‘I’ve got one,’ screamed a voice. ‘Here it is!’
It was a woman’s voice, impossibly old and yet implausibly young at the same time; as if a crone and a toddler had spoken in unison.
Jane Schofield was up in the air, long fingers encircling her waist, squeezing just that little too tight. At least, she thought they were fingers, scaly and rough, until she looked down and realised that they were made of wood.
She twisted around in the vice-like grip, looking up at what had snatched her from the ground. It was a tree!
Its arm was a gnarled tangle of wooden limbs wound into a contorted mockery of muscles and sinew, the scales she’d felt on its fingers lumps of coarse bark. It had a face of sorts; a hideous mouth and misshapen eyes formed by slashes across its thick trunk that creaked as it yelled in a sing-song voice: ‘Come and get it!’
‘Put her down this instant,’ the Doctor commanded from below. Too far below. Schofield was caught between the urge to break the tree’s grasp and the knowledge that she would break herself if she fell from this height.
‘It’s alive,’ she yelled down to the Doctor.
‘Of course I’m alive,’ the tree said. ‘What do you expect?’
‘Don’t worry,’ the Doctor called up. ‘Its bark will be worse than its bite.’
‘Ha ha!’ she snapped back, her legs dangling helplessly in her gold-stained trousers. One of her equally gilded shoes had slipped off and was down on the ground. Schofield half-considered getting the Doctor to lob it at the tree, not that it would do much good.
‘There’s no need for this,’ the Doctor continued. Schofield thought at first that he was talking to her, before realising that he was addressing her timbered abductor.
‘There’s every need,’ the tree replied. ‘They’ll pay me handsomely for this one, and for you too!’
The Doctor stepped back as another gnarled arm swept down to catch him, the leaf-tipped talons raking the front of his shirt.
Schofield wriggled in the giant hand, trying to get to her belt. She still had her baton, she was sure of it. There was also her CS spray, of course, but she didn’t know how effective a burst of tear gas would be against something that technically didn’t have eyeballs.
‘What does a tree want with money, anyway?’ she grunted.
‘Money? Who mentioned money?’ the tree croaked. ‘The Boggarts will give me a sun of my own, to warm my branches and no one else’s. Then the others will be sorry they ignored me. They’ll reach out to me, their leaves hungry, but the nutrients will be mine, all mine.’
Around them, the branches of the surrounding trees rustled, as if the trees of the forest were shaking their trunks in disapproval.
On the ground, the Doctor laughed. As if anything about this situation was funny. In the distance, Schofield could hear the baying of the Boggarts. The problem was that the distance suddenly didn’t seem so distant after all. Their pursuers were closing in and she had no way of breaking free.
She tried sinking her nails beneath the chunks of bark on its fingers, as if they were scabs ready to be ripped from the fresh skin beneath, but the tree only tightened its hold of her, making it hard to breathe.
Still the Doctor wouldn’t give up. ‘Can’t we come to an arrangement?’
That shut the tree up. It regarded the man in the golden coat with renewed interest, rubbing its gnarly stump of a chin. ‘I’m listening …’
‘Excellent. Because that’s how things work around here isn’t it? Deals? Bargains? I scratch your bough, you scratch mine.’
‘You would give me a sun?’
The Doctor started looking through his pockets, as if he expected to find a spare star in his loose change. ‘Maybe not, but I could give you something better.’
‘What’s better than sunlight?’ the tree snapped.
The Doctor grinned like the wolf that had got the cream. ‘You’re interested then?’
‘I’m always interested, if the price is right. Tit for tat.’
‘I like that,’ the Doctor said. ‘And you’ll like what I have in my pocket. You give me my friend, and I’ll give you a companion of your own.’
‘Show me.’
‘Do we have a deal?’
‘Show. Me.’
‘You strike a hard bargain. Very well.’
With a flourish, the Doctor produced something from his pocket, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger. Schofield couldn’t see what it was. Neither could the tree.
Its hand shot out again, but this time the Doctor didn’t even try to evade capture. The idiot let himself be lifted up to look her captor in its distorted eye.
‘What is it, then?’ the tree asked, peering at the tiny object in the Doctor’s hand.
‘An acorn?!’ Schofield exclaimed. That was it? That was the Doctor’s bargaining chip?
‘It is an acorn,’ the Doctor confirmed. ‘Plucked from Noah Holland’s hair by my own fair hand.’
‘What do I want with an acorn?’ the tree sneered.
‘But this isn’t any old acorn,’ the Doctor insisted. ‘It’s from the Visible, the other world. It’s unlike any tree in this forest, and it could be yours. You could plant it, nurture it, grow it into a mighty tree, right here, your roots intertwined. Imagine it. Someone to talk to, to watch the birds nesting in your boughs. Not like the other trees, the ones who have ignored you for so long. So, what do you say?’
Schofield hung on to the tree’s craggy digits as its cavernous eyes narrowed on the seed. The Boggarts were so close she could almost smell them. This wasn’t going to work. She was going to die here, in a world she’d never believed existed, crushed by a lonely tree and all because of the Doctor. She’d never see her husband and daughter again, and it was all his fault.
Without warning, the tree let them go. Schofield dropped with a cry, remembering her training and throwing herself into a roll as she hit the forest floor to stop her ankles from shattering.
The Doctor landed beside her, somehow managing to stay on his feet. Show-off. He held up the acorn like a trophy, the tree grinning from limb to limb as it reached down to tenderly accept the seed with knotty fingers. ‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ he called up, grabbing Schofield’s shoulders as soon as she was back on her feet and steering her away. ‘I hope you will be very happy together.’
But the tree wasn’t listening. It was already waxing lyrical about its prize, trying to make its neighbours green with envy.
‘Can we run yet?’ Schofield whispered, recovering her shoe from the ground.
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said the Doctor and broke into a sprint. He was patting down his pockets as he ran, becoming increasingly agitated.
‘What you looking for this time?’ she asked. ‘A prizewinning conker?’
‘The TARDIS key,’ he admitted. ‘I must have dropped it back there.’
‘Back there?’ she spluttered. ‘Didn’t you realise?’
‘I was a tad preoccupied!’
‘But the key was telling us which way to go.’
‘I know!’
‘And it was going to get us home!’
‘In theory, yes.’
‘What do you mean in theory?’
‘It was never a certainty. The TARDIS has a mind of her own.’
Now he told her! ‘So, now what are we going to do?’ she asked, looking back to see if the Boggarts were still on their trail.
‘First we try not to get eaten.’
That sound like a good start. ‘And then?’
‘One step at a time,’ he snapped. ‘I’m still trying to work that bit out. But don’t worry, I always win.’
Something in his tone didn’t exactly inspire confidence. ‘Who are you trying to convince?’ she asked him. ‘Me or you?’
For once, the Doctor didn’t have an answer, and that scared her more than any Boggart.