Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 1 - Fish Fingers and Custard Fanzine

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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 1
‘Doctor, I still don’t understand. What are we looking for?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said simply, ‘but there’s something. Something so big I can’t see
the edges, something wrong across all of space and time that I can’t see yet, like
an iceberg with all the sharp bits hidden underneath. Amy, I’m going to have to
ask you to be as quiet as you can, as I need to concentrate on this.’
She nodded, and he flashed her a brief, reassuring smile.
‘Be right back.’
The Doctor closed his eyes and listened.
He filtered out the ever-present murmur of the TARDIS, too low for humans to
hear, as much a feeling as a sound, as familiar to him as the beating of his hearts.
There was the bird-quick patter of Amy’s pulse, the liquid rustle of cloth on her
skin as she shifted nervously from foot to foot, her eyes fixed on him. She
exhaled, and he heard the whispering hiss of molecule against molecule before
that too faded to the white noise of irrelevance.
Under that, under everything, was the ever-present rhythm, the sound of the
universe itself as it slipped from one moment to the next, now frozen and inert,
laid bare for him to examine. The Doctor filtered out everything but that, the
constant susurrus that was the movement of time itself...
...and flinched at the missing notes.
On Andrestra Quintus in the year 4600, a child fell from a hotel balcony and never
hit the ground.
The Fourth Sontaran Army vanished before battle with a cadre of the Rutan Host
could be joined, their weapons unfired, their final cries not of fear or rage but of
childish confusion. It would have gone down in history as the only time any of that
race had retreated, had any mention of the Fourth Army remained. The Consular
of the Rutan cadre was executed soon afterwards for inexplicably deploying to an
empty battlefield.
In the Hephaestus Nebula, a star disappeared. Four ancient civilisations froze to
death, unable to remember ever having been warm.
The Doctor could hear it. His fingers tightened, the sound of shifting muscle
deafening to his heightened senses. Across a thousand systems, across a million
years, he could hear them opening like tears in fabric, like mouths hungry and
waiting.