Couldhavebeen Part One
Author’s Note: After tasting the sweet flavour of seeing my work in print in The Cat Who Walked Through Time, and with the promise of a story being printed in a second volume, I immediately seized upon another opportunity to have a story featured in a Doctor Who charity fanzine. Someone was doing a collection called “Not the mind probe!” which is a quote from a classic Who story, not sure which one, and I submitted a story featuring the Eighth Doctor and his companion from the Big Finish series of audio plays, Charlie. (I have to admit that at the time I’d only heard an episode or two from one of the audio plays, so was working more from character notes, so my interpretation of Charlie could only have resembled the character by luck.) Couldhavebeen was accepted straightaway with just one edit to get rid of a reference to Babylon 5 I’d snuck in, and then everything went quiet. Well, these things happen.
So I had the story in a file for a long time. In the meantime someone else produced a story which used the basic idea, but not in the same way I’ve done it, so I dusted it off and rewrote it. In the doing so, I got rid of Charlie and replaced her with Sophie Crane, a companion of my own devising (although along the way I also started a version with the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack).
As mentioned earlier, the story has grown into a monster. Therefore, in classic Who style, it will be presented as three episodes, with cliffhanger endings. So you’ll have to imagine the scream of the theme tune when you get to the end of the first part.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is the property of the BBC, I have no rights whatsoever to the property and present this only for entertainment.
Doctor Who: Couldhavebeen
Part One
It had been dying every day of its life.
*
“There’s something wrong with my brain!”
Columbo
Author’s Note: I was bored. It was lunch time. Columbo was created by Richard Levinson and William Link. He’s probably owned by Universal. But not by me.
Charlie sometimes wondered if it was worth keeping his restaurant open during the nighttime. A few city workers came in, from time to time, but his main clientele were cops. Cops wanting meatball subs and doughnuts and hot soup and black, sweet coffee to take on stakeouts. Cops wanting to grouse about their old ladies and their kids’ school fees and their supervisors’ narrowminded, shortsighted understanding of police regulations.
And then there was Columbo. Rolling up, looking like he’d slept in his clothes for a week, his hair like a tangle of smoke dried and set on his head.
‘Gimme some chilli, Charlie.’
‘Do you really want to eat that stuff this late at night?’ asked Charlie.
‘Charlie, I’ve spent all day driving around movie lots, chasing this psychotherapist that kicked his wife into the sea. All I’ve had to eat is three hard-boiled eggs and a half-empty tube of chips I found on a bench somewhere.’
‘You must be pretty hungry.’
‘I look at my dawg and think that he’d fry up pretty good with some onions, Charlie, that’s how hungry I am.’
‘But chilli, Lieutenant. I mean. I don’t like to kick a guy when he’s down, but when was the last time you had a shower?’
‘Well y’see, the shower’s busted at home and my wife, Mrs Columbo, she goes to the swimming baths - it’s a really good way to keep fit, she has the biceps of a woman half her age - my wife washes at the swimming baths. I use the sink in the department restroom, but I haven’t been in today. Captain Ritchie’ll be wondering where I am. So it’ll have been last Tuesday. What day is it today?’
‘Friday.’
‘Okay, a week last Tuesday.’
‘Look, Lieutenant, I ain’t gonna serve you no chilli while you’re smelling like that. People think the drains have backed up. Even the hoboes ain’t coming in for a cup of dishwater no more. There’s skunks hanging around my back door. Some guy came over from that swanky French restaurant down the street asking if I could sell him some blue cheese.’
Columbo fixed Charlie with his good eye. There was a tear in the corner.
‘What are you trying to tell me, Charlie?’
‘That you stink, Columbo, that you stink.
‘I’m telling you, Lieutenant, that if you want me to give you anything other than soda crackers and water, you’ll go home, have a long bath and splash on some cologne.’
Columbo looked down at the counter and got off his chair. He began to walk away but then stopped before he reached the door and looked back.
‘Ahh, Charlie charlie, just one more thing…’
‘What is it, Lieutenant Columbo?’
‘I know you just poisoned your accountant, Charlie. He was having an affair with your wife. The boys’ll be coming around to collect all your garbage in half an hour.’
He turned to the door and then turned back to Charlie and tapped his nose. ‘My aroma might not be so good, but I smell like a bloodhound.’
Stonekirk prelude
Author’s note: Stonekirk stonekirk stonekirk. One day this story will be written. Vampire jam. Magic realism. The urban decay of English market towns. The strange manner that North Yorkshire is somehow still snared in the 1950s, even as darkness runs through it. I’ve held off on writing it, because my friend David is very keen on doing the story and very much likes Benny and Burke. He came up with some of the elements of this: Philip Stead is his. I had a joke about Stead being “bitten in the Balkans”. It made us laugh every time I mentioned it for about six months. But that’s a different story.
So this is a prelude to that story. It may be that when Stonekirk is written this bit doesn’t even come into it, or it may act as the gateway to get Benny and Burke there. But I needed to get the story out of my system. So here it is. A little early because I’m out tomorrow.
Burke watched the graveyard from the car. Stead must have been a well-liked or much-hated man; half of Stonekirk had turned out to see him buried. Benny was amongst the throng, working the crowd, pretending to be a friend and work colleague, pressing the flesh. It was more than Burke could be bothered with these days.
Three weeks ago, Philip Stead’s body had been found in the Balkans. His throat had been cut with a knife and his limbs worried by what the bonesaws at SIS headquarters had identified as wolves. Clearly the agent of Her Majesty’s Government had run afoul of criminals of some variety, which then led to an investigation into his personal life.
(more…)
The eternal heart
Author’s note: What? It’s Valentine’s day. I actually wrote this flash fiction in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of romance is about all you get. (Or is that just me?)
And yes, you could regard the ending as a Stuism.
Some days I watched her as she walked up and down the aisles. She was the Aphrodite of the Stonekirk Odeon with her little tray of ices propped under her chest. Her legs were long and slender, and so was her neck. She had an obstinate pout that looked sullen but made it so much more exciting to make her smile. Her eyes were wide and deceptively deep so that once you were in them you would lose track of which way was up and drown in happiness.
(more…)
Fast Living
Author’s Note: Sometimes you write something and you just want to put it out. I don’t know if it’s that I don’t think there’s much more I can do with this story, or that it’s the culmination of the series thus far, but I wanted this story out there. Sometimes I’ll keep hold of a story and keep working it and re-working and feel really unhappy when I finally pass it on. Other times, it’ll click straight away. (Stories clicked straight away. Urban Fairy Tale did too. But then I rewrote it about seven times and knocked the spontaneity and lightness from it.)
I can’t say that I think this one is literature. For those of you who have been enjoying the Superstu stories, though, you should get a good pay-off with this. I have become morbidly scared that Stu is a Mary Sue (or possibly even a Jerkass Stu, hee hee) but we’ll just let it go. If Stu’s a Mary Sue, Benny is too.
She had been a quiet, sensitive child. Picking up easily on other people’s feelings, she would get giddy. If her mother was sad, her little face would crumple and tears would roll down her cheeks unbidden. If her father was angry, as he so often was until he left, she would feel heat in her face and pain in her brow.
It was in puberty that her powers fully blossomed. She would wake up to find that the contents of her bedroom had been turned upside down. Her mother called in an exorcist, thinking it was poltergeist activity. Her mother was half right.
Why fan fiction?
The next few weeks are going to feature quite a bit of fan fiction. You’ve just had an unexpected bonus Columbo flash (which was a surprise to me too as I literally wrote it on Monday lunchtime) and then there’s a Doctor Who three parter coming up, so now is as good a time as any to answer the question, Why fan fiction?
I dunno.
No, I keed I keed. There’s a slightly mercenary sense, a slightly poetic sense and a downright lazy sense to doing fan fiction.
1.) I keep my best stuff for sale. No good using up all my original stuff if I one day want to make this hobby into a job. Although you’ve already seen some of my original stuff here, too.
2.) I want to write Doctor Who and have done for years. It’s unlikely to happen, so live the dream. Plus, who would have paid for that Columbo flash? I apologise, Mr Falk - it’s just that your acting is so evocative.
3.) I can write fan fiction faster because I don’t have to build as much. (Except that in Doctor Who you do have to build. And I had to build that world for Stark, too. So maybe I’ve not got the jist of hack work…)
Fan fiction can be cheap and shoddy, but it can also be clever. You can take what already exists and push it much further. If any of you had a look at lostluggage.org.uk, there’s a really good short story with the Ninth Doctor stopping a girl from committing suicide. It could never appear on telly for so many reasons.
At the moment I’m thinking about doing a Dangermouse fan fiction and a Full Metal Alchemist fan fiction. We’ll see.