Come Die With Me (audio story)
Come Die With Me was the second story in the audio anthology, You Are the Doctor and Other Stories, which comprised the two hundred and seventh release in Big Finish's monthly range. It was written by Jamie Anderson and featured Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace.
Publisher's summary[[edit] | [edit source]]
A spooky old house. A body in the library. A killer on the loose. The Doctor accepts the challenge laid down by the sinister Mr Norris: to solve a murder mystery that's defeated 1,868 of the greatest intellects in the universe... and counting.
Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]
Following the previous story, the Doctor is still letting Ace try to fly the TARDIS to Australia, but they land instead in what appears to be a Victorian mansion - though the futuristic lighting gives away its true age. The pair hear a strange noise that sounds like a scream, and they dash out of the drawing room to investigate. Ace opens the door to a library, and notices a strange lectern-like object at its centre, but the Doctor strongly warns her against entering. Ace walks through a different door instead, into the parlour, and the two of them overhear a laugh and a conversation from the next room. Ace leaves to investigate the other rooms while the Doctor is greeted by Mr Norris and his other guest Mr Morecombe, who have apparently been expecting him and explain that the Doctor is here to play a murder mystery game. The Doctor deduces that the TARDIS was intercepted by a time scoop, which is why he and Ace are here, and Norris informs him that the prize for winning his game is his library.
Just as Ace is about to go into the library, entirely against the Doctor’s wishes, she is startled by Mrs Bryer, Norris’s housekeeper. Bryer explains to Ace about the game, and mournfully tells her that when her husband Daniel lost the game, he died and Norris forced her to work for him. According to a guest they had had in just that day, Mrs Zingiber, Norris has had 1,868 guests, all of whom have died - though Zingiber herself was able to reverse-engineer the time scoop and escape.
Norris explains the rules of the game to the Doctor - there is a murderer loose in the house, and each guest has five minutes to work out who it is and enter the answer on the machine in the library. Despite the Doctor’s efforts to persuade him otherwise, Morecombe tries to solve the mystery - but predictably, he gets it wrong and dies for it. Ace hears his scream and runs off to investigate, but after she enters the library, the door seals itself behind her. The Doctor and Norris soon arrive and Norris says that there’s nothing he can do to get them out. Ace tells the Doctor that the time scoop is in the conservatory and he uses it to transport himself into the library with her.
He explains that the device is a Memorialiser, which consumes the consciousness of a person and converts it into a physical record, as it has done with Morecombe and the other 1,868 victims of Norris. The only way the Doctor and Ace can disable it is to input the name of the true killer. They realise that the real killers are Norris’s victims, whose souls are still trapped in the Memorialiser. The Doctor decides to copy the entire Memorialiser log into the terminal, but Ace reminds him to remove Morecombe’s profile from the list. This turns out to be the right answer: the game is finally won. The Doctor and Ace confront Norris, who confesses that his motivation for constructing the game was to eliminate his intellectual competition and become the smartest person in the universe. Bryer, carrying the gun Norris had asked her to fetch, forces the Doctor, Ace and Norris to go back into the library as none of them can bring her husband back to life, and the souls driven mad by being trapped within the Memorialiser finally take their revenge on Norris before turning their attention to the Doctor. The Doctor speaks to Morris’s ghost and persuades him to delete the Memorialiser log, destroying it for good and exorcising the souls from the machine. The Doctor and Ace console Bryer over the loss of her husband, but encourage her to keep the “Daniel Bryer Memorial Library” open for business.
Cast[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The Doctor - Sylvester McCoy
- Ace - Sophie Aldred
- Norris - Jamie Newall
- Bryer - Juliet Cowan
- Morecombe - Oliver Dimsdale
Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Morecombe claims that Norris is "the greatest intellect in the entire universe".
Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The title is a play on that of the TV series Come Dine With Me, in which people are also invited to various houses.
Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Ace is still trying to pilot the TARDIS. (AUDIO: You Are the Doctor)
- Ace refers to Gabriel Chase when she reminds the Doctor that she doesn't like haunted houses. (TV: Ghost Light)
- Norris is in possession of a Time Scoop. (TV: Carnival of Monsters)
- The Twelfth Doctor would likewise be invited to solve a mystery that others could not. (TV: Mummy on the Orient Express)
- The Doctor hints that he may be capable of resurrecting people, but believes it to be immoral. (COMIC: The Road to Hell; TV: The Girl Who Died)
- The Doctor refers to the Library of Alexandria. During his first incarnation, he witnessed its destruction by the Mim in the 5th century. (AUDIO: The Library of Alexandra)
- The Doctor would later determine that Ms. Zingiber was an alias of Melanie Bush. (AUDIO: A Life of Crime)
