Hannah Fergesen
DOCTOR WHO SPECTRAL SCREAM
S PE CTRAL SCR EAM
HANNAH FERGESEN
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First published by BBC Books in 2025
Copyright © Hannah Fergesen 2025
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Chapter Three
Chapter Four
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For Benjamin
Chapter One
The TARDIS landed with a forceful thump, and Belinda fell hard on her backside. Unfortunately for her rump, there were no soft landings on the main deck of the cavernous control room.
‘Ouch,’ she said crossly. She would have to ask the Doctor about putting in a bench or something. With pillows.
The Doctor looked down at her sympathetically and held out a hand. ‘Sorry. I’m normally way better at landings.’
‘No,’ she grumbled. ‘You’re not.’
He laughed. ‘No, I’m not.’ He heaved her upright and unhelpfully dusted her off. ‘But I think you’ll forget all about it when we open that door.’
She crossed her arms. ‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘Listen!’
The muffled sound of music and laughter carried through the front door to the console. It didn’t sound dangerous – robots didn’t laugh, did they? And whatever was happening beyond that door sounded far too human to be the musical work of another cartoon villain.
Doctor Who
She was fairly certain that had been a one-time thing.
In fact, for a moment she was sure she could pick out the lyrics of a recently popular song she’d heard a time or two on the radio before all of this.
Was it possible …?
As if hearing her thoughts, the Doctor’s smile fell. ‘I’m afraid it’s not what you’re thinking, babes. I’m sorry.’
She swallowed her disappointment and waved a hand. ‘This is just another place to take a Vindicator reading?’
‘You got it,’ he said. ‘And what a place. Do you want to see?’
It did sound like people were having an awfully good time outside … Surely a peek couldn’t hurt?
The Doctor, apparently sensing her hesitation, sprinted past her and flung the door wide. He grinned at her, that megawatt smile, and bounded through the door.
‘Come on, Belinda – there’s a whole new world to see!’
‘Doctor! Wait!’
It seemed she had no choice but to follow him.
While the Doctor had assured her travelling with him wasn’t always daunting and dangerous, the evidence so far did not support the claim. And the longer the TARDIS tried and failed to return to the date Belinda had left Earth, the wilder their destinations seemed to be.
So, when Belinda stepped through the TARDIS door, she was shocked by the joyous scene before them. The Doctor, who hadn’t gone that far, gripped her hand and watched her take in the view with awe.
The TARDIS had landed in what appeared to be a massive gorge surrounded by rocky red walls climbing towards the stars, like photos she’d seen of the majestic Grand Canyon.
The clearest night sky she had ever beheld was spread above them, full of the stars and swirling, gaseous pink and purple clouds of an unfamiliar galaxy. A ringed planet shrouded in the light from some nearby star loomed over the world on which they found themselves, beautiful as a painting.
But none of this was what made her jaw drop.
Rather, it was the thousands of people gathered in the canyon, a disco ball hovering high above them, untethered to anything and casting light in a thousand directions over the grooving, glittering crowd. Iridescent bubbles drifted through the air from no discernible source and, despite the way the music reverberated off the canyon walls, she could find no source for it.
No band. No DJ.
The music simply was.
It had been ages since Belinda had gone dancing, and certainly no club she had ever been to looked like this.
‘Oh, Planet Sooz, how I’ve missed you!’ The Doctor beamed at the lively, sweaty open-air disco carrying blithely on before them.
Belinda stared at him. ‘You’ve been?’
‘Excuse me, never-ending dance party! You could dance for a year here if you wanted to.’
Doctor Who
‘I’m not dressed for a party, and I certainly don’t want to dance for a year.’
He turned to her, taking both of her hands in his. ‘What have you learned about travelling with me, Bels?’
‘That I should put a bell on you,’ she said, a little grumpy. Not that the music wasn’t calling to her, and sure, everyone looked like they were having a brilliant time. When was the last time she’d had that much fun? Even back on Earth, she rarely let herself do anything that looked as enjoyable as the party before her. But she was desperate to get home, to find a way back to her mum and dad, to the job that exhausted her and rewarded her in equal measure. She couldn’t do that if she was dancing on a party planet millions (trillions?) of light years from home. Could she?
‘Lucky for you,’ the Doctor replied, ‘there are bells and the perfect clothes for a night out in the TARDIS.’
‘What about the Vindicator?’
The Doctor gripped her shoulders gently. ‘That’s why we’re here. It’s the perfect spot to triangulate the other signals we’ve already shot into the universe. It was this or a nearby planet populated entirely by snakes. To be fair, they’re some of the nicer snakes I’ve met and I have a gorgeous sweater made with their shed skins …’
She shivered. ‘So it’s a nonstop dance party or snakes?’
‘Bingo!’
‘Oh, fine!’ She threw up her hands. ‘But, I told you! I’m not dressed for a dance party, Doctor.’
There was that incredible smile again. ‘Pretty sure we can scrounge up something.’
Chapter Two
Not ten minutes later, Belinda was decked in a somewhat scandalous minidress and platform shoes, her hair buffed like a 1970s movie star and her eyes smeared with glittery eyeshadow.
The Doctor dazzled, as he always seemed to do, in a sequined tartan sweater, a kilt and an unexpected but handsome swipe of eyeliner. He’d even put on a necklace with a little bell on it. Cheeky.
He carried the Vindicator out the TARDIS door and set it down on the dusty canyon floor, pronged legs holding it upright, signal arm pointed towards the glorious, starry sky. He crouched beside it and began pressing a dozen different buttons.
The Doctor, Belinda and their strange alien tech earned them about as much attention as the TARDIS’s landing had, which is to say, none at all. Every dancer in the canyon seemed totally and completely invested in their own movement. Belinda’s normally tense muscles loosened a little as she watched them; it seemed highly unlikely that anything could go wrong in the midst of a never-ending disco.
Doctor Who
The Doctor straightened. ‘This beauty needs some time to find the correct alignment before it beams the signal into the universe.’
‘How long?’
He held out a hand. ‘Just long enough to get one good groove in!’
And so, beneath the stars and the spectre of the heavy, ringed planet looming above, they danced. Under the refracting light of the hovering disco ball, Belinda felt the music move through her body and into her arms and legs, where it shook loose a tension that had lived there for a very long time, long before the Missbelindachandrabots kidnapped her from Earth. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Doctor spin with his arms out wide, face turned ecstatically to the stars. She wondered about what had happened to his home planet, to the Time Lords, to all of his other companions. She wondered how he could still dance so freely after everything they had been through, after the people he had lost.
Maybe it was time she tried it for herself.
She closed her eyes and allowed the music of Planet Sooz to pulse through her and shake everything out, all of it – the sadness that had burrowed into her bones when the Doctor told her she couldn’t go home; the misery of realising that people had died because of Alan’s twisted idea of love for her on Missbelindachandra One; the fear of facing down Lux, god of some mystical pantheon Belinda had never even heard of, but that the Doctor
clearly had. Belinda wasn’t a time-and-space traveller! She wasn’t cut out for that kind of danger – that kind of adventure.
And yet, here she was. And as she danced, soaking in the music and vibes of Planet Sooz’s eternal dance party, she felt all of those fears and worries melt away, until she was dancing like no one was watching.
Someone was watching, though.
At one point, Belinda glanced at the Vindicator, just to make sure she hadn’t missed any indications that it had finished doing … whatever it was that it was supposed to do. As she did so, she caught the stare of an older woman some way away, her expression set in an affable smile as she surveyed the dance party without joining. Her smile widened, just a little, as they locked eyes. Then, just as quickly, the woman tottered away and disappeared into the crowd.
It took Belinda a moment to realise who the woman reminded her of: her sweet, elderly neighbour, Mrs Flood. And hadn’t the Doctor said he’d met Belinda’s own descendent, many years in her future? Maybe one of the TARDIS controls was labelled Freaky Coincidence.
The universe, she was beginning to understand, was a stranger place than she ever could have imagined.
She felt a hand slip into hers and turned to find the Doctor beaming at her, which wiped all thought of her elderly neighbour’s doppelganger from her mind.
‘Feel better?’ she asked him.
Doctor Who
‘There’s nothing that dancing can’t sort out.’
She grinned back at him. ‘I didn’t always know that, but I do now. Shall we check on our gizmo?’
She followed him back to the Vindicator, nerves tingly with anticipation. They only needed to send the signal a few more times to locate 24 May 2025, and then she’d be back on Earth where she belonged. Her parents needed her. Her patients needed her, and so did the doctors.
But this particular Doctor was frowning.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘The signal’s stalled. Like there’s something blocking it.’ He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the Vindicator and pushed a button. The sonic lit up blue, indicating that it was working. She was still getting used to the strange sound the little device made, and for the life of her she could not figure out how the Doctor took readings off it. When he looked at the sonic again, his frown deepened.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What are you seeing?’
He looked up at the sky, brows furrowed. ‘There’s some kind of field blocking us – magnetic? Force? Man-made?’ He scanned the expanse above them but didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.
‘What can we do?’ Belinda asked.
‘Let’s turn the power up to eleven and see if we can’t poke through.’ The Doctor pointed the sonic at the Vindicator one more time and hit the button.
A scream ripped through the air.
Chapter Three
The scream pierced to the very heart of Belinda’s being, shocking in its intensity. One dazed look at the Doctor told her that he felt it too, a scream so intense neither could think or speak. They slapped their hands over their ears and dropped to their knees, incapable of remaining upright under the agonising auditory onslaught.
And it just … kept … going. A howl of deep, horrible agony, a soul-shredding pain.
Belinda couldn’t have said what made her whack the Vindicator as hard as she could, except that she had been trained to take action in a crisis, and it was the first action that came to mind. Luckily, it must have been the right call because the scream cut off abruptly. Both of their bodies slumped, utterly exhausted, the horrible aftershocks of the sound still echoing inside her mind.
‘What the hell was that?’ she finally managed to say. She felt utterly winded, like she’d just run a marathon without any training.
‘There’s a better question,’ the Doctor replied, just as breathless.
‘Which is?’
Doctor Who
He pointed at the never-ending dance party, where the disco raged on unaffected, the dancers all blithely unaware of what the Doctor and Belinda had just endured. She caught a glimpse of her neighbour’s lookalike, the expression on the older woman’s face a disturbing glower, but then Belinda blinked, and the woman was gone.
Belinda turned her attention to the Doctor. ‘But how is that possible? They must have heard it too. That might have been the loudest scream I’ve ever heard.’
‘And yet, somehow, it was a scream only the two of us could hear.’ He paused. ‘A telepathic scream?’
And there it was, that expression she was beginning to know well: the lightbulb moment when the Doctor realised something desperately important. ‘Of course. It isn’t a magnetic field blocking the Vindicator signal. It’s a psychic one.’
‘What are you on about?’
The Doctor sprang into action, gathering the Vindicator in his arms. ‘There’s a field of psychic energy blocking the signal. When I dialled up the power, the Vindicator pierced that psychic field, just enough to let a different signal through from the other side, and into our minds.’
‘Not sure I’d call it a signal,’ said Belinda. ‘I’ve heard some screams of pain in my time – that’s what I heard just now.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘I reckon you’re right about that. The TARDIS must be helping it through.’ He pushed the door to the police box open and disappeared inside.
Belinda took one last, longing look at the dance party, and followed him, the door shutting with a firm click behind them. The music melted away and became a vague, muffled noise in the background.
‘Doctor, I’m not following. Well, I’m literally following you, yes, but not mentally following.’
The Doctor made for the central console and placed his hands beside the bank of levers that would need to be pulled and twisted to get them off Planet Sooz. ‘The translation circuit. I think the signal has been hijacked. Which shouldn’t be possible, but I’ve been surprised before. And when our Vindicator signal punctured the psychic field of some far-off planet, another telepathic signal was able to escape through that puncture and hitch a ride on the signal the TARDIS feeds into our brains.’
Belinda joined him at the console. ‘And that allowed us to hear the scream inside our minds. Like a distress call.’
‘Totally.’
‘So who’s in distress?’
The Doctor leaned towards her, lowering his voice conspiratorially. ‘That’s asking the million-dollar question, isn’t it?’
Belinda knew better than to touch any of the strange dials on the console, but she saw his hands twitching to start flipping the switches there. And yet he remained still.
‘What happens if we don’t? Ask it, I mean.’