Chapter Text
How The Winds Are Laughing
by Kathryn Andersen
Chapter 2. Who Told You A Calf To Be?
Donna didn't bother asking her mother or grandfather about her missing memories. They would just tell her not to stress about it; and what they didn't know, they couldn't worry about. But there were other things she could check: telephone records, employment records, NHS records, newspapers.
The day of her aborted wedding was not only the day Lance died, but the day someone had drained the Thames. How bizarre.
There was no record of her illness in her health records: no doctor's appointments, no hospital stays, no sick leave. The last was explained by the fact that she hadn't actually been working for about a month before her memories started. She asked her girlfriends, and they said she'd been travelling. That might explain it; some exotic tropical disease, treated overseas, outside the system. It might. Or it might not.
Another odd coincidence: she couldn't find any phone records for that month. Or any time since. It was as if her phone had dropped off the network... except that it was still working. No bills, no phone records, but her number was still working. Now that she thought about it, there was another odd thing about her phone: on the day after the so-called planets-in-the-sky incident, she'd found that all her stored phone numbers were gone. She'd just thought it was an accident at the time, but maybe it wasn't. Yet another coincidence confronted her when she checked dates against the newspaper archives: her phone had dropped off the network the same day the cars had all gone crazy and spewed smoke everywhere.
-oOo-
The smoke swirls inside the car, almost obscuring Gramps from sight. He coughs, choking. You frantically try to open the doors, but they are locked. Glass shatters as Mum smashes the windscreen. Both of you pull Gramps out of the car, and support him to the front door.
You push the door open. You are alone, and it is not your house. The light is dim, the walls are dark, the ceiling is low, and there is a humming in the air. You are looking for something. Your heart beats fast, your hands are clammy; they must not find you. You hold your phone before you like a lucky charm. It will tell you where to go.
Donna shivered as she awoke. The first part of that dream: was it a memory? It might have happened like that. She wrote the dream carefully in her dream-diary, trying to recall every detail. It might be important.
-oOo-
The light burns. It sears into your eyes, your mind. It consumes you.
Dark, stifling heat. Flickers of fire. Your eyes adjust to the dimness. Rough walls, rough floor, all tinged with red and orange. The air stinks of sulfur; you want to hold your breath, but you must breathe. You are following someone, someone up ahead in the dimness. Quickly, or he will leave you behind. Yet you must step carefully, for if you stumble you will burn.
You stumble.
The light burns.
Donna breathed deeply through her nose, keeping her eyes closed. She wasn't going to let this dream turn into a headache. Breathe in the life, breathe out the pain, she repeated to herself in her mind. Breathe in the life, breathe out the pain. She blessed her yoga instructor again. This stuff really worked!
She sat up and turned to her dream diary, opening a fresh page.
-oOo-
As she prepared to turn in after another long day, the black cat on the mantlepiece caught her eye. Elegant, thin, its blue-green eyes stared back at her. The style reminded her of something... something she'd seen on a school excursion. Something old. Could she have bought the cat on her trip to Egypt? She picked it up and took it with her to her bedroom.
Once in her pajamas, she sat cross-legged on her bed, holding the cat in front of her. Breathe in, breathe out. Focus on nothing but the cat. She concentrated on the feel of it in her hands, its weight, the smooth polish of its body, the warmth it was picking up from her own body-heat. Relax. Let it come. Relax.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Silence. Darkness. And in her mind's eye, a flicker of memory. The air is hot and dry, with a taste of grit and sand. The air smells of sweat, unwashed bodies, camel dung, fried foods, baking bread. She is haggling with a stallholder for the cat, certain that his first offer is outrageous, even though she doesn't know the actual worth of the trinket. And she can still shout, even when she doesn't know the language.
Donna opened her eyes. "Yes! I remembered!"
And she didn't have a headache, not even a trace.
-oOo-
After that success, she scoured the house for trinkets. Some worked, some didn't. A spiky rubber ball reminded her of the Secret Santa exchange at Lethifers, where she'd been temping just before Christmas last year. A cannister of green tea brought to mind Lily at Oxfam, though she couldn't recall when it was. But the mysterious deep blue necklace in her jewelry box just gave her a headache. She kept trying. Bits and pieces floated to the surface, like seaweed brought in by the tide.
-oOo-
It is night, cold enough that your breath mists before you. Trees rattle and rustle in the breeze. Your heart pounds as you notice that the trees have more than one shadow. You look up. There are three moons in the sky. The largest glows white, cratered in an unfamiliar pattern. Two smaller moons trail it, one a dirty grey, the other a pinkish red.
"It's beautiful," you say.
You look around with a smile, but there is nobody there to hear. Your friend is missing. You want to call out in the darkness, but you can't remember his name. You have to find him. You look through the triple-shadowed trees, but you cannot see him. You stumble, tripped up by mists and shadows.
There is movement ahead, a figure walking through the trees. You hurry to catch up, but even though he seems to be strolling slowly in the silvery light, you get no closer. You cannot see his face.
Donna closed her eyes and thought about the dream. What was her mind trying to tell her? I'm looking for something. I know what that is: I'm looking for my memories. She sighed and looked down at her dream diary, re-reading the account of the dream. Then she paged back and re-read some of the others.
"Doofus!" she chastised herself. "Not something, someone." A friend. Definitely a friend, not a boyfriend. Someone she'd forgotten. Someone important. She sighed again. That still doesn't tell me who he is.
-oOo-
Donna frowned at the screen. The bookmark folder she stumbled across on her laptop was confusing. Why call it 'FindDoc' when it wasn't about finding documents? Instead it was full of conspiracy sites. Conspiracies and weirdos; what kind of club was LINDA, anyway? Why on earth would I be interested in that kind of stuff? She tapped her fingers on the desk. There had been weird connections in her forgotten life: draining the Thames, cars going crazy, planets in the sky. But surely she hadn't gone all gullible, had she? Unless... had her lost friend been into that kind of thing?
She flicked through the sites. The "Ghostwatch" site had lists of haunted houses with a star rating for "activity level". Another, called , was full of space-crazies. The content was laughable: "Harold Saxon's body never found: was he an alien?", "Missing Bees Return", "The fat just walks away: the real truth behind Adipose Industries", "Atmos System designed by aliens", "Why Was Titanic aimed at Buckingham Palace?". Huh. Nutters.
But when she came across an article titled "An Analysis of the Planet Transport Incident" she kept reading.
-oOo-
A wooden door is before you. You pound on it, worried. There is no answer. You break the door open. There is no one there, just a pile of clothes on the floor. Movement catches your eye; a white blobby creature stands on the windowsill and waves at you. It jumps out the window into the night.
You are outside, hanging on for dear life, a crosspiece in your hands, a cable stretched taut, your only lifeline. The glass wall of a skyscraper reflects the city lights. You yell at someone above you to get you out of this mess. Someone you can't see.
You are on the roof of the skyscraper, looking up. Thousands of the blobby creatures are floating upwards in beams of light. Someone stands beside you as you wave the blobs goodbye. You want to turn and look at him, but you can't.
"I'm waving at fat," you say.
She almost dismissed the dream as her overactive imagination after reading too many conspiracy theories the day before. But she hadn't read the article about Adipose, she'd just glanced at the title. She hopped out of bed, sat at her desk, and brought up the article. She gasped. There was a photo of the blobby creatures she'd seen in her dream. She clicked on a youtube link, supposed to be a video of the creatures. It was them. Hundreds of them, walking down the middle of a street. The footage showed a taxicab screeching to a halt to avoid squishing them flat.
"I saw this," she said to herself. "I was there. I was there with someone. But who?"
-oOo-
The nights were growing cooler, the days shorter. Donna's grandfather went up on the hill more and more, taking advantage of the earlier darkness for his stargazing. Donna sometimes came home from work via the hill so that she could drag her grandfather out of the cold and inside for a hot dinner. He wasn't always there, but she figured that the longer walk did her good anyway.
This evening he wasn't there, so she walked down the hill to the back door. It had been an unusually warm autumn day; she could hear voices drifting out the open kitchen window.
Just as she was about to open the back door, she heard Gramps say, "It breaks my heart that she can't know."
"You heard what the doctor said," her mother said. "It's too dangerous for Donna to remember."
"But she did so much!" Gramps said. "And she can't remember any of it!"
What the hell? Too dangerous for me to remember? Why?
Her keys dropped from her nerveless fingers, and by the time she'd picked them up, Gramps and her mother had changed the subject. She pretended she hadn't heard anything. If she confronted them, she suspected that they would lie, as they had apparently been lying all this time about... whatever had happened. And if she let them know that she was trying to remember... she didn't think that would go down well.
She wondered if it had something to do with her missing friend, then laughed to herself. Of course it does. Whoever he is, he likes conspiracies, and how far away is that from cloak-and-dagger danger? Her heart stopped as it suddenly occured to her that the man in brown might be dead; killed under mysterious circumstances. You're letting your imagination run away with you, girl. But it wouldn't hurt to be careful.
-oOo-
Donna found the dress in a box in the attic when her mother had sent her up there to look for old Women's Weekly magazines for a rummage sale. It had clearly been a wedding dress, all white satin and lace, but it was no longer. Someone had ripped it from top to bottom, then ripped those pieces into pieces. Guess I really was that mad at Lance, she thought. It was obviously her ex-wedding dress; it wasn't as if anyone else around here had gotten (almost) married recently.
She sat down on the attic floor and examined the pieces of the dress. They were dirty and water-damaged, as if she'd run around outside and then got caught in the rain. Though there hadn't been any rain that day, she'd checked. But it had been the day that someone had drained the Thames. Could she have been involved in that? Not bloody likely!
She emptied the box of pieces into her lap, burying her hands in the cloth, feeling the scratchy lace and smooth satin with her fingers. She closed her eyes. It should have been easy, she had been getting enough practice at it, but she couldn't help tensing in excitement. Her not-wedding was where her lost memories began, and she hadn't been able to remember anything about it at all, as if it was buried deeper than the events which had followed it. Which didn't quite make sense. It was like her lost memories were bookended by events that really didn't want to be remembered: her wedding, and the month before the Planet Incident, the month her friends said she had been off travelling.
She took a deep breath, and cleared her mind. Think of nothing but the touch of the cloth in your hands.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Fragments. She walks down the aisle, the excitement building inside her. She stands in the sunshine outside. Someone takes her hand and slips a ring onto her finger. "With this ring I thee biodamp." She runs up and down a high street in her wedding gown, trying to catch a taxi. She is inside a taxi; it is going the wrong way. She yells at the driver. She opened her eyes in surprise. "What the hell...?"
She shook her head. She wasn't going to stop now, not when she was so close. She breathed in, then breathed out and let go of the tension. She started from the top of her head, down to her toes, telling her muscles to relax. She took one of the larger pieces and draped it over her head. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose. It smelt musty and dirty, with an overtone which made her think of fishponds and river-water. Relax. Relax. It will come.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
The day had been bright and cold, but that hadn't mattered, because she was going to be indoors for the whole wedding. She walks down the aisle, excitement building inside her. She yells at the taxi driver; he turns his head, and it is nothing but a mask, bronze and blank. Someone calls out to her, telling her to jump. She is in a long corridor, driving a Segway. Lance laughs at her, standing next to a huge red spider-woman. "My children are hungry." Fire and water, and someone above her, his face grim and terrible and empty. She calls up to him, "Doctor! You can stop now!"
She pulled the cloth off her head and bit her knuckle to stop herself from crying out. The Doctor. She remembered now. Vanishing from her own wedding, the Doctor, his TARDIS, the spider-woman, Lance's betrayal, the snow coming down at the Doctor's command, refusing his offer to come travelling with him. Regretting it later when Egypt had been such a bust. Wondering whether she should try to find him again. The Doctor was the person she'd been searching for in her dreams, just as she'd started to search for him in real life. How on earth could she have forgotten him?
It couldn't have been a brain-fever. Someone had made her forget. Someone had wiped her memories. But why? And why wipe nineteen months worth of memories while they were at it? Why not just wipe out her wedding? Well, maybe it wouldn't have worked so well, her not knowing why she'd decided to go to Egypt. Maybe. Or maybe... maybe she had found the Doctor. And gone travelling with him. That missing month! Maybe she had found the Doctor, and whoever it was didn't want her to remember that either. Too dangerous if she remembers. Oh.
Someone was trying to keep her away from the Doctor. Someone dangerous. Well, the Doctor did attract enemies, didn't he? Huh. They didn't know Donna very well if they thought a little memory wipe would stop her. Well, it had stopped her, but it certainly wasn't going to stop her now.
She was going to find the Doctor. She'd done it before; she could do it again.
TBC