He crouched down and whispered. ‘Where are you Harold? And what are you?’
‘Doctor?’ came a voice. The Doctor looked around and standing in the opening between the walls was Caroline. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, Caroline, I’m fine. It’s Harold that I’m bothered about.’ He looked back to the grave. ‘Where could he have gone?’
Caroline crossed over to the Doctor and knelt beside him. ‘Never mind him. What about Tom? Danny and Mark haven’t seen him for ages.’
‘I believe Tom is a very resourceful young man. He’ll be just fine.’
Tom was dead.
He fell to the floor and gazed up at the disgusting face that leered at him from the darkness. He tried not to look at it, but that strange human desire for looking at something so gruesome was too strong.
‘Do you like me?’ hissed the remains of Stevens. The thing extended a bony hand towards the shivering Tom. ‘Why do you shake?’
‘Because I’m scared,’ gibbered Tom as he stared at Steven’s rotting face.
‘You are dead,’ chuckled Stevens. ‘You’ve no need to fear me. We’re both the same now.’ He pointed towards Tom’s lifeless corpse. ‘Take control of your body.’
‘I’m not dead,’ said Tom desperately. ‘I can’t be dead.’
‘Your body’s over there, boy,’ said Stevens. He walked over to it and lifted it to it’s feet. Stevens smiled. ‘You’re dead, kid.’
Tom’s mind was racing. Was this really death? Where were the angels and where was God waiting at the end of the tunnel with the light?
‘I can read your thoughts,’ said Stevens. ‘I know what you’re all thinking.’ He grinned. ‘There is no God.’
Tom’s face exploded with rage. ‘There isn’t a God for you!’ He brought himself up to Stevens’ level. ‘That’s why you’re still here! That’s why you’re haunting this place.’
Stevens threw what consisted of his head back and let out a guttural howl-like laugh. ‘You poor pathetic creature. Haunting? I’m not haunting this place, I’m trapped.’
Tom looked around the darkness. ‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
Harold shook his head. ‘Maybe if I was a ghost. But I’m not a ghost.’
‘What?’
‘Let me tell you a little story about me.’ Suddenly Stevens’s grizzly body went limp and dropped to the floor in crunch of bones. Standing over the remains was a shadowy figure. Tom could only just make out the colour of blue.
‘Follow me,’ said the shadow as it walked off into the darkness.
Tom felt compelled to follow.
In the prison grounds the group were sat on the grass in a circle.
The Doctor sighed and looked at each one of the teenagers. ‘We don’t know where Tom is, we don’t know where Harold J Stevens is, and we have no idea why Kate is back with us. The one thing we do know, almost certainly, is that the three incidents are related.’
‘What do we do then?’ asked Alex. ‘I mean, Tom has to be here somewhere.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Caroline. She nodded her head towards the point where the TARDIS had stood. ‘The TARDIS vanished and it’s nowhere to be seen. So did the van.’
‘To be fair,’ continued the Doctor, ‘the TARDIS may have been moved into the cells or somewhere else on the complex. Or it might have even moved itself. The van could have been stolen.’
Caroline nodded.
‘So,’ said Danny pointedly, ‘to repeat Alex’s question - what do we do?’
The Doctor breathed in and gave a heavy sigh. ‘We need to search this entire complex.’
‘With our eyes?’ asked Joanne.
‘Yes, and with the equipment you have. You are ghost hunters after all. I assume it’s all still in the chapel?’ asked the Doctor.
‘It was when I left there yesterday,’ said Kate.
‘Why leave the equipment but get rid of your box and our van?’ asked Mark.
‘Perhaps, if it was Harold J Stevens, he was scared away by the equipment and couldn’t go near it,’ suggested Joanne.
‘Let’s not speculate,’ said the Doctor. ‘Let’s just find Tom.’
‘Any clues on Kate yet?’ asked Alex hopefully.
The Doctor looked at Kate and smiled sadly. This was one problem that would only be solved when the evil force was destroyed. ‘I’m sorry, Alex. We’ll just have to wait and see on the Kate front. I do, however, suggest that she gets some rest.’ Kate nodded and then the Doctor clapped his hands together. ‘Come on then, everybody. We’ve got some hard work to do and I don’t fancy having to stay here tonight.’
I was lost. So very, very lost. Lost from my own kind as I fell to your planet. Burning. I burnt across your sky until I came crashing down to Earth, landing in a forest clearing, creating a huge crater.
The air was warm and the sky was clear. The stars glittered down on me as I climbed from the burning hole in the ground. But I had forgotten who I was. I was a blank slate. Nothing but a shadow.
I made my way across the forest clearing and from out of the trees there came a man. A young man with red hair.
He stood with a pretty, blonde woman. Such a beautiful thing. He was clearly shocked at my appearance - just a shadow. A faceless, featureless shadow, but he extended his hand in friendship. The idiot! I took his hand - and took his form. That is what we do, Tom, do you see? That is what my people do. I had forgotten all of who I was, but I knew the basic instincts of my race. It’s something that never goes away.
So I was drawn inside this young, foolish man. I became him.
‘Who was he?’
Harold J Stevens.
The man I took over - possessed if you like - was Harold J Stevens. And his memories replaced my own, lost ones. He was out here camping with his fiancee. Pretty, pretty Patricia. But I was damaged. The crash had damaged me. And I panicked. As soon as I knew I was safely within Stevens’ body I made my way through the forest.
Patricia followed me.
She was scared of me. She tried to stop me. She could see I needed help. Warrior instinct took over and I killed her. Snapped her neck in an instant.
And I enjoyed it.
‘You’re sick!’
Am I, Tom? Really? Because this is who I am. My people travel from planet to planet. We are shadows, the “thing” in the corner of your eye. We bury ourselves in people’s heads and absorb all of their memories. Then we send in the troops and decimate worlds.
‘So you’re an alien?’
Got it in one, Tommy-boy.
‘So, you lost your memory?’
Yeah. But by the time it had started to return, I realised I had been trapped. The longer we spend in a persons body, the more chance we have of being tethered - trapped - to it. And by now I was on the run from the police, killing anybody or anything in my way.
And so I ended up here, at Sherman prison. And then they executed me. Except that they didn’t. They only killed the physical form of Harold. I survived outside, but was trapped here, unable to leave as my kind had travelled so far away from Earth. They had abandoned me.
The Doctor had disconnected the cars headlights and managed to rig them up in the chapel to provide better light for the group. The camp beds had been re-set up and a rug had been placed over the floor for them to sit down.
Kate shivered upon entering the room and crossed over to the wooden cross lying beside the far wall. It was still sticky with her blood and she took it to the door and threw it out just before Alex came in.
‘You okay babe?’ asked Alex.
‘Yeah,’ said Kate’s dry voice. ‘Just getting rid of a few memories.’
Alex smiled and turned back to the others.
Kate quickly shifted a cushion over her pool of blood on the floor. It’d do no use to get him upset again.
‘So,’ said the Doctor, who was holding a sheet of paper, ‘are we all clear what we’re going to do?’
‘Yes,’ they nodded in agreement.
The Doctor took out a pencil from his coat pocket and pointed to Mark and Joanne. ‘You two will check out the cell area.’ He pointed to Caroline and Alex. ‘The two of you will check out the grounds and cemetery areas.’ He turned towards Kate. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be staying with Danny.’
‘What?’ asked a confused Danny.
‘Somebody’s got to stay and look after Kate,’ said the Doctor.
‘I can look after myself,’ Kate said.
‘Perhaps it’s best if I stayed with Kate,’ said Alex urgently.
‘No, no, no,’ said the Doctor ,who had screwed up his sheet of paper and was shaking his head in frustration. ‘I can’t be doing with any emotional liabilities. Alex and Caroline, Mark and Joanne, Kate and Danny here whilst I go off to the torture chambers.’
Caroline rolled her eyes. ‘Won’t Mark and Joanne be an “emotional liability”?’ she asked.
‘Not at all.’ The Doctor smiled at the couple. ‘If anything they will work better together.’ He turned back to Danny. ‘Now, I don’t want anymore arguments from anybody else. All we have to do is find Harold J Stevens, find Tom and somehow put an end to Harold’s frighteningly scary haunting.’
‘Just another day at the office then,’ said Caroline under her breath.
Tom sat in the corner of the room, his knees drawn up to his chin.
The shadowy figure of Harold was standing nearby, smiling.
‘So what’s your real name?’ asked Tom, not quite believing his was actually an alien.
‘Vrezan.’
“That’s…an interesting name.”
More thoughts were swirling around Tom’s confused head. ‘But I’m really a ghost, aren’t I?’
Harold - or Vrezan - chuckled. ‘Not exactly. I’m keeping your soul - your aura - alive. If that’s what you class as a ghost, then that’s your choice.’
‘This is all too much,’ said Tom, shaking his head.
‘It’s really very simple. It’s all just a part of my psychic make-up. Just the same as how I’m able to control things around me and read people’s thoughts…and show people their past.’
Tom looked up quickly. ‘What? No. Please, no.’
The air shimmered around Tom and Vrezan.
Now they were standing in a bathroom. A young, blonde haired girl was lowering herself into a bath. Time seemed to move on a little. Now the girl was asleep and calm in the warm water. Although Tom and Vrezan were unable to smell it, the choking stink of gas was beginning to creep into the bathroom.
Tom fell to his knees. ‘No…,’ he said quietly.
The girl remained sleeping and silent.
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