Fans Fiction The Mystery of Mayhurst Manor part 2 by Sarah Cambridge

The heat was well and truly beating against the cellar door as the Doctor spoke, revealing the truth he was trying to get through to his shocked companion.

   She had always hated the thought of being trapped in a building that was on fire, ever since she had watched the film The Towering Inferno, one night when she’d had the prison TV room to herself after Trish the Snitch got everyone in trouble on C wing for helping themselves to extra potatoes at dinner, leaving them all confined to their cells for the night. Lady C, as it was well known, was very allergic to potatoes and hadn’t had so much of a crisp since she was 5 years old and had blown up like an air balloon during one of daddy’s parties which ended abruptly with the sound of ambulance sirens and mummy crying into her wine glass as her baby girl looked like the Sloth from the goonies.  Now here she was, living her nightmares and once again in a life and death situation courtesy of the Doctor.

   “That’s it! I’m leaving right now and going home!  You can stay if you like Doctor but I will not become part of the fire and rescue service for an empty house!  I took that pendant knowing the lady of the manor had died and there was no one, not one living member of her family left and it was all due to be sold at auction. I just got there first and saved myself some serious money. Its my retirement fund and you can’t have it. I won’t let you!”

   She was almost in tears at this point. Scared of the fire raging against the door knowing that was all that was standing between her and death, and angry that her beautiful pendant might be taken from her when she had gone to great lengths to protect it and keep it hidden.

The doctor shook his head in confusion and shouted at Christina who nearly dropped the phone she was holding as she was about to text herself in the past.

   “You don’t understand, do you? Is it because you have smoke in your ears or have I not explained it properly? That pendant is the reason Mayhurst Manor is on fire! This house, the Mayhurst family, they weren’t just a load of posh people who had some money. They were witches! Well, Lady Jane was and from a very noble family line too. Lord Harry took her name and title when they married, albeit it for the money but he had no idea who she really was, but they had a daughter. Harriet-Jane Mayhurst, or as you and I know her, Harri the witch? That pendant had a protection spell on it to keep Harri safe after her mother had died because she knew that once her husband discovered her magical heritage and in turn his daughters, he might not be too pleased to know he’d married a witch, and as it happened, he wasn’t!  He killed Lady Jane himself and locked Harri in the cellar, this cellar for 5 years when she was 7 years old so that she could never receive the gifts her mother would bestow upon her when she became of age. Lord Harry’s death was the only reason Harri was found by the staff who had ventured into the cellar in search of his will. You taking the pendant from here after her mother had died, made her vulnerable and she became tortured, twisted into her magical beliefs, believing her father’s rantings that she was as evil and as vile as her mother, until she became cursed by her magic, not gifted.”

   Lady C listened in silence, her fury and impatience growing more each second as the Doctor’s tale of the one person in the world that gave her more hassle than Hugo ever did, was Harri the useless witch. She had worked at the manor around 10 years ago, turning up on her doorstep days after Lady C had returned from the planet San Helios, claiming the Doctor had sent her to help out.  She was to cook, clean and protect the manor with her magic and although Lady C had never really believed in that sort of thing before, having just returned from an alien planet and arrived home by flying bus, she had resigned herself to every possibility in the hope that nothing would shock her anymore. Unfortunately, the only thing Harri helped with was herself to lady C’s vodka supplies and spent most of her time in the stables with Hugo showing him how to turn knackered ponies into dead ponies with the flick of her magic wand. Harri was the bane of Lady C’s life but the Doctor insisted she stay there because as he told her repeatedly whenever she complained…

   “One day, you’ll thank me” …. So far, she had not!

  

   “Oh, so what you’re saying is that the reason Harri is so bad at magic, so unbelievably lazy, useless and rude is my fault? That stealing the pendant made her the way she is? That if somehow I could go back in time and leave the pendant for her in this very cellar when she was trapped down here that it would enable her to receive her magic properly and then she’d become the good wonderful witch she was always meant to be?”

   Lady C scoffed at the idea and muttered under her breath about how ridiculous all this was, but then, suddenly had an amazing idea! Take the Tardis back in time to when Harri was here and leave her the pendant. They could literally drop it off 10 minutes after her father had left her here and she would never go through 5 years of hell meaning she would never turn up on her doorstep years later in the mood she was in and give her 5 years of hell. It was an ingenious plan. Before she could open her mouth and tell the doctor just how clever she was, he grabbed her hand and pulled her back towards the portal, shouting behind him over the roar of the fire.

   “We’ll go back to the Tardis and take the pendant back in time to the moment Harri was put here by her father. That way she’ll get the protection her mother left for her and she’ll get the magic in the way she was supposed to get it, not all backward and twisted. Maybe she’ll turn out to be a better person and the two of you might actually get along. Might save all that nasty business with the ponies too.”

   Before she knew it, she was back in her own vault stepping in spilt gin, and the Doctor picked up the pendant case and opened it carefully, his eyes full of admiration as he looked at it.

   Lady C however was full of annoyance at having her plan and pension plan stolen. Deciding to let it go, she slipped her mobile phone back in her pocket after pressing send seconds before she was dragged through the portal, her look of annoyance now turning to one of quiet smugness.

   “Didn’t you ever wonder why it glowed the way it does or why it vibrated as you held it Christina?” The Doctor asked softly as his eyes lit up with the magical light the pendant omitted.

   “It’s full of magic, literally bursting at the seams waiting to be set free to its rightful owner. You keeping it here for so long could potentially have caused a catastrophic explosion of immense power that the world would never be able to cope with. It’s a wonder you don’t get yourself killed from time to time.”

He was as furious as he was concerned for her, but that was how it was with lady C, she would never learn her lesson.

   “Yes whatever.” she said airily pretending she didn’t care anymore and made her way over to the Tardis waiting to be let in where her mood became a lot darker.

   “But I swear to god Doctor, if we succeed and we get back here and she’s miss magical bloody mega witch with a billionaires fortune living the high life, famously flouting her magical talents all over the news for all to see whilst I have to scrape by on what I can steal, you will feel my wrath until your never ending dying days!”

It would be just her luck to return to an alternate universe where Harri was loved the whole world over and she wasn’t.

   The Doctor looked confused once more and glared at her thoughtfully as he opened the Tardis door and let her saunter in, wondering how women managed to change their moods and their minds so quickly. He dashed in after her and placed the pendant on the console and tapped in some coordinates.

   “Right! I’ll land, you go in, give Harri the Pendant and then leave again. No talking, no helping, no remarking on the smell or mess or giving her any indication who you are or where you’ve come from. In and out, do you hear?”

   Lady C nodded and shrugged and sat herself down impatiently waiting to do as she was told and hoped that by the time she got back, if all was well and Nelson’s column hadn’t been turned into Harri’s Column, she would be walking back into a world where she would never have to go begging to the Queen again, in fact…..she might even be the Queen!

   Seven years in the past, in the year 2012, the notorious cat burglar known as the Lucky cat was about to leave her house the deSouza Manor and go on one of the biggest diamond heists of her life when she received a text from an unknown number. It read….

   “GN 2013/14 Auroras Encore. Pineau De Re. £1000,000 on each. Stash the winnings in Hugo’s clean sock drawer.”

She then gave her past self a name with instructions on what to do with it.

   “Take the Koh I noor you’re about to steal to the Queen and tell her if she wants it back, she’ll have to give you the throne or you’ll tell the world who your real mother is.”

To be continued…….

Fans Fiction The Mystery of Mayhurst Manor, Part 1 by Sarah Cambridge

The week following Lady C’s discovery of her new Secret ID, The Night Bird, seemed to pass in a blur of phone calls to builders who hadn’t turned up to start the restoration work on the manor, but had received rather an earful of abuse from the not so refined Lady of the manor, who after questioning them several times as to, “Do you know who I am?” It turned out they did not, and so she had fired them before they had even begun which for them, was a blessing in disguise. Having received a large sum of money from the Sovereign grant issued by the Queen herself for the sole purpose of restoration, Lady C had tried in vain to hire the local tradesmen to start working for her asap, but little did she know that not one local tradesman would ever step foot in the manor again, not after the last time they were there when Lady C was away at her majesties pleasure and they were left to the rather unalluring charms of Hugo, John Cook’s very special cousin who had taken a fancy to anything covered in brick dust. This included all the builders, the van they travelled in and a cement mixer, so after one week of continuous advances, numerous vulgar suggestions and the site of Hugo in one of Lady C’s negligees, they could not stand it any longer and had left (run screaming) with the threat of a sexual harassment law suit ringing in Hugo’s ears!  Coincidently, or maybe not, this was the day Hugo left the manor and hopped on a mystery tour bus of London, never to be seen again!

   After several cups of tea and half a bottle of gin, Lady C decided that she’d call one of those places poor people go to when they had no money or means to make any.  A job centre apparently, which she found out after a quick google search. Maybe they could hire some needy and desperate workers to come and restore her beloved manor so she wouldn’t have to bother trawling through the internet in search of something that wasn’t going to be stolen to make her money and hopefully notoriously famous.

   It was a hard and arduous task talking to Janis at the Job centre. She had a very common tone to her voice yet seemed particularly up herself for someone who worked with layabouts all day. After a few questions, mostly about the pay, she did promise to try and get something sorted as soon as Kelly was back at work as she was on leave until a week next Tuesday and it wasn’t really her department as she worked on new claims and had only been at Kelly’s desk borrowing her stapler when the phone had rung so all she could do was take a message and leave it in Kelly’s in tray as her cover, which had been arranged by the job centre, had called in sick.

   Upon asking for the new would be employers name and upon hearing the title, “Lady” instead of Miss or Mrs,  sovereign grant instead of minimum wage, and Manor instead of council flat, Janis, who usually worked on the first floor dealing with the new claims of the recently unemployed and was only borrowing a stapler, suddenly decided to promote herself to Kelly’s position of Job finder general and promised to not only put the ad on the job centre website herself that very second, but would also spend the rest of the day looking through Kelly’s list of unemployed builders until she found a suitable candidate which she would ring with the intention of getting them out to the manor that very next day or her name wasn’t Janis Buckle, (although she pronounced it, B’Ouche, probably in the hopes of impressing the Lady Christina deSouza who she would now tell people down the Dog and Duck, was her new best friend. )

   Lady C thanked her and then tried to hang up, but Janis had intended to chatter on about how her aunt Gladys had once worked for a Lady Brown, Forsyth-Smith and did she know her? She eventually just hung up after her head started to hurt from Janis’ common accent and the withdrawal of gin!

   She would pass the rest of the day away, as it was still only 11am, but visiting her vault and cataloguing what she had left in the way of stolen goods after the Queen had tried to clear her out when the crap of being caught red handed had hit the fan.

   Lady C’s secret vault had lots of other secrets to it such as secrets floors and secret hidey holes that she prayed had remained secret from her majesty as that’s where she kept her most valuable of possessions. The things that were worth the most money to any greedy buying who would pay millions just to say they had possessed it.

   As she wandered through the kitchen and through the cellar door, down the stone steps that led to the basement, she came to a stop outside the secret hidden door of the vault and froze in fear as she heard the familiar sounds of engines grinding to a halt just inside of the vault. It was with a heavy heart and several seconds of heavy breathing to calm herself, that she tapped in the code to open the door and made her way through, her heart sinking into her stomach as she saw the towering looming figure of the Tardis blaring its blue light across the vault as it spun slowly, flashing like the police light it was meant to be.

   The doctor had arrived and no doubt would try to take all her stuff back to their rightful owners as he often did every now and then and usually because taking it in the first place had somehow upset the laws of gravity or time or something else mundane and totally not worth her listening to when he lectured her.

   She was about to start yelling for the Doctor who as she suddenly remembered was now a woman, to show herself and explain how she had managed once more to get passed the highly technical doctor detecting security, she’d had fitted some years ago. Albeit it by the Doctor himself as he was back then, but on agreement that he wouldn’t break in if she didn’t steal anything that was considered alien. As she had not, he or she had no right being there! Before she could utter a word, she spotted what looked like an old man at the end of the vault’s passageway, looking carefully at one the bricks on the wall as he made some muffled puzzled exclamations about it which sounded a lot like Scottish.

   “It’s here, but not over there which makes me think that its just a small disturbance, yet it registered big enough for the Tardis to bring me here herself which is highly unusual”

   “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU!?” Lady C suddenly shouted, very annoyed that not only had the Doctor turned up unannounced yet again, but that she had brought a weird looking old man with her and was letting him wander about tapping bricks to his hearts content. She strode over to the Tardis and banged on the door still yelling. “Oi, LADY DOCTOR, GET OUT HERE IMMEDIATLY AND TELL ME WHATS GOING ON! I DO NOT APPROVE OF YOU INVITING YOUR FRIENDS INTO THE PRIVACY OF MY SECRET VAULT THANKYOU VERY MUCH! NOW, SHOW YOURSELF WOMAN!”

   The man at the end of the vault spun round as soon as she opened her mouth and rushed towards her, placing his hands gently on the Tardis doors as he looked highly concerned for it after it had been hammered on so ungraciously. “Woah, woah woah, what’s your problem? I’m only looking, you don’t usually hear me down here this time of day Christina, you’re usually still in bed. The Tardis brought me here because of the disturbance in time that seems to be secured within the walls of your vault. Nice locket by the way”, He said rather sharply, raising an eyebrow as he gestured towards a velvet silk lined box that contained the last known piece of jewellery once owned by the late Lady Jane Mayhurst which had disappeared shortly after her death. “I’ll be taking that back with me”

   Lady C listened in disbelief, her head turning from the man with the accusing eyebrows to the wall at the end of the vault and back again, and then started shouting once more. “WHO THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU AND WHERE IS THE DOCTOR?!”

   “I am the Doctor, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you recognise me?” He stopped to think for a minute, his eyes narrowing as he put the missing pieces of the jigsaw into place in his mind. “Oh, my apologies, have you not seen this face before? I thought the Tardis might have given it away as to who I was though”

   Lady C screwed up her brow in confusion. Today hadn’t started well and wasn’t going to end well by all accounts, but she could probably relax a little knowing the strange man wasn’t a strange man at all, well he was but one she knew and trusted, although not to break into her vault it would seem. “You were a woman last time I saw you which I might add was only a few months ago. Surely you remember that? The wedding, the tiara, you bumbling in on one of my jobs as per usual being all sanctimonious, as per usual?”

   The Doctor shook his head and wandered off back to the brick wall to examine it again, talking casually over his shoulder as he went. “No, not really but then again I don’t tend to visit in terms of linear time lines. Good to know I’ll be a woman someday. I always fancied seeing how that would work out, no I think the last time I saw you was the night I visited you in jail, the first night if I remember and I was wearing that ridiculous bow tie. How long ago was that?”

   “5 years” Lady C replied, almost spitting the words at him as it was and always would be a sore point. It had confused her enough to know the Doctor could change his face when he wanted and confused her further to know he could change sex too, but knowing his visits weren’t in the same order for him as they were for her, added to the confusing and she began to scan the vault for her secret stash of gin. Grabbing the only bottle left from under one of the loose floorboards, she pulled it out and removed a very sticky note attached to it which read, “Soz, I drank yer wine Mrs Yer’Ladyship. I’ll get yer a new bottle from Tesco. Love Hugo” She grimaced slightly knowing Hugo had put his hands on her stuff after probably letting himself into the vault during the Queen’s raid, but beggars could not be choosers at this point so she un capped the gin and took a swig, hoping the slow lull of drunkenness would wash away the stress that the day would no doubt continue to bring.

The Doctor eyed her over his shoulder but for once didn’t remark about her drinking, nor about her time in jail, even though it was he who had put her there. Instead he carried on tapping bricks whilst mumbling to himself about how strange it was.

   Lady C was about to ask him what the hell he was up to when he suddenly jumped backwards and yelled “HA! Found it!” He spun round and grabbed Lady C by the hand and pulled her to him, his eyebrows going crazy with his mixed emotions. “There was a temporal disturbance here, but it was confined to just one brick, but I now know what it is, it’s a doorway probably to another time or dimension or planet maybe, could even be a space craft. I found one just like it in an elevator once, but this one manifested by itself, right here in your vault. Shall we take a look and see where it goes?”

   Lady C was not in the slightest bit excited by the prospect of travelling through dimensional space with an alien. She had been there and done that with him many times before, and whilst it had always been adventurous and thrilling, she had only managed to escape with her life still in tact each time and she had begun to fear the Doctor each time he turned up to whisk her away somewhere new. Today was no exception.

   “Well you can if you want, but I very much doubt I’ll fit through that one brick even though I have lost a lot of weight recently, but if you think you can then be my guest. I’ll wait for you upstairs if its all the same with you?”

   The Doctor looked at her with confusion etched across his face and he totally ignored her request to stay behind and uttered “Nonsense” under his breath and still holding her hand tightly, he moved his other hand through the brick so that it disappeared and the temporal doorway around it began to spread to accommodate his body as he moved further through it.

Lady C was about to protest louder and tried to pull her hand free but before she could utter a single sound, she was stood in a completely different place, surrounded by cold, damp, dark shapes that omitted an awful smell of rotting flesh and worst of all, she had dropped the bottle of gin which was now spilling out all over her vault floor.

   “Where are we?” she whispered, unable to shout abuse at the doctor as the stink had got into her throat and was choking her whilst making her eyes sting. The doctor lifted his sonic screwdriver into the air and let it analyse the surroundings for a moment before he looked at its findings.

   “August 2012, think it’s a Friday although Tuesdays are very much like Fridays in terms of time travel. Norfolk, England. Christina, what was the last thing you thought of just before I pulled you through the doorway?”

   Lady C rolled her eyes and glared through the dark at the doctor, almost wanting to slap him if she thought she wouldn’t miss. “7 bloody years ago, and we’re still on earth? What kind of time travel is that? I could have probably managed that myself if I still had Captain hot stuffs vortex thingy. Hang on, 7 years? Good lord although I was at my best then. Maybe we can go and find me and tell me not to listen to a bloody word you tell me and maybe I wouldn’t have to go to prison!”

   It seemed like a great idea to be honest. Why wouldn’t she want to warn herself about the dismal future she had, but the doctor had other ideas and she uttered a small cry of surprise as his face suddenly became so close to hers, she could feel his breath on her skin. “Do nothing of the sort. If you change things here you have no clue to what kind of future you’ll be going back to, you should know the laws of time by now Christina, now tell me, what was the last thing you thought of?”

   There was anger in his voice and panic too which wasn’t like him but she was too freaked out by how close his face was to hers to start an argument with him at that point, but she would bring it up later and completely ignore him as she always did and send her past self a text message when he wasn’t looking.

   “Erm, about the pendant, I think. Just as you yanked me here against my will, I thought to myself, hide that bloody pendant whilst he’s gone” She had taken to pouting now in the vain attempt to make him feel sorry for her, but she remembered it was dark, so she stopped and whined instead. “There are no living descendants of Lady Mayhurst so what would it matter if I kept the damn thing? She was dead when I took it after all”

   The doctor flashed his sonic once more and checked the data. This time pulling Lady C along with him as he moved toward a stair case that led to a door which hopefully led outside.  “It matters” he growled angrily “because 1, its not yours and 2……” They climbed the staircase and the doctor pushed open the door. There was a surge of heat and a blanket of black smoke welcomed them, almost covering them and surely choking them to death if he hadn’t of slammed the door shut as quickly as he’d opened it on the crumbling wreck of what was once a magnificent building.

   “2…this is Mayhurst Manor and I think it’s on fire!”

To be continued…