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The Doctor felt the force rip his body asunder. His shoulders and hips buckled under the strain as his arms and legs, held in the implacable grasp of an invisible horde, were stretched like elastic. His senses inverted; his soundless screams ignited the void around him, lathering the endless white in a cacophony of rippling colour; his vibrant clothes were blanched, the fabric crackling impossibly with energy that burned his nostrils before his nose dissolved into liquid down his blank face.
Curling around his ears, the howling engines of eternity meted out a drumbeat that quickened with his beating hearts, swelling greater – it was always building, it had only just begun, it had already stopped, it was always building – until a single note of unbroken fury sounded out ceaselessly as the only ambient presence in the vacuum. The Doctor tried to breathe, but every intake of acrid air clawed at the inside of his throat; he tried to blink, but, feeling no eyes in his head, found himself gazing out at the expanse through his palms, his vision obscured by an itching lacquer of sweat.
‘I deny it. I deny it!’ the Doctor tried to yell. ‘This is an illusion. A trick. Nothing more.’
The Doctor held his eyelids firmly shut. He could feel the details of his lashes and the delicate sensation as they brushed against one another, a reminder that his physical form was still intact.
‘I deny it,’ he repeated to himself, ‘I deny it all.’
Then, everything was silent. Cautiously, the Doctor opened his eyes, nearly staggering backwards at the sudden changes around him.
The void was gone, but his surroundings remained a stark white. The room was small and featureless save for a hexagonal dais in its centre and a concealed screen on the farthest wall. ‘The TARDIS,’ the Doctor gasped. ‘My TARDIS…’
He moved to the controls. A part of him knew this was merely another trick, but habit compelled him to examine the instruments and screens on its panels. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and began to drum idle patterns against his legs; the Doctor leaned back from the console and hummed through pursed lips, summoning more effort than he knew was necessary to stop himself from succumbing to the routine of tinkering with the TARDIS.
The Doctor shook his head, ‘I deny it.’ His pronouncement was soured, however, when the Doctor flinched at a different sound. It was abrupt and brief, vanishing as suddenly as it arrived, but it was impossible to mistake it for anything else: it was a scream.
The voice belonged to a woman, and it was clear that she was terrified. It was familiar to him, the scream shifting like a fragment lodged beneath scar tissue as the Doctor combed through his half dozen lives to identify it. As its pernicious edges cut against his skin and the closed wound began to split open, the Doctor noticed that he was no longer alone in the room.
A silhouette stood across from him on the other side of the console. Its features were indiscernible, but the Doctor noticed the figure was turned away and looking elsewhere. He shuffled to get a better view and noticed a second shape, smaller and evidently terrified as it cowered away from the looming shadow.
‘The interesting thing is,’ the taller of the pair began, ‘before it became good, it was evil. And that’s what you are. Thoroughly evil.’
It was the Doctor. His brow furrowed—though he recognised that voice as his own, he had no recollection of ever speaking those words.
The shorter shadow stepped back. The Doctor knew immediately – and with a growing pit in his stomach – that the voice belonged to a woman as she shuffled carefully away, ‘Doctor, stop it!’
‘No. No, not even a fairy,’ the shadow Doctor continued. He drew closer to the woman, his voice low and accusatory, ‘An alien spy, sent here to spy on me. Well, we all know the fate of alien spies!’
The real Doctor cried out, ‘No!’ But his protest had no effect; he could only watch as his shadow lunged at the woman, his jagged hands sealing around her throat with a malice the Doctor could never fathom succumbing to. ‘This is an illusion! It’s not real! It can’t be…’
The assailant soon relented, his form fading into wisps of smoke before dissipating entirely, his victim still unmoving on the floor. Instinct pushed the Doctor to kneel by her side, to help her in whatever way he could, but, as the contours of her face cut through the blackness, his anguish gave way to mounting horror. Her short hair and soft cheeks resolved with the details of her face, a face whose lifeless expression would no more shine the sweet smile seared onto the Doctor’s hearts; she was no longer an anonymous victim: she was Perpugilliam Brown.
She was dead.
‘Peri…’ The Doctor reached out to hold her, but his fingers passed through the insubstantial form. ‘No…’ His refusals came as little more than mewling pleas, ‘No, don’t—’
The phantom dissolved—the Doctor was alone.
‘Not real. It’s not real, none of it is.’ He uttered the affirmation several times, each repetition bringing with it a fresh twinge of pain as the Doctor remembered what he witnessed unfold on Thoros Beta. ‘Peri… Peri may be gone,’ he said, ‘and there may never be enough time for me to make peace with that, but I would sooner accept her death than this false reality! I deny it!’
His protest was unanswered and unacknowledged as it echoed through the empty control room. The false TARDIS was cold; the walls lacked their usual warmth, the typical vibrancy in the heart of the ancient machine absent in this pale imitation. But, in the corner of his eye, at the door beside the scanner screen, the Doctor gleaned a flicker of activity. Hazy tendrils of light coiled into the room, bleeding through the gaps in the frame from the corridor beyond.
‘Is someone there?’ he called out. ‘Glitz?’
The door opened wider and the Doctor flinched to cover his eyes at the sudden blaze. The path ahead was scarcely visible through the blinding glow; even through a squint, the Doctor could only just discern the faint boundary of the floor against the threshold. The ground beneath his feet was as solid as an illusion could be, but the Doctor began to imagine it falling away beneath him.
Then, for a second – a measurement he clung to as his sense of time wavered in the wake of the maelstrom ahead – the undiluted din was tainted by the musings of another spectre. ‘It’s a question of re-imprinting their identities,’ the Doctor heard himself say, ‘of establishing again who they are.’
He lingered on the words and remembered them clearly. The grizzly sights of Varos flashed before him.
‘Can you walk, Peri?’ his past self asked. ‘Come on, try.’
The Doctor gazed down at his own feet as the floor returned to its original state. His vision began to clear, but his mind remained clouded by the nightmares of the Punishment Dome; the memories of his own suffering, though unpleasant, were subsumed into a larger torment as another image, more vivid than any other, played before the Doctor.
Peri was confined to a slab as the transmogrification process continued. Thick plumes of feathers covered every inch of her skin; though she still retained the approximation of a human, the perverse mutation threatened to alter her body entirely and revoke what little independence she had left.
The Doctor, confined by time in the prison of the future, was powerless to intervene. He remembered how the floor had fallen away and returned, how, for the briefest moment, he may have been able to navigate the directionless expanse and find his own way forward. He sighed just as the memory of Peri opened her mouth to mutter a string of incoherent ramblings; the Doctor found his voice doubled as she spoke with him, ‘I thought I could fly…’
‘Yes,’ said his past self, ‘but walking is all that’s required for now.’
The Doctor steeled himself and pursed his lips.
‘Come on, Peri,’ the voice said, ‘Walk.’
Like a whisper, another voice echoed the command. The Doctor strained to hear Peri’s voice urging him onwards, ‘Walk, Doctor. Keep going.’
‘Peri…’ With a grimace, the Doctor mustered the disparate shards of his shattered resolve and began to walk.
With each step, the space around him became clearer. Bubbles of the sparse infinity swelled and popped, their odourless gases solidifying into the labyrinthine corridors of the TARDIS. The Doctor recognised the forgery’s shortcomings, observing how the harsher tint of the white surfaces emanated a more clinical tone than their counterparts in reality. The columns reached a few feet higher, terminating at an irregular ceiling that hung askew above his head. But the roundels were without discrepancy.
The Doctor examined one of the walls more scrupulously. The roundels were set at regular intervals identical to the measurements the Doctor had made several times during his routine maintenance of the TARDIS’ systems. Each grey casing was precise in its refraction of the gentle light inside, but, as the Doctor looked closer, he could see a shape take form.
Before his eyes, the roundel transformed into a screen and displayed another memory. The Doctor could see himself in the control room tugging at his blue cravat to emphasise his latest exclamation as he argued with Peri. Their words were inaudible, but the Doctor mouthed along as he watched the row escalate. He had no need for audio—he could remember every tiff and disagreement he and Peri ever had.
A faint crackle startled the Doctor and, as he stepped away from the wall, he could see a projection inside every roundel. He saw the gardens of Karfel and his dismissal of Peri’s botanical remarks; he saw himself clad in a blue cloak as he and Peri bickered in the snow on Necros; he watched conversations devolve into arguments and struggled to watch Peri flinch each time his younger self raised his voice.
The roundel in the middle of the wall resolved into something different, something recent. Peri was chained to the rocks on the purple shores of Thoros Beta, screaming at an apathetic man. Then, the image shifted, and she was in a prison cell. It shifted again and she was being sedated. The roundel changed one final time and displayed the facsimile of Peri screaming in defiance of King Yrcanos before falling limp in a flash of energy.
When the Doctor found the courage to look again, the roundel had reverted to its natural state. He ghosted a hand over the wall, aching for a touch he knew would never be reciprocated. ‘How could I have done this to you?’ he asked. ‘You were good and kind and… And it was my fault.’ He wanted to press his forehead against the wall, to broadcast his thoughts to Peri even though he knew in his hearts that she would never hear him again. ‘I have to face this, Peri. I have to accept… You’re gone. But, I brought you back before, remember? You were on the brink of death before I gave you the bat’s milk.’ The Doctor stared into the roundel and the memory of Peri’s face stared back. ‘I died for you once, Peri. I’ll do it again if I have to, if it brings you back…’
‘No, Doctor. You will not.’ The leering voice tore through the Doctor. It was the Valeyard. ‘Death would be too easy.’
‘Do you honestly believe that?’ the Doctor asked with disdain. ‘You’ve wanted nothing but my life ever since this farce of a trial began. My death would surely be a boon to you. Besides, how do I know if your voice is even really you? Perhaps this is just a conjuring of my idle mind. Perhaps I just need somebody to shout at!’
‘Perhaps.’
Farther down the corridor, a door opened. The Doctor had no memory of seeing it before and made no move towards it.
‘What lies beyond the Seventh Door, Doctor?’ the Valeyard asked. ‘Perhaps, in stepping through it, you will have crossed the boundary dividing one life from another. Or, perhaps, you already have. Perhaps, after what you’ve seen, there is one less lifetime until you become me.’