything you risked."

"Yes..." said Felix slowly, feeling that it was rather unfaire of the Doctor make make this personal to him, "though I knew I was coming with you.  I knew I'd be safely away from anyone who wanted to punish me."

"Coming with me could be seen as volunteering for more danger than just staying in the war and following orders.  We don't exactly shy away from danger, do we?  You chose all sorts of possible consequences.  You signed up for my war instead of theirs."

"Yes, I suppose so,"said Felix glumly, sounding unconvinced.

"But you can't expect those sorts of choices of people."

"No, that's why we praise them as special when people do make them."

"That's also why they never solve anything, at least in the long run.  Because the circumstances are exceptional and isolated."

"Except when lots of people make them at once."

The Doctor had stopped and stared at him, a smile spreading across her face.

"Maybe we should get you back for the end of the war," she said.

Felix said nothing.

"I think what you really want to know," continued the Doctor, "is whether these people have souls."

"Do they?"

"Why ask me?  I don't know.  I think we are what we do."

"No, there's more to it than that."

"But aren't souls judged on actions?  Your actions are your soul."

"So Cybermen have souls?  They do things."

"Yes, if you like.  You believe souls can be damned or saved, yes?  Then souls are not good or bad in themselves.  They are what we make them."

"Then these people have souls too, even if they're just working to the instructions of an author, like machines."

"The Church wouldn't agree with you."

"That's not what I think.  I'm following your logic."

"Aquinas would be on my side," said the Doctor.

"Is that an appeal to authority?" Felix countered, which both irritated the Doctor and made her beam at him proudly again.

*

"This way Mistress," said the Karkus, before leading them down a right turn that had been invisible to Felix until the big man stomped into it.

"This is like having K9 back," said the Doctor to herself.

"Are you sure we can trust him?" asked Felix in a whisper.

"We can trust his formula," said the Doctor outloud and unabashed.

And it seemed that they could, because after bringing them only a short way down this new corridor, the Karkus stopped outside a large steel door and barked: "Here, Mistress."

"So this place," said Felix, looking up and around to indicate that he meant the entire realm of the Land of Fiction, "isn't really a democracy now after all?"

"Democracies have their prisons, Felix," said the Doctor, "and their bureaucracies and armed forces and institutionalised hierarchies.  Depressing, but true.  There are better ways, of course.  I thought they might be practicing something better here, in their way, but..."

She stared at the Karkus.  He looked grim, and slightly shamefaced.

"Let me in then," she said.

"I do not have the key, Mistress," he said, with truculent innocence.

The Doctor just raised an eyebrow at him again.  He deflated instantly.  He turned to the door and ripped it out of the wall with an air of harassed resignation.

"That's better," said the Doctor sternly, and walked through the gaping hole where the door had been.

Felix followed the Doctor, leaving the Karkus holding the massive steel door like someone unsure of where to set down their shopping.

"Come on," said Felix.

The Karkus did not move.

"Come on," called the Doctor.

This time he instantly obeyed.

They found themselves on a gantry which seemed to be raised above a huge black pit.  But the space below them was more than just emptiness.  It felt somehow full and alive.

"Lead the way," said the Doctor.

"Yes Mistress."

Felix rolled his eyes.

"Aren't you getting bored with that 'Mistress' stuff?" he asked the Doctor as they followed the Karkus, who was now striding purposefully along the gantry.

"I have to keep playing by the rules if I want him to keep playing by them," said the Doctor, "and I need him to keep obeying until he takes us to this prison."

Felix thought about the military prison where he would be put if he ever returned home, a deserter.

At least it wouldn't be like this.  A dark, echoing pit.

Variant Iterations

"I can't think why you would want to spend so much time here Doctor," said Felix, "it seems a very odd place to choose as a regular holiday destination."

"I think it's rather pleasant," said the Doctor brightly, "especially since we cleared out the former management."

"The former management?" asked Felix.

"Oh, Drumlins Westmore tried to enclose this place a little while ago," said the Doctor.

"Drumlins Westmore?  Sounds like a British general.  General Sir George Drumlins-Westmore OBE."

"Ha!  No, it's a corporation.  The Drumlins Westmore Interplanetary News and Entertainment Media Group.  Or something like that.  There's probably an Inc in there too somewhere.  They set up a department on one of their office worlds devoted entirely to fiction.  Hired loads of struggling wannabe authors.  Lured them in with promises of agents and publishing contracts and regular meals."

"You mean they started publishing novels?  They created a sort of novel factory?"

"No, they didn't publish anything.  They got the writers to spend all day writing stories featuring brilliant, dynamic, hyper-capable, unbeatable employees of the Drumlins Westmore Corporation.  Heroic corporate accountants and lawyers and lobbyists and marketing executives.   Capitalist atlases who never faltered in their noble determination to cure all of society's ills by privatising everything... into the hands of Drumlins Westmore, naturally.  The writers took to it with depressing ease and speed.  As a rule, the more principled a writer, the quicker they accomodated themselves to the work.  You should've heard the byzantine self-justifications I had to listen to.  Anyway, the fictional Drumlins Westmore employees from the stories all appeared here as a matter of course.  And, also as a matter of course, they immediately set about taking over.  It worked too.  Effectively, Drumlins Westmore pulled off a hostile takeover of the Land of Fiction."

"But that's all over now?" asked Felix.

"Oh yes," laughed the Doctor, grinning so widely Felix thought her head was about to split in two, "we couldn't be having that sort of thing now could we?"

They walked and the Doctor expounded.

"It's the people you meet here, you see.  That's why I keep coming back.  That and a strange feeling I get... a feeling of coming home.  But in a good way."

"It doesn't seem entirely safe here," said Felix, "even without those Drumlins and Westmore gentlemen."

Felix looked around warily, as if expecting a corporate accountant or a marketing executive to leap out at him and attack.

He was still somewhat on edge after half an hour of hiding behind a rock from a platoon of huge robotic tripods.  He and the Doctor had spied them in the far distance.  The Doctor had insisted they duck out of sight, just in case.  Even so, she had leaned around the rocks and spied on the things with her telescope.  Felix had taken a turn.  Through the telescope he saw them, metallic tendrils flailing from the bulbous bodies suspended at the tops of their tall and jointed legs.  They were lumbering towards a far-off cluster of settlements connected by rivers, backed by gorges, and interspersed with farmland filled with grazing sheep.

"Most household accidents happen in the home," said the Doctor absently.

Felix was getting accustomed to her sometimes oblique way of speaking.

"Nowhere is entirely safe," he translated, with the rueful air of someone announcing the solution to a riddle five minutes after everyone else in the room had figured it out.

They had been trudging uphill for almost half an hour, and were nearly at their destination.  The dirty winding road ended at the gates of a deeply improbable-looking castle.  Felix thought it looked like something from the tales of Hoffman... except for the colour scheme, or rather the lack of one.

"Should we not have helped the people in that country?" asked Felix, "Those tripod things did not look pleasant."

"The people of Erewhon can look after themselves," said the Doctor.

Felix looked up at the massive, grey castle door as they approached it.  It was set into the grey stone walls.  The portcullis was grey.  The drawbridge upon which they stood was grey.  The water in the moat beneath their feet was grey.

He looked down at his own body.  His pale grey hands emerged from his darker grey sleeves.  At least his army greatcoat was still more or less the right colour.

"This will wear off, won't it Doctor?" he asked.

"You've already asked me that," said the Doctor.  Inspecting a closed hatch in the door.  She looked entirely at ease with her greyness.  It suited her somehow.

"Well, it is a matter of great concern to me," replied Felix.  "I do not wish to be in black and white for the rest of my life."

"This land is in black and white," said the Doctor, "I don't know why.  It just is.  We'll go back to being the way we were once we leave."

She turned back to him.

"Besides," she said, "I think you look very fetching in monochrome.  A young soldier of the Kaiser's Army, like you.  Suits you.  Although I suppose that, for the full effect, you should be moving at about 16 frames per second."

"I feel ridiculous.  I feel like Charlie Chaplin."

"Nothing wrong with that," said the Doctor, "Chaplin was a genius."

"A genius?" snorted Felix, "making those ridiculous films?"

"I'm enormously tempted to make a bigoted remark at this point.  A remark involving a certain European nationality being notorious for lacking a sense of humour."

"Oh they were funny enough," said Felix, affecting a mature loftiness, "it's just that I always found them disturbing too... jarring."

"Benjamin would've understood," said the Doctor.

"Benjamin who?" asked Felix.  The Doctor had never mentioned anyone called Benjamin to him before.

"Slightly after your time," said the Doctor sadly.

Felix felt foolish and ignorant.

"Of course, I've met Chaplin here," said the Doctor, "or rather some of his characters...  only the early ones for some reason.  If you meet any, you could ask them for some pointers about coping with life in grayscale."

"I'm glad this amuses you," said Felix, looking down again at his own silvery grey skin.

"Honestly Felix," said the Doctor approaching him and putting a hand on his shoulder, "don't worry.  You'll get used to it.  Trust me."

"Maybe I don't want to get used to it," protested Felix.

"But Fee, think of the aesthetics of the thing!  The silver screen has a magic all its own!  And black and white captures such mood, such atmosphere, so many dimensions!  Think of Man Ray!  Think of Murnau!"

"Some more things slightly after my time?" asked Felix.

"I did you no favours," said the Doctor, "whisking you out of Europe just as Modernism was about to take off for real.  Not that Murnau was all that modern in anything but technology."

"You got me out of the war," said Felix.

"True," said the Doctor, "and I don't suppose there was ever anything more Modern than that war."

Felix looked down.

"Do you still feel guilty about leaving it?" asked the Doctor.

Felix nodded.

"Should I not have stayed to fight?  Is that not what you do?"

"I fight my wars, or the wars of people who want my help.  I don't fight for kings and empires."

"We were told we were fighting an empire.  The British empire."

"Empires don't fight other empires to end empire."

"I had a duty to my country."

"You had a right to your life."

"I'm not sure I had the right to leave my friends behind."

"Like Sassoon," said the Doctor, sounding sad and lost.

Felix looked at her.

"A poet," she said, "again, after your time.  But only just."

"You just can't help yourself, can you?"

The Doctor bit her lip and looked down.   

"What I'm trying to say is that these things..." she hunted for the words, "well, they're never just... black and white."

Felix smiled in spite of himself.

"I know, I know," he said with a weary chuckle, "life is... what's the phrase?  Nothing but 'shades of grey'?"

"Yes well, let's hope we don't meet anybody from that book," said the Doctor.

"State your name and attribution," barked a stentorian voice from behind them.

The Doctor whirled round.  The hatch in the castle door had opened. 

"I am the Karkus," growled the Doctor, jutting her pointy chin forward so that her battered top hat tilted alarmingly close to falling off the back of her head, "Earth; 21st Century; comic strip creation; the Hourly Telepress."

"Not autheticated," said the voice flatly.  The hatch snapped shut.

"Oh," said the Doctor, looking crestfallen.

She looked genuinely at a loss, which amused Felix almost as much as it alarmed him.

"That should've worked," she said, "it always has before."

"What do we do now?" asked Felix.  He was rather hoping the Doctor would suggest retracing their steps, maybe making a return visit to the Blue Angel.  He'd rather liked that barefoot dancer.  And the place had felt like home... albeit a part of home he would never have dared to visit back in the old days.  The Doctor hadn't liked it much.  "I'm more of a Weimar girl myself," she had muttered.

The Doctor shook her head slightly, as if to clear it, and turned back to the door.  She rapped on it smartly with her knuckles.

The hatch snapped open again.

"State your name and attribution," said the voice from within, exactly as before.

"I am the Karkus," repeated the Doctor, using the same truculent growl, but this time augmenting it with what Felix could only imagine was meant to be a germanic accent of some kind, "Earth; 21st Century; comic strip creation; the Hourly Telepress."

"Not authenticated," said the voice again and, as before, the hatch snapped shut... or rather, it tried to.  On this occasion, however, the Doctor had suddenly whipped a long spoon out of one of her pockets - at least, Felix assumed that was where it had come from - and jammed it into the open hole before the hatch could close.

"Hang on a mo, old chap," she said, dropping her false voice completely and reverting to her usual curving, flowing Bolton accent, "could you tell me why my attribution is not being authenticated?"

There was silence from within.

"I mean," continued the Doctor, "I realise that the bureacracy here has become considerably less efficient since the departure of the Master Brain... and that's all to the good, don't get me wrong... but even so, you must be able to tell me what's gone wrong, yes?  Hmm?  Pretty please?  With sugar on top, and so forth?"

"Query accepted," said the voice after a dubious silence.

"Well that's a start," said the Doctor, nodding approvingly and keeping a firm grip on her long spoon.

The silence resumed, but it somehow seemed to have become a busy, concentrated silence.  It had become the silence of activity.

"Why do you carry a long spoon on your person?" asked Felix, even as he reflected that he really should have learned not to ask questions like that by now.

"You never know when you might need to sup with the Devil," said the Doctor, "especially here... though I have grounds for thinking that particular character might have escaped some time ago..."

"Query response," barked the voice from behind the door, "The character known as the Karkus is already logged as being within the Citadel."

"Aaaaah!" exclaimed the Doctor, "I see!  Well that's no problem!  Check your records and you'll see that the Karkus went through many versions before his eventual retirement from the strip section of the good old Hourly.  Many of those versions are completely incompatible with each other in terms of backstory, style, etc, to the point where they must exist in seperate continuities.  Blimey, he was officially relaunched and rebooted at least twice.  And that's without counting the so-called 'Young Karkus Adventures'... but nobody likes to talk about those.  You should've heard Zoe on the subject.  You wouldn't think she even knew words like that."

"Do you claim to be a variant iteration?" asked the voice from behind the door.

"Yes," said the Doctor immediately, "that's it.  That's exactly what I'm claiming.  I'm a variant iteration.  That's what I am all right.  Oh ho yes.  I'm a variant iteraion, me.  No question."

She looked across at Felix and twitched her eyebrows at him.  He had to cover his mouth to suppress a laugh.

There was another little slab of busy silence before the voice asked.

"State details of your variation," said the voice cunningly.

The Doctor's eyes narrowed, making her look like a chess player whose opponent had just done something unorthodox with a bishop.

"I'm... sorry but I'm from a Karkus strip in which the Karkus has lost his memory.  Dull storyline.  But then the amnesia plot is always dull.  At least, I imagine it is.  I can't actually remember."

"You also fail to match the physical description and set gender of the character," said the voice.

"It was part of the my storyline," replied the Doctor instantly, but with a touch of desperation, "the character changed gender.  Some people didn't like it, but there you go.  I'm still the same inside.  You should see me under these clothes.  All muscles and pectorals and washboards and that kind of thing.  They use my before and after photos in adverts on bit torrent sites.  I got ripped in three weeks."

More silence.

"There are no records in our files of such a storyline," said the voice, now sounding openly sardonic.

"Of course not, that storyline was lost.  Someone junked it to save shelf space of something.  They never found any of it, despite the best efforts of fans."

Silence.

"Oh for goodness sake!" exclaimed Felix exasperatedly, "I thought you said this place was a democracy now!"

"Democracies run on paperwork just as much as tyrannies," said the Doctor, "but you have a point."

She turned back to the hatch.

"Look here mate," she said, adopting a tone of chummy familiarity, "we're all working stiffs here, amirite?  I realise you've got a job to do, and I realise it's an important job, and I admire how seriously you take it, but... has it really come to this?  Checking and double checking the minute details of a chap's life, just because she wants to walk through a door?  Who is it that you think I am?  What mischief do you imagine I might be planning to get up to in there?  How long has it been since the White Robots and the Toy Soldiers got reprogrammed and went off to live together in that big commune?  A long time.  There's even a generation of their kids now, I understand.  Has there been any trouble since then?  Beyond the obvious trouble you're bound to get in a world where Iago is friends with Richard III, I mean?"  Her voice adopted a slightly wheedling tone.  "C'mon, we're all fictional characters together, aren't we?"

"Are we?" asked the voice after a long pause.

"Yes," said the Doctor, "of course."

The hatch opened a little way and the Doctor withdrew her spoon.

"Not authenticated," said the voice, and the hatch snapped shut.  This time, unimpeded.

"Reminds me of Herr Weißhaupt at the hotel," said Felix, "He was only the doorman but you would have thought he owned the place."

"Hmm," said the Doctor, frowning and looking at her spoon, which now had an unsightly dent in it's long handle, "I only wanted to look around the castle.  Retrace my steps.  Set off a few alarms by walking though some light beams.  A bit of nostalgia."

"Nostalgia literally means 'the pain of the past'," said Felix.

"I know that," snapped the Doctor.

Felix felt himself blush.

"I'm sorry," said the Doctor.

"No, I'm sorry," said Felix, "it comes of being a schoolmaster's son.  Papa always liked showing off his knowledge.  I suppose it rubbed off on me."

"I'm hardly one to talk," said the Doctor.  "Perhaps we should go and see Ichabod Crane.  Now there was an insufferable schoolmaster.  And goodness only knows who he stayed that thin with his appetite."

Felix was relieved.  The awkward moment had been erased as the Doctor had ridden off on another of her trains of thought.  He wondered for which station it was bound.  All he knew was that he wanted to be along for the ride.

*

They trudged back down the long, winding, dirty path.

They met some fascinating travellers on their way.  A voluble Irishwoman called Molly Bloom, a young governess of steely intellect and dignity called Miss Eyre whom the Doctor approached with something like reverance, and a pair of Russian aristocrats named Myshkin and Oblonsky who were travelling together in mutual fug of amiable bemusement.  Felix took an instant liking to two young men they met further on, Messers Nickleby and Smike.  Nickleby and Felix had a good long chat about the ethics of classroom discipline.  Felix's father had been notably lenient, which Nickleby applauded.  Smike said little, but sat under a tree with the Doctor, shyly eating chunks of cheese which the Doctor had found in one of her pockets wrapped in a piece of brown (which is to say grey) paper.  The Doctor insisted he ate them, telling him he needed fattening up. 

Felix began to see what the Doctor meant about it being the people here who drew him back again and again.  Having said that, the Doctor studiously avoided some of the travellers.  She wanted nothing to do with a superficially charming Italian man who introduced himself as Count Fosco.  And when they encountered someone called Humbert, the Doctor immediately kneed him in the groin, took his stepdaughter by the hand, and walked off.  Felix asked what was going on but the Doctor only muttered something about a nice turn of phrase being no excuse.  She chatted naturally enough with the young girl, who trotted along beside her with an air of bland lassitude.

The Doctor then stopped for a long chat with a dogged land surveyor who called himself only 'K'.  She advised him solmenly not to bother trying to get into the castle.  "No point," she said, "trust me." 

"Hang on a minute!" said the Doctor suddenly, startling K.  She abandoned the conversation with him (which was only going round in circles anyway) and turned to the little girl, who was now chatting with Felix by the side of the road.

"You," she said, pointing at her, "you're still in copyright!"

*

"Why are we going back?" asked Felix.  He was feeling weary and exasperated, but he was also concerned about he Doctor.  She was anxious, upset, frantic.  It was hard to tell with her face rendered only in silvery grey, but she seemed to have gone very pale.

"You heard Dolores!" the Doctor replied, shouting back to him from over her shoulder as she strode ahead, "you heard what she said!"

Young Dolores - whom they had left in the care of Miss Eyre - had told them that she and her stepfather had 'escaped' from somewhere.  From the account she gave, Felix thought the place sounded like a cross between a prison and a gigantic filing cabinet.

"I don't understand why those people were being held prisoner," said Felix.

"Well, Humbert deserves to be locked up," said the Doctor, "but the point is, he wasn't locked up for the right reasons.  He and the girl were being kept locked up because they're still in copyright!  That's why you never meet late Chaplin characters!  The rights to the movies he made after 1918 are all still owned by someone!  All these years I've been coming here and I never realised!  Never stopped to think about it!  You never meet anyone here who's still in copyright!  So where are all the copyrighted characters being kept?  Hmm?  I never thought about it!  Never let it trouble me!  I just never asked the question!"  She was fuming with herself.  "I just accepted it!  'It's just the way it is', I said to myself!"

"Like the black and white," said Felix.

The Doctor stopped abruptly and faced him.

"Exactly," she said, and she looked downcast and ashamed, "You were right Felix.  We shouldn't just accept the things as they are.  We should always question.  'Doubt everything', as old Charlie-boy used to say on his daughter's questionaires.  We should always worry about how the world we're in works, and how it changes us."

She turned on her heel and resumed striding up the path towards the castle.

"Well," panted Felix, "since I'm so wise, perhaps you'd like to answer my very pertinent question!"

"Which of your many pertinent questions are you referring to?"

"The one about why we're going back to the castle."

"Because that's where Dolores said she escaped from!"

"But my point," said Felix, stopping to hunch over, hands on knees, and dry heave from exhaustion, "was: why are we going back there when we know we can't get in?"

The words came out as little more than a whisper, but the Doctor seemed to hear them anyway because she called back: "Because I've just remembered something."

"What?" gasped Felix, making a valiant effort to straighten up and get started again.

"Continuity!" shouted the Doctor.

*

They collapsed back at the castle doors.  Felix fell face down into the dusty grey dirt and had to traverse the final few feet to the drawbridge crawling on all fours.  Even the Doctor was showing strain by this point.  She was wheezing loudly and sweat was pouring down her now indisputably pale face.  She had even abandoned her beloved astrakhan jacket because of the heat.  It lay in a crumpled heap by the side of the road about a quarter of a mile away. 

"I'm dying," groaned Felix, "I haven't had to run that far and fast since training..."

"You'll survive," croaked the Doctor.

Felix looked over the side of the drawbridge at the grey water of the moat below... far too far below to be reached.

"Do you think they'll let us in for reasons of compassion if we beg for water?" said Felix, "Is that your plan?"

"No," said the Doctor, "We don't need to rely on compassion.  What we need..." and here she seemed to self-consciously gather herself up and address herself to the silvery sunniness of the heavens, "...is the strength of Karkus!"

In any other context, Felix would have assumed that what he saw next was an hallucination brought on by heat and exhaustion.  As he squinted through his tear-filled eyes he saw a man appear out of nowhere in an explosion of stylised zig-zags.  The man was about seven feet tall, and seemed to be made entirely out of muscles.  The ridges on his bare chest were so defined they looked as though they had been picked out in black, as if someone had painted a vast spider's web across his front.  The muscles heaved and rippled like an obscene, fleshy bouncy castle.  The man was wearing a back cape, black leather gloves, and a black leather mask and skull cap reminiscent of those worn by medieval executioners.

"You will get up," shouted the man hectoringly, and in a psuedo-germanic accent even more ridiculous than the one the Doctor had adopted earlier, "and put the hands above the head."

The man glared down at Felix, and his grey eyes displayed an alarming mixture of malice, contempt and pig ignorance.  And yet, there was something strangely noble about him.  It was as if he had self-consciously turned his truculence and anger into a shield by which to camouflage the ridiculousness of his appearance.

Felix was irresistibly reminded of old Feldwebel Bendel, who had somehow managed to instil terror in all the young recruits despite being short-sighted, nasal, duck-footed, and so small and skinny that he almost disappeared behind his disproportionately vast moustache. 

Unfortunately, the dignified effect that the strange man had achieved with his weaponised arrogance was somewhat undermined by the appearance of the actual weapon he held in his hand.

"Or what?" gasped Felix, "You'll shoot me with that thing?"  He indicated the 'gun' with his eyes.  "What is it, a child's spinning top?  A miniature model of a Christmas tree?  A piece of abstract sculpture?"

"This is my anti-molecular ray disintegrator!" declared the man, sounding genuinely as if he expected Felix to be awed and terrified.

"A what?" asked Felix.

The man seemed momentarily at a loss but he rallied himself quickly.

"It is a powerful gun!" he declared.

"Pfft," said Felix, and allowed himself to collapse back onto the ground.

"I said get up!" bellowed the man.

"I know guns," said Felix, as if talking to the dirt, "I've shot them and been shot at with them.  That's not a gun.  That looks more like a new type of egg whisk."

The man actually growled. 

There was a polite cough from behind him.  He wheeled round, surprised.

"Hello again," said the Doctor, conversationally.

"Ahh!" exclaimed the man, mouth wide open and teeth gleaming.  He looked satisfied with his new opponent.  He put his 'gun' back in his belt and spread his arms.  He faced the Doctor in a battle-ready half crouch.  He snarled.  He pounded his rippling chest.  He slapped a fist into his palm.  His triceps competed with his biceps for which would bulge the most.  His feet pawed the ground like a tiger getting ready to lauch itself at a crocodile.  His eyes gleamed.  He raised both fists.  He quivered like a coiled spring.  He yelled a belligerent and triumphant "Rrrrraarrrgghhh!" sound.  He sprang.

4.8 seconds later the Doctor had him on the ground, sobbing, in a full nelson.

Felix wanted to facetiously complain about the Doctor's use of an illegal move but he couldn't get the words out for laughing.

"Mercy!" bawled the man.

"Do you submit?" demanded the Doctor, pushing one of her knees viciously into the small of his back.

"I submit!  I submit!"

She released him and rolled back into a sitting posture.  She crossed her legs.  All aggression seemed to have suddenly drained out of her.  She now looked relaxed, affable and amused.  Her hat had fallen off.  She looked around and saw it lying in the dust a few feet away, but seemed not to be in a rush to retrieve it.

The huge man picked himself up off the ground and stood directly in front of her.  His attitude was a curious hybrid of resentment and humility.  Then he fell to one knee.

"Command me, Mistress," said the man.

The Doctor grinned and shook her head.  She ruffled her hair to knock out some of the dust.

"Fetch my hat would you, Karkus old chap?" she said to the man as he seethed meekly at her.

Felix boggled as the man obediently jumped up and trotted over to the Doctor's hat.  He picked it up and brought it back to where she was sitting.  He held it out to her like a lady-in-waiting offering Marie Antoinette a fresh eclair.

"This is the Karkus!?" spluttered Felix.

"That's him," said the Doctor, "the man himself.  In his first and most famous version... the version of him which appears out of thin air when summoned by someone who needs him.  As I eventually remembered."

"Oh," said Felix, "I see.  But why would he come when called by someone needing help and then attack the way he did?"

"It's a bit dirty, old bean," said the Doctor to the Karkus, as if mildly outraged at being offered a dusty hat.

The Karkus started brushing the hat with his hand, looking stoical but thoroughly at a loss.  Felix got the sense that he would instantly be happy again if asked to crush the hat with one fist, or stamp on it, or tear it to pieces with his teeth.

"Ah well," said the Doctor, readdressing herself to Felix, "that's the Karkus you see.  That's how he works.  If you want his help, you have to beat him.  At least, that's how it works with this version."

"What kind of hero is that?"

"In some ways he's a bit like Wonder Woman," said the Doctor.

"Who?" asked Felix.

"An Amazon," said the Doctor, accepting her now-dusted hat from the Karkus. "Another comic strip creation.  She originally furthered her creator's strangely utopian fixation on bondage.  Part of the original point of the character was that she was tall, powerful and gorgeous, and frequently got tied up... and then tied other people up.  Thrills galore there, if that's your thing.  The Karkus is similar in that he was invented by a woman writer who liked the idea of a character who was your typical muscle-bound, misogynistic meathead of a male supervillain but who had to become the slave of any woman who could beat him up.  They summon him, he attacks them, they win, he becomes their slave.  That's the formula... at least of this version of the character, before they ballsed him up, before men got their hands on the comics and decided to feel oppressed by the concept.  Classic Karkus - proper Karkus! - spends his entire time being physically vanquished and dominated by beautiful women who then lead him around like a puppy dog, ordering him about.  Which is precisely what has just happened again, you'll notice," she added, smoothing a stray slab of her hair behind one of her ears before placing her hat back on her head.

"Isn't it enough for you that you have me to run around after you doing everything you say?" asked Felix.

"Don't be churlish, Fee," said the Doctor, "you know you love it."

"I'd also quite interested in meeting this Wonder Woman," said Felix.

"We'll see what we can do," said the Doctor.

"Should I take away his gun?" asked Felix, indicating the Karkus.

"No need," said the Doctor, "his gun doesn't exist.  Can't do.  It's stupid."

The Karkus looked down at his belt where his gun had been.  His mouth turned very thin and his chin wobbled slightly, but he said not a word.

"All right?" asked the Doctor, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Yes, Mistress," said the Karkus sullenly, "I am your slave."

"Yes you are Karkus, my old buddy," said the Doctor, "yes you are.  And you have to do everything I say, don't you?"

"Yes Mistress," said the Karkus.

"Yes," said the Doctor. 

And though she was smiling, and her tone was jocular, there was anger in her eyes.

"Uh oh," said Felix.

He'd seen that look before.

Lost Post

“Twenty-eight minutes past,” said Felix, looking at his watch.  "Nothing."

The Doctor consulted the black plastic Casio with a broken strap that she kept in her pocket.

“I make it 3.26,” she said.  "Any moment now."

They were standing behind some empty flower tubs at the centre of a roundabout.  Every now and then a car would swoop past, but essentially they were alone.  A spray of chilly drizzle floated all around them.  It was almost frozen, and felt curiously oily.  Each droplet turned as bright gold as a cinder as it flew under the beams of the street lamps.

They'd left the TARDIS stuck half-way out of an Off Licence several streets away.

"How do you know there's a roundabout around here?" Felix had asked.

"If we walk far enough in any direction," the Doctor had replied, "we're bound to come across one.  Roads need to diverge, you know."

And, sure enough, a roundabout had eventually presented itself.  It was deserted, so they had strolled across the broad ring of tarmac to the little grassy hill at its centre.

And there they stood, side by side, like strangers waiting for a bus.  They did not speak for quite some time.

"Are you sure you've got this right, Doctor?" asked Felix at last, who was feeling wet and sick and cold, and increasingly sure that the Doctor was playing some kind of game, the aim of which was to fob him off.

"The instructions were quite clear," she replied tersely.

"But I thought one had to wait at a crossroads at midnight," said Felix.

"That's if you're waiting for the Devil.  We're not."

"I don't think we're waiting for anyone," said Felix sulkily.  "I think you have been misleading me.  Again."

It was a little while after this that they checked the time.  As they did so, a figure appeared on the other side of the roundabout, riding a bicycle.  The bicycle and its rider emerged from a patch of darkness between street lamps, without having entered it first.  The pedaling figure seemed simply to have formed itself from the darkness.  It began rolling slowly around the roundabout in what looked like a cloud of mist.  It had swerved into view and trundled up onto the centre of the roundabout almost before Felix and the Doctor had realised what was happening.

The Doctor consulted her Casio again.

"Twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning," she announced, waggling her Casio in Felix's face, and sounding more smug than Felix had ever imagined possible.

Felix did not respond.  His attention was fixed on the thing that had just appeared in front of them.

One cloven hoof remained upon a still pedal.  The other rested on the ground.  It made the wet grass sizzle and steam and char.

“Shall we finish the argument later?” asked Felix in a hoarse whisper.

"Just because you're losing..." muttered the Doctor.

The creature stepped off its bike and leaned it against a flower tub.  It was short - though still taller than Felix - and stocky.  Its legs bent backwards like the hind legs of a goat.  Every visible inch of its skin - or rather his skin, because the creature was clearly male - was a dark, lava-like red.  The red was coated with a thin layer of fine white hair, which had a silkiness to it that was oddly disturbing.  The creature's fingers ended in long, black, tapering claws.  He had a long and goatish face, and glowing yellow eyes with vertical slits for pupils.  His long nose ended in widely flared nostrils which overflowed with yet more white hair.  A white goatee beard pointed forwards from his chin in a curled tuft.  It looked like a beckoning finger.

He was wearing the uniform of a postman, very much like that worn by Herr Beckmann, the postman who had cycled around Felix's home village in Germany in the years of his childhood... except that it also reminded Felix of the drivers who had brought post to his section of trench.  The resemblance was undeniable, if more than slightly offset by the cloven hooves that emerged from the trousers where boots should have been, and the two conical horns which stuck out through the top of the peaked cap.

The creature had a large leather satchel slung over one shoulder.  A long, red, forked tail swished back and forth behind him, occasionally wrapping itself around one of his legs like a snake climbing a tree.  It looked worryingly prehensile.

Both Felix and the Doctor drew back.  Not so much because of the appearance of the apparition as because of the waves of heat, and the smell of brimstone, which radiated from him.

“This is all very literal,” said the Doctor under her breath, sounding bored.

The creature cocked his head on one side.  He looked down and seemed to notice his body for the first time.

“Yes,” he rumbled thoughtfully to himself in a voice that sounded like the cracking of faraway thunder, “it is literal, isn’t it?”

He turned back to the Doctor.

“You must be a very literal minded person,” he boomed.  His mouth split open in a grin, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth.  "Surprising, given everything I've gathered about you... Doctor."

If the Doctor was dismayed or surprised at being recognised, she gave no sign of it.  She simply flicked the brim of her top hat in acknowledgement.

"I suppose you've read about me," she said, sounding even more bored than before.

"Indeed," said the entity, "you turn up in correspondence a lot more often than most people... and in such varied correspondence too, sent by such varied people in such varied places, over such lengths of time.  And so much of the correspondence about you seems to end up in my hands..."

"I imagine Felix is responsible for the shape of your current iteration," said the Doctor lazily.  "I should've expected it after I told him we were going to see the Mailer Daemon."

The Mailer Daemon bared his teeth in amused satisfaction.

"You're very good at changing the subject," he boomed.

“Do you mean, Sir, that you would appear different if I had been expecting something different?” interrupted Felix, addressing the creature and pointedly ignoring the Doctor's implied insult.  He was determined not to let this encounter get sidetracked.

For a while, the Mailer Daemon seemed to consider his reply.  He trotted from side to side, looking down at Felix, his tail swishing.

“I am a metaphor,” he said at last.  “Reality is metaphorical, therefore metaphors are real.  But metaphors are still made by people.  No matter how real they are, or become.”

He fell silent and gazed at them haughtily, as if expecting applause.

“Well I’m certainly glad we cleared that up,” said Felix.

“I can look how I please,” said the entity, almost kindly, as if relenting, “but I have so much work to do, I tend not to concentrate on my appearance.  I often find that I have unwittingly adapted myself to the expectations of those I meet.  Not that I meet many people face to face.  I generally prefer to manage my business out of sight, behind the scenes.  And, of course, when I am not within sight of someone, I don’t really look like anything at all.  It is your perception of me which creates my physical presence.”

“It sounds as though you are admitting to being an hallucination,” said Felix.

“Such beautiful English," said the Mailer Daemon.

"Thank you," said Felix.

"I am made of words,” said the Mailer Daemon, shrugging, “which is why I appreciate such things.  And, to answer your point: all things that are made of words are, in a sense, hallucinations."

He watched them for a moment.

“Most things are made of words,” he added as an afterthought.

"We're being lectured on epistemology... or is it phenomenology... by a metaphor," said the Doctor.

“The word ‘metaphor’ means ‘to carry meaning’,” said the Mailer Daemon.  “I carry meaning… literally,” and he twitched a shoulder to indicate the satchel which dangled from it.  Felix noticed for the first time that it seemed to be bursting at the seams with papers and parcels and bundles.

“What are they?” asked Felix, pointing.

“Meanings that have been displaced,” said the creature sadly,  “Failures of communication.  Subtexts nobody picked up on.  Messages that were never sent, or which went astray.  Copied and cut paragraphs which were accidentally never pasted.  Crossed-out sentences.  Things that circulated for years, never arriving anywhere.  Things addressed to people who were not known at that address.  Things returned to sender.  Lost letters.  Lost emails.  Emails which were sent and then deleted unread.  Things that failed to happen because words never travelled from one place to another.”

"Lots of spam in there, I imagine," said the Doctor.

Felix didn't know what to make of this remark, but waited to see if he could pick up a sense of what was meant by listening to more of the conversation.

“No,” said the Mailer Daemon flatly, and with an unmistakable touch of pride.

“Why not?” asked the Doctor, “doesn’t spam have meaning?”

“Not all meanings are worth saving and curating,” said the Mailer Daemon.

“Who are you to decide?” asked the Doctor, with a sprinkling of frost in her voice.

“I am the Mailer Daemon,” said the Mailer Daemon simply.  “If I didn’t decide, who would?  I exist because these things need deciding.  The sheer weight and volume of the decisions which needed to be made was what brought me into existence.

“Besides,” he said, looking intently at the Doctor and raising a white eyebrow at her, “haven’t you ever made similar decisions?”

The Doctor blinked.

“Perhaps,” she said, after a moment, "But I only read things that are addressed to me.”

Felix wondered if that was even close to being true, or whether - like many of the Doctor's ethical pronouncements - it was meant as a general statement of principle, to be upheld when possible and discarded if necessary.

“And," continued the Mailer Daemon, "when things - for whatever reason - don’t reach anyone who has the right to decide, that’s when I take on the responsibility of caring for them.  Nothing should ever be entirely lost."

"On that subject," said the Doctor, affecting a sudden breeziness, "my friend here was wondering..."

"I can speak for myself," interrupted Felix, who was nevertheless pleased that the Doctor had remembered he was there, and that he had an agenda of his own.

The Doctor held up an apologetic hand and turned away slightly, though Felix could sense her continued close attentiveness.

Felix turned to the Mailer Daemon.

"Sir, do you have anything in there..." he glanced meaningfully at the creature's satchel "...addressed to me?"

"Oh yes," said the Mailer Daemon immediately, "I do.  As the Doctor already knows."

The Doctor said nothing.

The Mailer Daemon opened the satchel and plunged one of his arms down into it.  His arm disappeared into the satchel far further than he should have been able to, which made the Doctor's lips twitch in amusement.  After a few moments of rummaging, he drew out a single letter clutched in his red, clawed fist.

The letter was old and faded and crumpled, and the creature's hand was making it wilt with heat, but Felix recognised the colour of the envelope, and the handwriting scrawled across it.

"This was sent to you from Germany, from the village where you grew up, from a few streets away from your family home.  It was the last letter sent to you from that particular address.  It was sent only a few weeks before you..." and here the Mailer Daemon flicked his yellow eyes up at the Doctor "...went missing in action."

"Why did I never receive it?" asked Felix, who was feeling tremulous with the thumping of his heart.

"The lorry carrying this batch of letters... went astray in some heavy fog," said the Mailer Daemon.  "It wandered too close to a British machine gun emplacement.  The bullets ignited the petrol in the tank.  It happened the very same day that a British ship carrying letters from Dover to Calais was sunk by a German submarine.  That was a busy day for me."

Felix held out his hand.

"May I?" he asked.

"Of course," said the Mailer Daemon. "It is yours, after all."

He started to hand over the letter and then paused.

"But be careful, young man," he said, glancing up at the Doctor again, and then back down at Felix with a thoughtful furrow in his red brow, "some things are lost for a reason."

Felix hesitated.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t read it?” he asked.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” replied the creature, “that’s not my job or my business.”

He glanced at the Doctor yet again.

"It's nobody's business but yours," he said.

"I'm his friend," said the Doctor, suddenly striding forwards, flushed and passionate.

Felix looked around at her and, seeing the care in her eyes, he felt all his annoyance with her melt away.  But he also felt fear rising inside him.  It was confirmed.  There was something in the letter that she didn't want him to know.  Not for sinister reasons, but for reasons of compassion... which was, if anything, worse.

"Roads must diverge, you know," said Felix, looking into the Doctor's eyes.

The Doctor subsided unhappily, thrusting her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket.

Felix turned back to the Mailer Daemon and held out his hand again.

“I always knew deals with the devil had catches,” he said.

“I'm not the Devil," the Mailer Daemon growled sadly.  "The Devil is always in the details.”

And with that, he handed over the envelope.

Once

The Doctor and Felix came to the village of Once on New Years' Eve.  Or rather, they came to where the village of Once had once been.

"Where is it?" asked Felix in his lilting German accent, staring into the empty valley beyond the copse in which they stood.

The Doctor tipped her head forwards slightly, to let accumulated snow tumble from the crown and brim of her battered, crumpled old top hat.

"Exactly," she said.

The village had disappeared years ago, she told him.

"Well," she continued, her words turning to steam in the cold air, "nobody knows exactly when it happened... or should I say when it, the village I mean, stopped happening."

It had taken a few months of accumulated surprises and puzzlements and disappointments and silences and ominous remarks before the conscious realisation had gradually dawned upon the people in the surrounding villages that the village of Once was no longer there.

"The government realised pretty quickly of course," continued the Doctor, "because the people in Once stopped paying their taxes.  But the government kept quiet about it, in case it gave any other villages ideas.  As best as anyone can make out, the village vanished from existence somewhere between Christmas and New Years, 1849."

"I suppose it has become one of those perennial mysteries," suggested Felix in his perfect schoolboy English, "like the Mary Celeste? "

"Umm, not really," said the Doctor, "You see, hierarchical cultures actually have a very low tolerance for mysteries that are genuinely mysterious.  They prefer prosaic mysteries.  The Mary Celeste, for instance.  I mean it's odd certainly, but the broad outlines of it aren't all that challenging to any common sense ideas about how the world works.  The ship was discovered with the crew and passengers gone.  Obviously, then, they left.  The reason why they left may be obscure, but the essential mechanism of the event is comprehensible enough.  They left.  People can, and will, do that.  But an entire village physically vanishing, structures and roads and farm animals and all..." she smiled wryly "...that's a bit different.  That sort of thing just doesn't happen.  Or rather, it does happen, but it's - if you'll pardon me - vanishingly rare.  When it happens, people get very nervous.  It undermines their sense of reality.  Human beings disappearing, that's one thing.  But property?  That's another.  Especially in England."

Felix chuckled.  "So this is one of those mysteries that polite English people do not talk about."

(The Doctor, by the way, genuinely doesn't know what happened on board the Mary Celeste.  It's one of the strange things about the Doctor's life: we know a lot more about some of the events in it than she does.)

They left the shelter of the copse and walked until they reached the bottom of the empty valley.  Their feet crunched in the snow, and ice-blue moonlight pooled in the caverns of their footprints.

Felix began to have a very strange sense that he was following a road that he could not see, passing houses that were almost - but not quite - visible.

He suddenly became aware of how cold he was.  How his toes were stinging with the cold even inside his boots.  How numb his fingers were.  He hunched over in his greatcoat and plunged his hands into his armpits.  It was like being back in the trenches.

The Doctor didn't seem to notice the cold, or how it was affecting Felix.  She wore her threadbare astrakhan jacket buttoned up, but that meant nothing.  She wore it like that whatever the weather.

"So how can an entire village just disappear?" he asked in an attempt to chivvy the Doctor along a bit, "Structures and roads and farm animals and all?"

"A surprising question," said the Doctor, "coming from someone who's actually been in villages that stopped existing the same day."

"That's war," said Felix sadly, who had met the Doctor at a football match in No-Man's-Land on Christmas Day 1914.  She had played defensive midfield, and had impressed him by tackling him with great ferocity as he made a bid for the two trenchcoats bundled on the ground nearest the British lines.  The bruises on his shins had taken almost a fortnight to fade.

"This might be sign of a war too," said the Doctor.  "The universe is like a battlefield sometimes.  Great powers struggling with each other for reasons incomprehensible to the little people who get caught in the rain of shells..."

"So a... a shell, fired as part of some astral conflict, went astray and this poor little innocent village became a casualty, just because it happened to be near the front line?"

Felix felt depressed by this idea.  Could it really be that the entire universe worked according to the same horrible rules as that war from which he had just escaped?

The Doctor didn't answer.  She seemed to have withdrawn into sad reflections of her own.

"Nobody ever tried to rebuild, then?" asked Felix nervously, "Or start a new village?  It seems a waste.  Such a fertile valley - in the warm months, I mean.  A stream..." he pointed to a frozen crick, and then gestured around "...and good farming land..."

He knew about things like this.  He was a country boy himself, born and bred in a little village not unlike Once must have been.  Not unlike that village in Belgium...

"Another interesting aspect of the matter," said the Doctor ruminatively, "this peculiarly decorous refusal of anyone to reclaim the valley, or even to acknowledge that anything was ever here.  You'll notice that there's no memorial.  Nothing.  And we're in..." she consulted her fob watch "...1962 now, so more than enough time has passed for people to feel as though the lost village of Once warrants some form of commemoration."

Felix was becoming distinctly unnerved.  He felt as though he was surrounded by people, people who could only just be sensed in the corner of his eye, people who were not to be seen when he turned to look at them.  He caught himself having to suppress little jumps of panic every time he sensed an invisible wall or door, or an unseen human presence near him.

He felt ashamed of his weakness.  He hadn't been a nervous person a few months ago.  The war had done it.  But plenty of his comrades in the trenches had coped without becoming nervous wrecks.

He wondered if the presences around him were the ghosts of the annihilated villagers from long ago.  He wondered if he could sense them because they had died in a war, and he was a soldier.  Did that mean that they could sense him in return?

He became aware that the Doctor was watching him.

"I'm all right," he said.

She came over to him and threaded one of her arms through one of his.

"Cold?" she asked.

"No," he said, shaking his head solemnly even as his teeth chattered.

"Good," laughed the Doctor.  Then, in a serious voice: "You can feel it too, can't you?"

Felix looked up at her.  She was much taller than him.

"I'm not imagining it then?"

"No," she said.

"You expected it?"

"Yes."

He looked down.  She'd been testing him again, or using him to test a conclusion of hers that she hadn't told him about.  He didn't know how he felt about this.  At best, it made him feel like an instrument.  At worst, like a sheep being sent across a minefield.

"We may as well go back to the TARDIS," said the Doctor suddenly, "We've learned all we can here."

"What have we learnt?" asked Felix, who didn't feel any more wise than when they'd arrived - just colder.

"That the village is still here," she said.  "Or rather... the village isn't here or not here.  It's more complicated than that.  But it has, at least, left traces.  Traces that are sensible to human beings.  That answers one question anyway.  A question you asked earlier.  The question of why nobody ever built here, or erected a memorial.  People sensed that they'd be building on top of... or commemorating... something that was, in some way, still there.  The people who came here sensed the village around them, just like you did.  Of course, the past is always still around us... but more so here than in other places."

"So are we going to investigate?" asked Felix, who knew the Doctor well enough already to know the answer.

The Doctor nodded.

"How?" asked Felix.

The Doctor said nothing.  She just started leading him out of the valley.  They trod in their own footprints on the way back to the wood.

The TARDIS was in a tree.  A grand, grave, elder-statesman of a horse chestnut.  Winter had turned it into a thing of gaunt, rattling, bony arms.  It looked like a snow-muffled riot of skeletons.  The TARDIS doors were set into its trunk, their blue blending seamlessly at the edges with the green and the grey and the brown of the gnarled bark.  The Doctor flourished her jangly mess of keys around the keyhole, and she and Felix clambered inside.

A few moments later, by their time, they emerged.  They had just walked out of a moonlit night; now they emerged into a morning flooded with low sunlight. The tree was younger and smaller now, less grave and angry-looking, but just as skeletal.   It was still winter, but a winter 113 years earlier than the one through which they'd just walked.  Snow from 1962 fell from their boots into the snow of 1849.  When the warmer weather came, it would all melt into the same puddles and then sink into the same earth.  When the Doctor and her friends travel, water and dust and seeds and air will travel with them.  The future and the past mingle and melt into each other, and cross-fertilise.

Felix was soon looking out from the edge of the same copse into the same valley.  But this time, Once was there, cradled in the valley like eggs in a nest.

"By spending Christmas 1849 in the village of Once," said the Doctor quietly, gathering a stray garland of hair out of her face and tucking it back up under the brim of her hat.  "New Years too perhaps.  We'll see how it goes."

"Will I be welcome?" asked Felix.

"You should be a hit," said the Doctor, "if there's one thing Germans are good at - besides classical music and critiques of political economy - it's Christmas."

Darwinia

Here are a few of the fortunes I devised during my first week as a writer of fortunes at Trang's Fortune Cookies Ltd:

YOU ARE CURRENTLY BALD.  THIS IS A MISTAKE.

 

OBEY THE WISDOM OF THE FROG.  HE KNOWS.

LOOK NOT TO THE RIGHT NOR TO THE LEFT BUT SIMPLY DO.

 

KEEP IT SIMPLE.  COMPLEXITY KILLS.

 

HAPPY THE MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF CHEESE.

 

STARSKY AND HUTCH, I SUMMON YOU.

I LOVE YOUR EARS, MY LITTLE FRIEND.

 

ABUSE ANTS.

 

Mr Trang speaks no English, but he pops his head round my office door every day and expresses his benevolent interest in my work by means of gestures and facial expressions.  I show him my work book.  I concoct something in the region of 500 fortunes a day.  More, on a good day.  Mr Trang cannot read them but he casts his eyes over my work politely.  He smiles and nods encouragingly.  Sometimes he bows and mimes applause.  I smile back, bow in return and mime modest shrugs.  This appears to please him and he leaves.

I came to work at Trang's after losing my job at the Ministry of Insects.  I was doing quite well at the Ministry.  I'd only been there five months and had already been promoted to Under Secretary For Grasshoppers.  I had my career path mapped out.  I would ascend to helm the Grasshoppers Department and then I would rise to a mid-level position in the related field of Locusts.  Once leadership of Locusts was mine, as it surely would be once I had ousted that fool Ormstead, I would deal directly with the other Heads of Department for the various bureaux in the Agricultural Pests Division.  I would establish a power base amongst Pests and clamber up the greasy pole until I was in a position to become the Pests Oversecretary.  The current Pests Oversecretary, Himmelfarb, would be hard to nobble, but I was confident I would find a way.  From there it would be only a short step sideways to any one of several possible paths.  I could choose which path I wanted to take based upon circumstances at the time.  I might continue to rise in Insects, via a route through the large and complex Flies Department.  I saw potential openings in Trichoptera and Megaloptera.  Progress through this area of the Ministry would be slower but would have the advantage of giving me more experience, which might be an issue that would come up later on.  Or I might jump sideways to the smaller but infinitely more prestigious Ministry of Arachnids.  Or I might even be able to jump over spiders and go straight to Marine Arthropods, depending on Tinkerman's attitude to me.  I found Tinkerman enigmatic, with his cold eyes and his monotonous voice and his habit of breaking things slowly and deliberately.  Chairs.  Desk tidies.  Books.  Paperclips.  Anything that happened to be in front of him, he dismantled and left in pieces.  I wasn't sure he disliked me, however.  It was just a suspicion. And, even if he did, there was a possibility that he disliked everyone equally.  Little did I know.

Speaking of things I didn't know, I had also entirely reckoned without Fotheringhamgaymortontonford at the Ministry of Long Names.  I never saw him coming.  I never knew that he harboured such animus towards me, such venom.  I never knew that a desire for vengeance burned in his rotten heart, like sulfur in a cess-pit.  I never knew how closely he was watching my every move, calculating my every thought, waiting for his opportunity, preparing his strike against me... a strike that would destroy my prospects, send me tumbling from my high perch down to the depths of ignominy and reduce all my exalted dreams to ashes in my mouth.

My work here at Trang's has gone through several stages. At the start, I made an effort to make my fortunes seem like predictions.  I found this hard so I would buy newspapers and plagiarize the horoscopes.  I was careful about it.  I would use the horoscope I had selected as a template and subtly alter it so that it became unrecognisable while still retaining that ineffable flavour of prediction which I found so hard to synthesize myself. So, for instance, I might take the following horoscope (which, as it happens, was published in the Evening Standard on 19th May last year, addressed to Sagittarius)...

You were born with great energy and drive.  However, you worry about hurting others as you push for what you want.  Partly, your worry is justified.  Take stock of your recent achievements and try to think how they might have put noses out of joint.  Saturn is settling down in the next few weeks, so this is an excellent time to think about being conciliatory.  But beware of compromising your ideals and goals.  

...and use it as the raw material from which to fashion the following fortunes:

DRIVE NERVOUSLY AND ENERGY WILL BE BORN.

 

YOU WILL HURT PEOPLE IF YOU PUSH THEM.

 

TAKE STOCK OF NOSES.

 

SETTLE DOWN ON SATURN.

 

YOUR GOALS WILL BE OFF SIDE.