“Oh great, Doctor,” said Peri Brown, rolling her eyes at the rather damp looking expanse of rough turf. “You’ve only gone and landed us in the middle of nowhere!”
“My dear, Peri,” breathed the Doctor, “the middle of nowhere is precisely where I intended to land us!”
Peri stuck out her tongue childishly. “Yeah, right!”
“Believe it or not, Peri,” said the Doctor, fiddling with the controls on the console, “unless I am very much mistaken, this is the Staffordshire moorlands, and not too far away from this very spot, there lies a great treasure!”
Peri blinked in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“I assure you I am,” the Doctor said, raising his eyebrows in mock indignation.
Peri snorted. “Okay, well... what treasure?”
The Doctor seemed to calm, and he beamed at her “It’s ancient Anglo-Saxon gold. Worth millions of ‘dollerz’ in your time, let me tell you, and a fine hoard, fit for a king.”
Peri nodded, her interest actually piqued, and turned to glance at the scanner screen. A shape bounced across the screen and was gone. “Doctor!” she exclaimed.
“Mmm?” he murmured absent-mindedly.
“Doctor!” she repeated, “I saw something, out there!”
The Doctor looked up. “What sort of something?”
“Well, you’re gonna think I’m completely bonkers...” she began.
“Perish the thought!” he muttered.
She went on. “It looked like, I mean, I think it was... a kangaroo? Or.. or, a wallaby? It was smaller than a kangaroo, I think it was a wallaby!”
The Doctor huffed. “On the Staffordshire Moorlands? Highly unlikely; must have been a trick of the light.”
The Doctor could see form her troubled expression that Peri was even doubting herself that it could have been what she thought.
“Nevertheless,” he blustered, hurrying to repair any damage to her confidence he may have inadvertently inflicted, “you saw something move, and out here – in the middle of nowhere – it could be someone that’s got lost on the moor and needs our assistance. Let’s take a look, shall we? Fetch a coat, and we’ll see which we find first, some treasure or your wallaby!”
Out on the moor, there was no sign of the wallaby, nor of anyone else, and although Peri felt sheepish, the Doctor insisted that they look and strode off into the mists. Peri struggled to keep up, but at least she was ever so slightly out of earshot of the Doctor’s unsolicited lecture about Anglo Saxon gold. As if she cared. God, he reminded her of Howard when he started off on his big speeches about the historical importance of some piece of beat up old junk.
She had all but convinced herself that there had been nothing on the screen after all when , losing her footing slightly, she found herself stumbling forward, landing on her knees, and face to face with the wallaby.
She stopped herself from calling out, even though she could tell that the Doctor had completely failed to notice that she was no longer following him and was probably halfway across the moor, still gassing on about some king’s bracelets or whatever. The wallaby didn’t seem remotely flustered. It stood there, blinked, chewed a bit of grass and then hopped off. She took a step to follow it, and it took a bigger jump, in the opposite direction to the one the Doctor had taken.
“Oh, great!” she complained. She looked over her shoulder and called out to the Doctor, but the wallaby was getting away again, and the Doctor didn’t seem to be coming. She didn’t want to lose the wallaby, but she didn’t want to end up lost on the moor either. “Thanks a bunch, Doctor,” she said.
As fast as she could run on the uneven ground, the wallaby was at a natural advantage hopping from one bump in the ground to the next, and it soon raced out of her sight. She started to wonder if she could retrace her steps when out of the mist there loomed a rocky outcrop. Something about it wasn’t quite right, as if someone had been playing domino rally with Stone Henge and the stones had all collapsed together in a higgledy piggledy pile..
Peri shrugged. Well, it looked like there was probably a cave of sorts that was quite a likely hidey hole for the wallaby, and if it wasn’t there, then maybe she could get higher on the rocks and get a view across the moor. If she could just spy the TARDIS and get her bearings, things wouldn’t be so bad.
She gave herself a decisive nod and headed into the cave mouth. The rocks were damp and mossy, and she could hear the lapping of water, so there must have been a pool of rain water collecting somewhere inside. There was no wallaby to be seen, but this cave seemed to be going on forever, and she started to worry that she was actually heading underground. That couldn’t be right, though, there was light at the end of this particular rocky tunnel.
Finally, she came to the other end, and found herself in what she assumed must be the centre of the outcrop. As she’d guessed, the centre was completely open, and there was a large pool of water there. She doubted it was very deep, but it was a lot bigger than she thought would have been possible. Never mind, she thought, absent-mindedly kicking a stone into the pool as she contemplated climbing up to get a view across the moor. The stone sank without trace, and Peri frowned to herself. Just how deep could that pool be?
She edged closer, and as she stared at the ripples and bubbles, a dark shape began to form where her reflection should have been....
Not as far away as Peri seemed to think, the Doctor had come across some help at last, in the form of two very helpful hikers; a young couple who had asked him a question that he thought rather bizarre, but that was just about to make perfect sense to Peri.
“A mermaid?” the Doctor spluttered. “On the moor? Not possible. I like a local legend as much as the next person, but the one thing I know about mermaids is that I don’t expect to find them on dry land!” He looked down at his rather soggy spats. “Well, damp land.”
“There’s a pool,” Jeff said, “kind of like a lagoon.”
Carol nodded, “the legend says that the mermaid appears every Easter like some sort of rite of spring, and grants eternal life to whoever can swim to the bottom of the pool and reach the treasure there.”
The Doctor was still sceptical. “Any inland collection of water around these parts would be very shallow indeed.” Then his brow wrinkled. “But if there were an Anglo-Saxon burial mound and the top had fallen in or been eroded, it could perhaps have flooded and the treasure interred there might be at the bottom of a collection of water. There’s always an explanation for these local legends.” He shook himself out of his musing. “So you say you think you know where this pool must be?”
As Carol and Jeff pointed across the moor in the direction of a dark hump in the mist, the Doctor chuckled to himself. Bouncing around in the distance, plain as day, there was Peri’s wallaby.
Peri herself had almost completely forgotten about the wallaby. Okay, you didn’t expect to see a wallaby on an English moor, but at least wallabies are real, right? What you’d expect even less would be to see a mythological creature anywhere at all. Well, anywhere on this planet, anyway.
The woman that had emerged from the pool slithered across to the side of the pool, all the while piercing Peri’s eyes with her stare. The air was still and Peri felt a curious tingling, like goosebumps, but she wasn’t cold. The only thought in her head was that she had gone mad. Even now, even after seeing all those worlds and all those creatures, she still couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was a mermaid. That was the only thing she could be. Half woman, half fish, tail and everything. That’s a mermaid, right?
“Hello?” Peri called. “Can you understand me? My name’s Peri – Peri Brown.”
The mermaid opened her mouth, but not to answer. As her watery lips parted, a strange music filled the air. It was a singing of sorts, but the sound that came out was a million miles away from the sound of a human voice. In a funny way it reminded her of that noise you get when you rub your finger round the top of a wet wine glass, a piercing high noted ringing that sounds like a thousand glasses all breaking in perfect harmony.
There were no words to the song, but Peri realised that as she looked into the Mermaid’s eyes, and listened to the sound that a message was there.
“Bring me the treasure from the bottom of the pool, and I will reward you with eternal life.”
Something nagged at the back of Peri’s mind. Why couldn’t the mermaid get the treasure for herself? After all, she had come from inside the pool. That seemed quite strange, but it didn’t seem in the slightest bit strange that she found herself taking off her shoes and socks and wading into the water.
“Your friend has lived many lifetimes, and will live many lifetimes more. He is a lord of time but your time with him will be but the blink of an eye, and you will fade and die.”
How did the mermaid know about the Doctor? Was she reading her mind? Inside her head somehow? She took a breath and plunged beneath the surface of the water.
“If you bring me the treasure, I will reward you with eternal life and you need never be parted.”
Mentally, Peri shrugged. Forever’s a long time, she thought, diving down, down, down. Hey, she’d go so far as to say the Doctor was her best friend, but did she really want to spend forever with him? She was in no hurry to leave him, but hadn’t she always envisioned a life after the Doctor? When she’s, y’know, settle down, have kids, all that stuff you’re supposed to do?
“It’s right at the bottom of the pool. Deeper, Peri, deeper.”
And then, as hard as she was swimming downwards, she felt a huge dark shape pulling her upwards. She tried to swim down, but she was going the wrong way, further and further upwards.
The next thing she knew, she was gasping for breath at the side of the pool, staring up at a lumbering sodden shape, that – with those colours – could only have been one thing. “Doctor!” she gasped, spluttering for breath.
The Doctor rounded on the Mermaid, who had slunk back into her pool. “Yes, you’d better leave right now, Madam, and you had better not return.”
She sunk lower, so that only her eyes and the top of her head were showing above the water’s surface. “ You won’t be luring anyone else to a watery death ever again,” the Doctor growled. The Saxon hoard isn’t here; it never was. It’s in a field about twenty miles from here, and even now, a farmer out walking his dog has just spotted something glimmering in the ground.”
The mermaid’s eyes glowed with anger.
“I don’t know what your business here is,” the Doctor said, scooping Peri up in his arms, “but you’ll never get your treasure, and no one will ever come here looking for it again.”
The mermaid hissed, and vanished beneath the surface.
“Come on, Peri,” said the Doctor gently. “I know a lovely little inn nearby that has a roaring log fire!”
An hour or so later, and nicely drying out, Peri looked at the Doctor sheepishly. “We never did find the wallaby, did we?”
The Doctor smiled. “I’ve just been speaking to the landlord, and it turns out that the legend of the mermaid isn’t the only local tall tale about these parts. Apparently, back in the 1930s, a group of wallabies escaped from a private zoo, and made it out onto the moor.”
Peri couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Seriously? But... how long do wallabies live? I mean...”
The Doctor shrugged. “Well, I suppose it’s possible that they could have survived on the moors and gone on to breed, but you know, I can’t help wondering who took the gold from the mermaid’s pool and buried it across the moor, and how the wallaby might have lived for over fifty years out on the moor...”
Peri shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. I mean, Wallabies can’t... can’t swim, can’t dive... although, if the gold was there before the pool... Oh, come on, Doctor, that’s crazy!”
The Doctor folded his arms behind his head and stretched out his legs. “Oh, of course, of course. It does make for a rather good local legend, though.”
THE END
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