Written as a companion piece to a script in development, in the same spirit as Moffat's original Sally Sparrow story. Hope you enjoy it:

THE HOUSE OF SIPAN

by Siôn Smith

I have been on this island for thirty-one years and I have learned that the sea gives back what it chooses, when it chooses, and that no arrangement with it is ever entirely on your terms.

My husband would disagree. My husband believes that every arrangement is on his terms. He has believed this for considerably longer than thirty-one years, which is perhaps why he has never learned to be afraid of the water.

I am afraid of it. I have been afraid of it since the night I found the cave

But I am getting ahead of myself. That is a habit of mine — the inheritance of a woman who has spent too long in a house where time moves differently than it does elsewhere. Sipan does that to you. The island, I mean. Not my husband, though he does it too. When you live somewhere the calendar seems to turn at a different speed, you begin to think in circles rather than lines. You begin at the middle and work outward. You lose the habit of beginnings.

So. A beginning.

My name is Eleanor Voss, as I was born, and Eleanor Sipan as I have been known these past three decades, and I came to this island in the February of 1945 because a man at a party in Edinburgh told me I had remarkable eyes and that he owned an island and that I ought to see it before I decided anything final about my life.

I was twenty-two years old. The war had just ended. Everything felt provisional and the word final had a particular lustre to it that it hadn't had before. Final meant something you could trust. Something that would last.

His name was Robert. He was older than me by what seemed, then, like twenty years, though I understand now that this estimate was rather more conservative than the reality. He was handsome in the way that men are handsome when they've stopped caring whether you find them so — that complete, self-contained quality that is not arrogance but something more unsettling. Certainty, perhaps. He was the most certain man I had ever met.

I saw the island in March and I married him in June and I have been here ever since.

That is the beginning. Told quickly because it is not, really, the story. The story begins in 1964, when I found the cave.

The island is three miles long and perhaps a mile wide at its broadest point, and in nineteen years of living here I had walked every inch of it in every season and weather. I know its moods the way you know the moods of someone you live with. The winter mornings when the sea came in grey and indifferent, the summer evenings when the light turned everything amber and the cliffs went golden and you could almost believe there was nowhere more beautiful on the surface of the earth.

I was a woman who walked. It was what I did when Robert's behaviour became opaque to me, when the work he did in his laboratory kept him from my bed for days at a time, when I noticed, again, that the new photographs in his study showed him looking exactly as he had looked in the old photographs. Walking was the thing I accepted instead of answers.

It was a November afternoon, the year of our Lord nineteen sixty-four, and the tide was further out than I had ever seen it. Something in the lunar cycle, our man-servant Hastings told me later, though I have never properly understood the mathematics of tides. The beach below the eastern cliff was wider by thirty feet than I had ever known it, and the cliff face itself was exposed in a way that changed its whole character, stripped of its usual skirt of kelp and standing rock.

And there, where there should have been only stone, was a darkness.

A mouth in the cliff.

I should have gone back to the house. I know that now with the clarity of hindsight, which is the only kind of clarity available to someone who made the choices I made. I should have turned around and walked back up the cliff path and told Hastings about it and let Robert go and look at whatever it was with his torchlight and his confident hands and his ability to absorb information without being changed by it.

Instead I took the small torch I carried for evening walks from my coat pocket and I went inside.

The cave was deep. Deeper than made any geological sense for a cliff of that size. A fact I registered and then set aside, the way you set aside things that don't fit into any category you already have. The floor was smooth beneath the seaweed, too smooth, like something worn rather than formed. The ceiling high enough to stand beneath.

I moved the torchlight along the walls.

And I stood there for a very long time.

They covered the left wall from floor to ceiling and ran along the back and halfway along the right — a continuous narrative in ochre and black and a blue-green pigment I had never seen before and cannot adequately describe, painted with a precision that seemed impossible for the materials involved. Figures and creatures and battles and coastlines. A whole civilisation's memory, compressed into rock.

I am not an archaeologist. I had no framework for what I was seeing except that it was ancient — undeniably, incomprehensibly ancient — and that it depicted, among the human figures and the creatures that were not quite human but walked upright among them, a war. A very long war. Conducted at the edge of a sea that looked very much like our sea, beneath a sky that looked very much like our sky.

I moved the light slowly. Slowly.

The creatures that were not quite human had scaled skin and eyes set wide in broad flat heads, and in the paintings they rose from the sea and walked among the humans and the humans ran from them, and then did not run, and then built things alongside them, and it was the building that stopped me. The caves and chambers rendered in the paintings, the deep places, the places near water, because alongside the paintings of these impossible beings and their human neighbours there was something else.

Painted into the rock with the same precision, the same blue-green pigment.

A box.

A blue box. Upright, rectangular, the size of a small room. Painted with a care that suggested significance, or reverence perhaps. Surrounded on all sides by a churning of water and figures in postures I could only read as terror.

I do not know how long I stood there. Long enough for the tide to begin its return. Long enough to lose the feeling in my feet.

When I came back to myself I was sitting on the floor of the cave with the torch in my lap and the light fading and the sea beginning to whisper at the cave's entrance. I got up. I walked to the opening. I stood there for a moment looking out at the grey water and then I went back inside.

And I began to cover the painting with shells.

I cannot fully explain the impulse even now. It was not a rational decision. It was the decision of a woman who understood, in the wordless part of herself where the truest things live, that this was a warning. That the blue box in that painting was not a historical record. That something about the arrangement of figures and water and that particular image was a prediction, and that the prediction had not yet occurred, and that she did not want it to occur.

I spent a week on it. Every low tide, an hour in the cave with a pail of collected shells and a paste made from crushed mollusc that Robert used in his laboratory for God knows what purpose and that I knew dried harder than cement. I plastered them over the painting section by section, working from the right wall backward, covering the battle and the creatures and the building and the centuries of memory. All of it.

I left the blue box. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it was already the thing I couldn't stop seeing in my sleep and it seemed futile to pretend I could cover it. Perhaps because I knew, in the same wordless way, that covering it wouldn't help. That the warning was already inside me.

I left the cave and I went home and I had dinner with my husband and I watched his face across the table. That handsome, certain, unaging face, and thought: “I know something now that changes everything and nothing at the same time.”

I watched the sky after that. It became my second occupation alongside walking — scanning the sky above the island, particularly at dawn and dusk, for anything that didn't belong. I became, in the private theatre of my own mind, the island's lookout. Its sentinel. I told myself that if I saw the blue box descend, I would find a way to warn whoever came out of it. I would leave a note. I would meet them at the TARDIS — I didn't know that word then, but I would learn it later — and I would say: “Go. Whatever brought you here, go.”

I did not know what else to do. I could not confront Robert. I had tried, in the years before the cave, to ask questions about the things I'd noticed — the photographs, the journals going back centuries in handwriting that was always his, the particular way the islanders deferred to him that was something more than respect and something less than fear and he had answered me with such patient, loving completeness that I had found myself believing him. He was very good at that. The certain men always are.

After the cave I stopped asking. I simply watched the sky.

For twelve years I watched the sky and nothing came, and I began, in the way of someone who has waited too long, to wonder whether I had understood the painting at all. Whether it was possible to misread a warning left fifteen hundred years ago in a language of images rather than words. Whether the blue box was simply a blue box — a religious symbol, an icon, a coincidence of shape — and not a specific prediction of a specific event.

I was almost convinced of this on the night of the party.

The Candlemas gathering has been held in the estate barn every February since before my time on the island. The costumes are a tradition Robert brought here before the house was the house it is now – before this house, even, if his journals are to be believed, which I have learned to do selectively. The animals and birds and creatures of the island, rendered in cloth and feather and papier-mâché. I have been a heron for thirty-one years. The costume is remarkable. The wingspan alone required three separate armatures and I am told, by people who have no reason to flatter me, that when I wear it I am transformed.

I was not, that February night, paying particular attention to the guests. The gathering always drew visitors from the mainland — people who knew people who had heard about the party, which had gathered a certain reputation over the decades as something worth the journey. I moved among them as I always did, greeting the faces I knew and introducing myself to the ones I didn't, and I had a glass of wine that became two glasses of wine and I was dancing with a young man in a badger costume who had red hair and a kind face and who looked slightly lost, which made me maternal toward him, when I saw the monks.

Three of them. Standing near the band with the bewildered expressions of people who have arrived at entirely the wrong party.

Two of them were pulled into the dancing almost immediately. A tall girl with red hair who turned out to be the young man's wife and the other monk who I noticed was not quite what he appeared to be but couldn't yet articulate why. The third stood apart and looked around the room with an expression I can only describe as active. Not passive observation. Something else. The gathering and sorting of information at a speed I associated with my husband, and with no one else I had ever known.

I was a little drunk. I made a decision.

I crept up behind him and pinched his bottom.

He wheeled around, which gave me the full effect of his face for the first time, and I remember thinking: well. There you are. Not because I recognised him. Because he was quite obviously not from anywhere I'd been.

He was a thin young man in a monk's habit with sharp cheekbones and eyes that were old in a way his face wasn't, and if I'd passed him on Princes Street I wouldn't have looked twice. But standing in front of me in my barn, in the context of everything I'd spent twelve years knowing and refusing to think about, he had the quality of an answer arriving.

We danced, briefly. He was already elsewhere, scanning the room over my shoulder, cataloguing, that extraordinary processor of a mind running at full speed on something that had nothing to do with me. Within moments I had been passed, quite cheerfully and without apparent awareness of having done it, to his companion, the young man with the kind face who had been dancing nearby. He was easy company in the way that uncomplicated people are easy. He said what he thought, laughed readily, and filled silences with a warm, generous chatter that asked nothing of you except that you listen.

I listened very carefully.

From across the barn, occasionally, I caught fragments of the other monk's conversation with whoever he'd found to talk to. He mentioned 1999. He mentioned 7047. He said party the way someone says a word that belongs to them more completely than it belongs to the language.

And then I asked the young man, because the wine had loosened the question that had been sealed inside me for twelve years:

“Is he entirely human?”

The young man with the kind face laughed, the way people laugh when the truth is too strange to deliver plainly.

“He's just the Doctor,” he said. “One of a kind.”

And across the barn, as if he'd heard it, the monk in question turned his head and looked at something near the back wall with an expression that stopped the laughter in my throat.

He had seen something.

I watched the Doctor leave the barn.

I watched the red-headed companion follow him a few minutes later, tumbling down the cliff path in the dark in the exact same spot where I had tumbled down it, twelve years before, on a November afternoon when the tide was further out than it had any right to be.

I stood in my heron costume in the middle of my February party and I understood that the thing I had been waiting for was happening and that I had maybe four hours to decide what to do about it.

I refilled my monk’s glass. I asked him questions. He answered them with the generous carelessness of someone who doesn't know he's had too much to drink and is being interrogated, and with each answer I felt the shape of the situation becoming clearer and more terrible — not because of what he told me, but because of what I was able to infer from it. The Doctor. A Time Lord. Two hearts. Regenerative energy.

“To the Feeder,” I thought, “a Time Lord is not merely food.”

I had read that in Robert's journals, in the section I wasn't meant to have found, the one he'd written in the language of the Moche people which he'd assumed I couldn't read and which I had spent three years learning precisely because he'd assumed it. “The feast that would last an eternity.” The offering that would make all other offerings unnecessary. The thing he had been waiting for since before… well who knows how long.

Since before the painting in the cave?

I looked at my husband across the room. He was in his plague doctor costume, which he wore every year without irony. The long beak, the dark coat, the mask that turned a human face into something ancient and inhuman and entirely appropriate. He was talking to the Doctor's young friend and he was smiling, and his smile was the smile I had loved for thirty-one years and had learned, in the years after the cave, to be afraid of.

He turned and met my eyes across the barn.

He knew that I knew. He had always known that I knew. That was the arrangement between us. Not spoken, not acknowledged but existing in the space between two people who have chosen to keep living together past the point where simple happiness is available to either of them.

I looked away first. I always looked away first.

I went to find the Doctor.

I did not find him that night — he had gone further than I could follow, into the dark and the cave and the deep places where the painting waited and the shells I had placed there with my own hands twelve years ago were coming away one by one. I found his companion instead, the red-haired girl, who had her husband's quality of unexpected directness and none of his naivety.

She found me first, actually. In the portrait gallery, which nobody comes to but me.

“He found the cave,” she said.

She said it the way you say something you've been practising. A stone placed carefully into water to see how deep it goes.

“Did he see what's underneath?” I asked.

“The TARDIS? Yes.”

I looked at the portrait of Robert and myself, painted in 1932, in which I look nothing like I do tonight and he looks exactly as he has always looked, and I thought about the twelve years of shells and the twelve years of sky-watching and the thirty-one years before that, and I thought about the painting on the cave wall, the ancient warning in blue-green pigment, the figures in postures of terror surrounding a blue box.

I thought: “I have been waiting for this moment for twelve years and now that it is here I find that I am not, after all, afraid of it.”

I told her about the midnight ceremony. I told her about the moment the ritual could be broken. I told her where to bring the Doctor and when.

And then I stood for a long time looking at the portrait after she'd gone — at the two faces in it, the man who would not age and the woman who had been aging for thirty-one years without noticing it particularly, and I thought about what I was going to do to him. What I was, in effect, in the process of doing.

I thought about the night he'd found me at the party in Edinburgh and said I had remarkable eyes.

I thought: “It was probably true. It was probably the truest thing he ever said to me.”

I put on my coat. I went out into the February dark to end my marriage and break a centuries-old arrangement and do whatever I could to protect a stranger who had no idea what he had walked into.

And I thought, as I walked: “the sea gives back what it chooses, when it chooses.”

I was about to find out what it chose.

After.

The islanders went home in the small hours without speaking to each other, which is what people do when the thing they have collectively never spoken about is suddenly, irreversibly, over. There will be years of not speaking about it. There will probably be a generation that doesn't believe it happened at all. That is fine. That is how islands work.

The Doctor stood at the cliff edge for a while before he left. I watched him from the garden. A thin figure in a monk's habit, looking out at the sea with his hands in his pockets. He turned once and saw me watching him. He raised a hand. Just that. A single, quiet gesture in the dark, across the distance between us.

I did not raise mine.

He didn't know. That was the thing I had to hold onto in the hours that followed, and in the days after that, and in all the long quiet days I suspect are coming. He didn't know what the Feeder would do when the ritual broke. He didn't know that refusing an offering is not the same as refusing hunger. That something vast and ancient and patient, denied its intended feast, will simply take what is nearest.

Robert had been standing at the cliff edge.

He had turned away from the water. I had watched him do it, watched something go out of his face that had been burning there for centuries — and in the moment of his turning the sea came up to meet him in a way that had nothing to do with tide or weather or anything that belongs to the explicable world.

It was very quick. I will say that. Whatever else I say about that night, and I think I will say very little, for a very long time, it was quick.

The blue box left before dawn. I watched it go from the observatory window, standing where Robert had stood on the night he brought that creature home, looking through the same telescope at a beach that was empty now in a way it had never quite been before. The box made a sound as it disappeared and then it was simply gone and the sky was the ordinary February sky and the sea was the ordinary February sea and the island was very quiet.

I went downstairs.

Hastings had left a fire in the library. I sat down in Robert's chair. I had never sat in it before, thirty-one years of not sitting in it, some unspoken territorial understanding between us and I looked at the flames for a long time.

I had spent twelve years trying to prevent this. I had plastered shells over ancient paintings with my own hands. I had watched the sky every morning for a blue box. I had cultivated the young man at the party like a plant I needed something from. I had walked to that cliff with every intention of saving a stranger and ending an arrangement and perhaps, in doing so, saving my husband from himself.

None of it had gone as I intended.

I thought about the portrait gallery. The long corridor of Roberts, face after face across the centuries, all those borrowed years accumulated and now — what? Returned, perhaps. All at once. To the sea that had funded them.

I thought about the morning in Edinburgh in 1945 when a man with certain eyes told me I had remarkable ones of my own.

Outside, the sea was quiet for the first time I could remember.

I sat in his chair by his fire in his house on his island and I listened to the quiet and I thought: this is mine now. All of it. The house and the island and the silence and the thirty-one years and the weight of everything that happened in them.

I didn't know yet whether that was a beginning or an ending.

I'm still not sure.