A/N - Wow. Chapter 30. I'm thinking this book might be closer to 40 chapters.

There was a loud thudding noise as they stepped out into a passageway. The candles on the candelabra were blown out. Ice started gathering on the windows around them. Loud thudding echoed through the house.

"Okay, what is that?" Clara asked.

"It's a very loud noise. It's a very loud, very angry noise," the Doctor said.

"What's making it?"

"I don't know. Are you making it?" The Doctor yelped and ran back to Clara and Elise as there were more bangs.

"Doctor?" Clara asked.

"Yes?"

"I may be a teeny, tiny bit terrified."

"Yes?"

"But I'm still a grown-up."

"Mainly, yes, and?"

"There's no need to actually hold my hand."

The Doctor looked down at his hands.

"Um, Clara...?" Elise said.

"Yeah?"

"I'm not holding your hand," the Doctor told her.

Clara and the Doctor screamed, running back into the living room.

Elise rolled her eyes and ran after them.

A black thing appeared, floating in mid-air.

"Has this happened before?" the Doctor asked.

"Never," Palmer said.

"Camera. Camera!" The Doctor grabbed it from Palmer and he started taking pictures of it.

The black thing started cracking.

Clara turned around and saw what Emma was seeing. Something had appeared in front of her. It was a figure some woods. "Doctor!" Clara yelled.

The Doctor turned and started taking pictures.

"Help me!" the woman screamed.

Emma fell back into Palmer's arms.

"Doctor."

The words "Help Me" appeared on the wall by the staircase.

They evaporated as the Doctor approached them.

The Doctor and Elise followed Major Palmer down to his dark room.The Doctor asked her why she didn't want to stay with the girls and she answered, "Because this isn't the 1700's. Besides, call it creative curiosity."

Elise had no experience with developing pictures, preferring to stick to paints and charcoals. This body liked reading, but maybe she could get into photography.

"I had a little peek at your records, back at the Ministry. You've certainly seen a thing or two in your time. Disrupting U-boat operations across the North Sea, sabotaging railway lines across Europe. Operation Gibbon. The one with the carrier pigeons, brilliant. I do love a carrier pigeon," the Doctor told him.

"I did my duty, but then so did thousands of others. Millions of others. I was just lucky enough to come back."

"Yes, but how does that man, that war hero, end up here in a lonely old house, looking for ghosts?"

"Because I killed, and I caused to have killed. I sent young men and women to their deaths, but here I am, still alive and it does tend to haunt you. Living, after so much of the other thing."

The Doctor's eyes met Elise's. She offered him a small smile and went back to looking at the pictures.

"You see, I was alone and unmarried and I didn't mind dying. I mean, not for that cause. It was a very, very fine cause, defeating the enemy."

"And if you could contact them, what would you say?"

"Well, I'd very much like to thank them."

The Doctor picked up a photograph and hung it up. A screaming face was in the background behind the Doctor's head.

"Who do you think she is?" Palmer asked.

"Not what I thought she'd be," the Doctor said.

"What did you think she'd be?"

"Fun. Can I borrow your camera?"

Palmer handed the Doctor his camera and they went back to the living room to pick up Clara.

"I've got this weird feeling it's looking at me. It doesn't like me," Clara said as the approached the TARDIS.

"The TARDIS is like a cat. A bit slow to trust, but you'll get there in the end."

Elise and the Doctor ran inside, but the door shut behind them. Elise opened the door when Clara knocked.

"Hey. You need a place to keep this," she said, holding up her dripping wet umbrella.

"I've got one. Or I had one. I think I had one. Look around. See if you find it," the Doctor told her, "Did I have one? Am I going mad?"

Clara started shaking the water off her umbrella.

"No, not in here. How do you expect her to like you? She's soaking wet. It's a health and safety nightmare."

"Sexy! Behave!" Elise scolded. The umbrella stand appeared and Elise placed the umbrella in it.

"Thank you," Clara said, "So, where are we going?"

"Nowhere. We're staying right here. Right here, on this exact spot, if I can work out how to do it," the Doctor said.

Elise rolled her eyes and walked over to the console, flipping levers and pressing buttons.

"So, when are we going?"

The Doctor laughed and high-fived Clara. "Oh, that is good. That is top-notch."

"And the answer is?"

"We're going always."

"We're going always."

The Doctor disappeared into an alcove. "Totally."

"That's not actually a sentence."

The Doctor came out with a bright orange spacesuit. "Well, it's got a verb in it. What do you think?"

"Color's a bit boisterous."

"I think it brings out my eyes."

"Makes my eyes hurt."

The Doctor pouted, making Elise laugh.

"Still better than that green coat of yours," Elise said.

"What have you got against that coat?"

Elise shrugged. "Just don't like it."

"Better than a fedora," the Doctor muttered.

"Better than a stupid looking fez!"

The TARDIS took off and they landed far back in the past. Just as the Earth was starting to cool.

The Doctor went outside and came back in after taking a photograph. "Back off. Hot suit. Hot, hot, hot."

Elise and Clara backed away from him.

"When are we?" Clara asked.

"About six billion years ago. It's a Tuesday, I think."

Their next stop was a tropical jungle. A giant dragonfly flew past and the Doctor took a picture. Then it was the house in Victorian times, probably shortly after it was built.

Their last stop involved the Doctor putting on the suit again. "Back in a mo. Are you all right?" the Doctor asked Clara.

"Totally. Peachy keen."

"Okay then. Well, don't press any buttons or pull any levers or make any funny faces. Actually, don't move. Stand completely still. Don't breathe. Well, you can breathe, but shallow breaths." She gave him a thumbs up.

Clara and Elise watched the Doctor on the scanner.

Earth had been devastated and there was no life to be found.

The Doctor took a photo and came back inside. He noticed the look on Clara's face. "Oh. What's wrong? Did the TARDIS say something to you?" He turned to the console. "Are you being mean?"

"No, it's not that. Have we just watched the entire life cycle of Earth, birth to death?"

"Yes."

"And you're okay with that?"

"Yes."

"How can you be?"

"The TARDIS, she's time. We... Wibbly vortex and so on."

"That's not what I mean."

"Okay, some help. Context?"

Clara shook her head.

"Cheat sheet? Something?"

"I mean, one minute you're in 1974 looking for ghosts, but all you have to do is open your eyes and talk to whoever's standing there. To you, I haven't been born yet, and to you I've been dead one hundred billion years. Is my body out there somewhere, in the ground?"

"Yes, I suppose it is."

The Doctor started to make his way back to the alcove to take off the suit. "But here we are, talking. So I am a ghost. To you, I'm a ghost. We're all ghosts to you. We must be nothing."

"No. No. You're not that."

"Then what are we? What can we possibly be?"

"You are the only mystery worth solving."

They went back inside the house and the Doctor handed his roll of film to Major Palmer to develop. They turned the negatives into slides.

"Right, done. That's it. Gather round, gather round. Roll up, roll up." The Doctor soniced the projector. "The Ghast of Caliburn House. Never changing, trapped in a moment of fear and torment. But, what if she's not? What if she's just trapped somewhere time runs more slowly than it does here? What if a second to her was a hundred thousand years to us? And what if somebody has a magic box. A blue box, probably. What if said somebody could take a snapshot of her, say, every few million years?"

It cycled through a few slides before it stopped on a black woman in a white coverall, running.

"She's not a ghost. But she's definitely a lost soul. Her name is Hila Tacorian. She's a pioneer, a time traveler, or at least she will be in a few hundred years."

"Time travel's not possible. The paradoxes..." Palmer said.

"Resolve themselves, by and large," the Doctor finished.

"How long has she been alone?" Emma asked.

"Well, time travel's a funny old thing. I mean, from her perspective, she crash landed well..." The Doctor checked his watch, "...three minutes ago."

"Crash landed? Where?"

"She's in a pocket universe. A distorted echo of our own. They happen sometimes but never last for long."

The Doctor blew up a blue balloon and a red one. "Our universe." The Doctor gestured to the blue balloon. "Hila Tacorian's here, in a pocket universe." The Doctor held up the red one. "You're a lantern, shining across the dimensions, guiding her home, back to the land of the living." He brought the two balloons together and then deflated them.

"But what's she running from?" Clara asked.

The Doctor snapped his fingers. "Well, that's the best bit. We don't know yet. Shall we see?" He soniced to the next slide. "Oh..."

There was a large creature behind a tree.

"What is that?" Clara asked.

"I don't know. Still, not to worry," the Doctor told her.

"So, what do we do?" Emma asked.

"Not we, you. You save Hila Tacorian because you are Emma Grayling. You are the lantern. The rest of us are just along for the ride, I'm afraid. We need some sturdy rope and a blue crystal from Metebelis Three. Plus some Kendal Mint Cake."

Clara, the Doctor, and Elise ran back to the TARDIS.