Autumn Mist (novel)

Autumn Mist was the twenty-fourth novel in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures series. It was written by David A. McIntee, released 5 July 1999 and featured the Eighth Doctor, Sam Jones and Fitz Kreiner. It saw the Doctor encountering the mythological Sidhe, or Fair Folk, of legend in the context of a World War II historical adventure.

Over the course of the story, Sam was killed; though this was quickly reversed, it proves to be the final straw, following the events of Unnatural History, which drives her to decide to leave the Doctor. The story thus ends with the Doctor intent on dropping her back in 1997, leading into the events of Interference, which officially ended Sam's tenure as a companion.

Publisher's summary
The Ardennes, December 1944: the Nazi forces are making their last offensive in Europe — a campaign which will come to be called the Battle of the Bulge. But there is a third side to this battle: an unknown and ancient force which seems to pay little heed to the laws of nature.

Where do the bodies of the dead disappear to? What is the true nature of the military experiments conducted by both sides?

The Doctor, Sam and Fitz must seek out the truth in a battlefield where no one and nothing is quite what it seems…

Prologue
15 December 1944. Pittsburgh-born Allied Lieutenant Wiesniewski is participating in the Battle of the Bulge in the wooded, snow-covered Ardennes. A dozen miles to the east, a strangely-equipped scientific vehicle under the Nazis' control detects some interesting phenomenon unrelated to the battle at hand, but which they've apparently been watching for — but, unknowing of these strange goings-on, Wiesniewski and his surviving men make their way to a German bunker that's been sporadically firing at them, and, getting in using a grenade, manages to gain entry. The sneak attack goes reasonably well until, as he makes his escape, a baffled Wiesniewski witnesses time itself slowing down around him. When he retraces the steps he took to get to the bunker, he finds his fallen comrades' corpses mysteriously gone from where he'd last seen them. As he makes it back to the forest, he feels down to his bones the presence of something unearthly, and screams as he glimpses something shadowy and non-human stirring in the snow.

Chapter One: Greif
The Doctor's TARDIS is in temporal orbit, and Fitz Kreiner is getting to know the TARDIS kitchen, trying to clear his head of his hesitations on where he stands with the recorporated blonde Sam Jones, having slept with "Dark Sam" in San Francisco.

Back in the Ardennes, Wiesniewski, alive and whole, finds himself running to an American outpost, only to stop for breath after tripping, and realise he has no idea how he got here, what happened to his gun, and indeed, what exactly happened to him after he saw the strange shadows rushing towards him. Despite "unnerving protests from his subconscious", he rationalises that he must have been hit by some hallucination-inducing fear-gas.

When Fitz returns to the TARDIS control room, he finds the Doctor and Sam peering over an open panel on the TARDIS control console as the Doctor tries to figure out why, no matter where he tries to land, the TARDIS only seems to want to take him to Earth, at a date which inexplicably appears blank on the date readout. Sam convinces him that they had better land and go from there. They find themselves landing on a snowy bridge, and, after outfitting themselves appropriately for the weather, they head out. As they step out, everything seems like an idyllic winter wonderland, notwithstanding some bunkers in the distance — but Sam cannot shake off a sense of unease, somehow feeling that the time-travellers are being watched by a pair of entities from the trees. The two recognise the Doctor as "the Evergreen Man"; one of them wants to go down and greet them, but the other reminds it that they must obey certain laws which forbid it.

They split up, with the Doctor and Fitz on one side, and Sam on the other, heading for opposite ends of the bridge. The Doctor and Fitz quickly find a pillbox where the presence of ready ammunition confirms that they are in fact in the middle of World War II, much to Fitz's distress. Before they can circle back and warn Sam to get back into the TARDIS, a bombshell lands close to the bridge, destroying it; while the time-travellers are unharmed, the TARDIS tips over into the river and disappears in its surprisingly deep waters before they can get back to it. As the smoke clears, the Doctor and Fitz find themselves trapped on the opposite bank from Sam; they decide to have Sam head to the village on her side to try and find help while the Doctor and Fitz walk along the riverbank to find the next closest bridge and join her there.

Sam finds the village eerily empty, and eventually makes up her mind to enter an inn whose door was unlocked. As she's trying the phone (which is unsurprisingly dead), she is confronted by a small group of American soldiers led by the somewhat-abrasive, unpleasantly machistic Sergeant Jeff Kovacs. Mollified by her clearly-native British accent, but confused at what she's doing in the middle of this war-zone, they decide to take her to Command HQ to check out her story, and refuse to take the risk of drawing out further German fire by looking for the Doctor or "his orderly", as she refers to Fitz.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Fitz meet a column of what appear at first to be more Allied soldiers. As they interrogate the two, Fitz is confused when the Doctor claims that they're trying to get to the village to meet a man named Jochen as opposed to Sam; only after the column moves on does the Doctor explain to the confused Fitz — who, thanks to the translation circuit, heard the exchange in English — that the "Americans" are in fact Nazi fifth-columnists from Operation Greif. Before he can process this, the fake Americans stumble into a group of real Americans on foot, whom the Doctor warns about the fakes, and in the commotion, Fitz slips and falls into the frozen river.

Chapter Two: Call to Arms
While Jeff Kovacs's men get moving with Sam, Lieutenant Wiesniewski, who's been losing blood from a minor head-wound and is feeling increasingly faint, follows the sounds of an altercation and stumbles upon the confrontation between the fake and real GIs. Thanks to the Doctor's warning, the Germans scatter and are pursued into the woods by the real GIs, leaving Wiesniewski to meet up with the Doctor. After confirming that he seems to be an actual Ally, he tries to threaten him into driving him in the jeep; the Doctor easily disarms the weakened, nearly delirious man but agrees, and they drive off. With the strong current, the Doctor assumes that if he didn't drown, Fitz must be somewhere downstream. As they drive, the Doctor is intrigued when Wiesniewsky mentions seeing "Leshy in the mist" before drifting off into unconsciousness.

Meanwhile, Fitz, unharmed if freezing, managed to get back to solid ground some ways downstream, and made his way to the next town, a bombed-out mess currently being used as a base by a small American detail. He decides against making himself known to them, at least not before he steals some dry clothes from an abandoned tailor's shop. Just then, the town is attacked by the Germans, with the Nazis quickly gaining the advantage over the Americans thanks to their Panzer tanks. Before the dust clears, Fitz thinks to steal a parasuit from a dead Nazi parachutist, which, combined with the flawless German the TARDIS translation circuits grant him, is enough for him to pass off as a Nazi soldier himself.

Sam and the Doctor are also soon put in life-threatening circumstances; Kovacs's convoy is ambushed, with the driver next to whom Sam was sitting being killed right in front of her. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Wiesniewski also make their way to what was hitherto the American HQ only to find it in the process of being taken over by the Nazis; they manage to make their way onto a small spotter plane, with the Doctor at the controls, and, after taking two more grievously-wounded men on board, they set off for Bastogne, the only location with medical facilities that is in range of their fuel supply.

Back at the German camp, where Fitz has gotten the chance to observe the oddly-sophisticated scientific vehicles, he is interrogated by officer Jurgen Leitz about the peculiar "temporal disturbance" which occurred partway through the skirmish, during which time briefly seemed to slow down. Though Leitz does not assume him to be a spy, he is surprised at Kreiner's overly-casual way of talking about the event, and resolves to keep an eye on him. His train of thought is then cut off by an underling's giddy announcement that the men in the detection vehicles have managed to capture a prisoner "of the special kind".

Chapter Three: Slings and Arrows
Having landed in Bastogne, the Doctor meets with head medical officer Ray Garcia, while back at the German base, a new Nazi officer, Jochen Peiper, arrives, and quickly relieves Captain Graumann of command. He takes an interest in a cringing Fitz, who once again manages to allay suspicion, and has him transferred to his own unit.

Meanwhile, the Doctor speaks at some more length with Wiesniewski about what he saw in the snow; now that he's more in control of himself, he denies having seen any Leshy, coming back again and again to the claim that he just saw a couple of deer, but part of him cannot help but insist that the things he saw walked on two legs, and he also remembers a conspicuous mist when the Doctor brings it up. This allows the Doctor to deduce that not only did he see something otherworldly, but that something had an interest in staying hidden and implanted a fake memory into his mind to cover its tracks.

Sam is riding along in Dan Bearclaw's army keep, but their way is blocked off by a logjam. They make conversation while waiting, until the entire convoy is suddenly attacked. They jump out of the jeep and take cover in a ditch just in time before their vehicle explodes; they flee into the village before realising that it's been taken over by the Germans already, whereupon they try to hide in a shed, where Sam finds a shotgun. They're soon discovered by a young SS officer, and Sam, to her distress, finds herself unable to shoot the young man point-blank. Informed of the situation, Lt. Colonel Peiper heads to the wreckage and orders the Nazi soldiers to stop "wasting time" on rounding up the Americans and to simply "clear the road for our Panzers".

Back in Bastogne, the Doctor meets with Colonel Allen Lewis. Lewis seems to broadly like and trust him, but refuses to authorise the expense of any resources to look for the TARDIS, Sam or Fitz (though they have been contacted by Kovacs's men and can thus reassure him about Sam's survival). Instead, he wants the Doctor to put his evident medical knowledge to use right here to tend to the wounded. After the Doctor leaves, Lewis reveals himself to be the ally of the mysterious, invisible, powerful creatures, discussing the Doctor with them.

Assigned to guard duty by Peiper, Fitz decides to sneak into one of the mysterious sophisticated trucks, from which a distinctly inhuman but alive-sounding moaning has been emanating. There, he is surprised to find a live prisoner, a being which looks strangely blurry and hard to make out even though the bars of its cage are clearly visible.

Meanwhile, Sam and Bearclaw's hopes (such as they were) that the Nazis were planning to send them to a POW camp are dashed when Major Poetschke simply orders his men to open fire on the prisoners with their tanks' machine-guns, whom the Nazis have been holding at gunpoint in a field. Sam is shot in the thigh and lower back in the confusion and falls to the ground, nearly delirious admist the carnage.

In Bastogne, Garcia starts to give the Doctor a tour of his medical facilities. After showing him all the lightly, survivably wounded, he is to show him the first of those for whose lives he fears, only to be baffled when he finds the first patient's room empty, his bed made; though he tries to speculate that the man must either have died or been discharged without proper paperwork, he struggles to understand who could have made the bed without his knowledge, and why. The Doctor is keenly interested, remembering Wiesniewski's words about the bodies of his own men disappearing.

At the field, the shooting has been going on for a quarter of an hour, with a handful of soldiers now ambling through the fallen bodies to identify and finish off any survivors; Sam is saved by her own weakness, which prevents her from raising her arm, from falling for a ploy where they pretend to be medics looking for survivors to help them. However, despite her best efforts, she is noticed by a pair of soldiers; to her horror, she realises that they mean to rape her, but they lose interest upon seeing quite how heavily wounded she is, and, before she can react, they shoot her in the chest before moving on.

Chapter Four: The Oz Factor
Jurgen Leitz spots Fitz Kreiner walking out of the armoured vehicle. Fitz claims that he was concerned that the "prisoner" was trying to escape, and admits to his curiosity about his (or rather its) identity. Explaining that the Nazis are "studying Light and Dark Elves", Leitz tells Fitz that he is requisitioning him for the unit dealing with this secret research project, being that he seems intelligent and it'd be a waste to kill him to keep him quiet (the only other possibility).

As night falls over the field-turned-mass-grave, Dan Bearclaw, still alive, finds Sam's body, and for lack of anything else, puts a handkerchief over her face by way of final respects, swearing revenge on the "Krauts". To his shock, he hears a strange tinkling sound as a mist rises, amidst which he can almost glimpse humanoid figures whom something within him wants to call "Kachinas". By the time the mist clears, Sam's body has vanished.

The following morning, back in Bastogne, the Doctor is still investigating that same mystery, getting a fuller testimony out of Wiesniewski over breakfast. The Doctor relates the story to what he's heard about the Oz Factor, a phenomenon of "sudden silence and disassociation from the environment" which experts have been studying in soldiers for some time, and asks the healing Wiesniewski (who's been temporarily reassigned to a desk job) to keep an eye out for rumours of others who've had similar experiences. Meanwhile, Ray Garcia is eating in a restaurant that has been converted into an officers' mess, and is surprised to see a "stubble-headed bulldog" of a sergeant in the kitchen, counting money with the catering corps. Glad of the distraction from treating the severely wounded, he discreetly follows the intruder as he leaves the restaurant.

Despite the threat of oncoming hypothermia, Bearclaw lived through the night, slowly limping along westwards, hoping to get back to American lines so he can report the atrocity at the crossroads. However, he eventually collapses, and sees "faces hovering around him and hands lifting him into the air", which he assumes is a dying dream. Elsewhere, on the Schnee Eifel, a patrol of paratroopers experiences the mysterious silence-and-mist-phenomenon again, and paratrooper Emil Metz is killed by a black shape which coalesces out of the mist before he can even try to defend himself. Meanwhile, Garcia returns to the hospital (having followed the sergeant all the way to a brothel) just in time for he and the Doctor to tend to Bearclaw, who was in fact picked up on the road. Upon seeing the Doctor, the delirious man calls him Nayenezgani and spontaneously testifies to having seen "Kachinas examining the bodies of the dead" before losing consciousness again.

Meanwhile, Colonel Lewis drops in on Wiesniewski on the pretense of welcoming him to his new desk job under Lewis, then brings up the rumours of "ghosts or phantoms… bodysnatchers" that have been going around. Wiesniewski plays coy and pretends to dismiss them as hallucinations caused by stress; this pleases Lewis, who tells him to put the word about that the Colonel does not want such stories discussed, on pain of being investigated for insanity (or worse, for court-martial-worthy attempts to fake it out of cowardice). After Wiesniewski agrees, Lewis walks off, inwardly worried that the situation is slipping away from his control.

Later, Bearclaw wakes up and makes his report about the Nazi massacre, in the presence of Garcia and the Doctor. The Doctor naturally worries upon hearing him mention an "English girl" among the dead, and he apologetically confirms her name to have been Samantha Jones.

Garcia confronts the sergeant in his room in the brothel; it is, obviously, Jeff Kovacs, who claims that his racket is a fairly innocent one: what with the heavy losses, the catering detail always receive more food than they have men to feed, and are meant to throw away the remainder. Kovacs instead buys it from them and sells it to civilians, sometimes for cash but mostly for good and services (such as a free room — and his pick of the girls — at the brothel). Though conflicted, Garcia agrees to turn a blind eye, though he makes it clear that he will ask Kovacs for something in return at some point.

Meanwhile, the Doctor steps out into a courtyard to clear his head and think of what to do next, now more determined than ever to find Fitz before she suffers the same fate as Sam apparently has. He is accosted by a mysterious fairy-woman who steps out from behind a tree that should have been too narrow to hide her. Claiming that they've met before (though he doesn't remember her) and that she wants to help him, she entices him into following her back where she came from, and the Doctor is baffled to find himself transported to a magical autumnal glade. There, the fairy continues flirting with him, and even takes off her dress before pressing herself against the baffled Time Lord.

Chapter Five: The Undiscovered Country
With barely any time seeming to have passed Ray Garcia finds a significantly discombobulated Doctor into the courtyard. Meanwhile, going to get some water, a frightened Wiesniewski overhears Lewis talking to his mysterious partner, whom Wiesniewski can neither see nor hear, and Bearclaw spots time stopping and three mysterious figures in surgical gowns who are invisible beneath them. Managing to find a clear exit, he hurries to get the Doctor. Back at the Nazi encampment, things are likewise taking a supernatural term as a particularly large and aggressive banks of mist begins to fill the occupied village, just as Fitz was leaving the armoured vehicle to get something to eat at the café.

In Bastogne, Bearclaw brings the Doctor and Garcia back to the surgery room in time to see the three ghostly nurses turning into flickers of light and disappearing, taking a dying patient with them. The Doctor's lack of surprise at the sight prompts an increasingly tightly-wound Garcia to ask him what he knows, but the Doctor is unwilling to commit to a hypothesis: the beings' disappearance didn't look like a transmat energy discharge, and his other guess seems unlikely to him as "surely they must be extinct by now".

Meanwile, Jurgen Leitz looks up from his work typing up an artfully-incomplete report on his research, and, stepping out of his command vehicle, finds the area himself under attack by mysterious black figures in the fog.

Elsewhere, Sam Jones, in a strange daze, feels herself travelling through a non-physical tunnel with a golden light at one end, finally arriving in a more stable "place" where she finds herself surrounded by snapshots of her former life. It is only there that she abandons her vague assumption that she's been "abducted by aliens" again and remembers just where she was before finding herself here — remembers that she is, in fact, dead. A flash of light startles her out of this strange reflective state, and she finds herself in more corporeal form once again, lying naked on her back on some kind of stone sarcophagus or altar, with a beam of bright light shining from overhead. Moving out of the way to take better stock of herself and her surroundings, she finders that her gunshot wounds have been miraculously healed, though the skin in those areas seems strangely pale and unearthly.

Back at the Nazi camp, Fitz hurries out of the café at the sound of Leitz's gunshot, immediately stumbling in the fog over the corpse of another SS soldier whose face bears beastly scratches. He hears another soldier trying to take a shot, and glimpses a huge arachnid-like creature whizzing past him on its way to maul the soldier who fired. Fitz wastes no time in deciding that it's time to escape.

In the mysterious stone room, Sam finds bland-looking clothes in her size hanging on the wall as if waiting for her, and puts them on before heading out through the sole exit she can see, which leads to a long and straight tunnel. Eventually, she exits into a mysterious wonderland of Disney-esque forests and glades, with a lake more blue than any water on Earth, and mysterious, beautiful constructions with pillars and golden domes dotted about. Walking along the lake shore, she is startled by the appearance of an elf-like creature in fine clothing, who greets her and apologises for frightening her.

Before making his escape, Fitz returns to the tent where the prisoner is being kept, knocking out the Nazi guard with a spanner after he refuses to buy Fitz's story about having been sent to relieve him. The prisoner reveals himself to be a frighteningly thin-looking man with intensely red hair, green eyes, and slitted pupils, who, too weak to walk despite the speed of his movements, asks for Fitz's help. Taking advantage of the confusion, he steals a motorcycle with a side-car, and rides out of town with the red-haired fae in the side-car, despite the pursuing gunshots. With the prisoner gone, the shadowy beings' attack on the camp abruptly ceases, saving the life of Jurgen Leitz as the monstrous beast which was attacking him loses interest; an intelligent sort of monster, he instantly realises that this means the prisoner has escaped, and is unsurprised to learn from Farber that "that corporal, Kreiner" is to blame.

Back in the faerie-realm, Sam sees German and American soldiers appearing one by one, recognising some of them as others who died in the massacre at the crossroads. This leads her to the suspicion that she is in Mictlan, and that the fairy is a Lord Celestial attempting to pressure her into taking the Mark of Indenture; her welcomer laughs off this notion, expaining that his kind found Sam (midway "on the path", which is what they call death for a mortal) before the Celestis did. The being tries to give her his name, which turns out to consist of a mixture of musical sounds, feelings, and emotions; unable to pronounce it, she bastardises it as "Galastel", which he sanguinely accepts.

Back in the mortal realm, the fairy Fitz freed finds enough composure to asks him to stop the motorcycle, as being in a craft of metal is hurting him. Understanding that Fitz had no ill intent, he thanks him for the help, and identifies the shadowy beings who attacked the Nazis as Black Dogs sent by his "clan" to look for him. Without explaining any more, the two set off into the forest on foot.

In the faerie-realm, Galastel invites Sam onto a large boat crossing the lake. As they glide over its crystal-clear water, she is surprised to see that what appears to be the silt at the bottom is actually a bird's-eye view of the Ardennes battlefield, complete with tiny tanks and shrubbery.

There, Fitz and the prisoner reach a clearing with a natural-looking stone mound in the middle. There, the fairy-man sheds the remainder of his human glamour, now appearing golden and shorter than a human, before offering Fitz shelter in his own world.

Chapter Six: Commonwealth Games
After his shift is over, Wiesniewski tries to find the Doctor, and ends up meeting him in the street, walking purposefully with Ray Garcia and Dan Bearclaw; they explain that they were on their way to discuss the "Kahinas and Leshy" — which the Doctor explains are cultural variants of the fair-folk archetype from Hopi and Polish folklore respectively — with Lewis. This prompts Wiesniewski to inform them of Lewis's conspiratorial conversation with the invisible entity, specifically bringing up Lewis's mention of an experiment in Philadelphia. The Doctor identifies it as a failed, classified experiment in October 1943 to turn a whole navy ship invisible by manipulating electromagnetic fields, leading him to speculate that Lewis was part of that team, and is now trying to replicate the experiment, most likely with the same invisible helpers who were secretly assisting with the Philadelphia Experiment. The conversation is interrupted by air-strike sirens, and they all hurry back to the hospital to help movable patients to the shelters.

In the Nazi base, at the café, Jurgen Leitz and Farber wonder what to tell their superiors, who are now asking for the prisoner to be transferred to them at the castle in Wewelsburg. They fail to notice three of the Sidhe who materialise behind their back and, taking human guises, seat themselves at inconspicuous tables in the room. Leitz briefly entertains the thought of deserting to neutral Switzerland, but ultimately, his scientific curiosity holds him back and he decides to take a chance on quickly capturing another prisoner. One of the Sidhe, paying him little mind, glides upstairs to the apartments which have been converted into a medical facility, zeroing in on the dying.

In the faerie-realm, where Galastel has identified his kind as "the Sidhe", the boat reaches its destination on the other side of the lake, a beautiful city nestled in the forest. As she walks through it, Sam notices patches of decay in the natural beauty, and realises with a start that they are echoes of bomb-craters from the human realm. The city itself, past the wonder of the first impression, is cracked and tarnished, its population sad and woeful. "These rotting patches were how the shells and bombs from the war affected the Sidhe's plane of residence that she could currently perceive. Presumably they had different effects on all the different levels that the Sidhe themselves could operate on. Perhaps they were patches of blinding light on one level, or bottomless pits on another… Sam suspected that the list of possible perceptions was longer than the casualty list for the whole war, but she was willing to bet that none of them were good."

In bombarded Bastogne, the Doctor has a heart-to-heart with Dan Bearclaw, talking him out of throwing his life away in some act of rage-fueled violence. Elsewhere, Kovacs, displaying a surprisingly philosophical attitude to the possibility of death, has stayed in his room in the brothel, and is calmly working on his account book.

In the faerie-realm, after observing the spread of more echo-damage, Sam is brought to the banquet hall of the Fairy Queen herself. Reminded of stories about mortals trapped for a hundred years in Faerie for having tasted its food, she is hesitant to accept the Queen's offer of food and drink, but the Queen assures her that the stories are exaggerated ("the unwary remain only seven years, not one hundred"), and, more to the point, that, both as a time traveller and as someone who has been brought back to life by Sidhe blood, she is not bound by the same rules as ordinary mortals in matters dealing with her kind. While Sam eats, the Queen "phases herself" in such a way that her communication is invisible to Sam, and speaks with Galastel, recommending that he take Sam on another walk through the realm while the Queen tries again to speak with the Evergreen Man.

She appears to him after the bombing stops; this time he is expecting her, and does not let her startle him. As their conversation progresses, he makes clear his preference for being addressed as "Doctor" rather than "Evergreen Man", and, assuming she will refuse to give him any of her real names, decides to refer to her as Titania, much to her amusement. Meanwhile, as promised, Galastel takes Sam on an outing, which turns out to be back in time by some number of hours, as well as on a slightly different layer of perception than she usually operates on; thus does she find herself watching her own earlier self first stepping out of the TARDIS on the bridge (being startled that the TARDIS appears as a "biomechanical crustacean" with many fluid metallic tentacles, rather than the familiar outer plasmic shell), making herself and Galastel the mysterious watchers from earlier, who could not interfere owing to the Laws of Time.

Meanwhile, Fitz continues making his way towards the American lines, finding a bike on which to make a substantial portion of the journey, though it eventually runs out of fuel. It is on foot that he finally runs into Americans, to whom he hurries to flaunt his Britishness despite his outfit; presenting himself as a spy who'd been working behind enemy lines, he cheekily gives his name as James Bond.

Sam and Galastel continue observing her earlier self's progress up until her first encounter with Jeff Kovacs in the abandoned inn; there, Galastel alters Kovacs's perception at a key moment, turning out to be the reason the Sergeant so easily accepted that Sam wasn't a spy, whatever else she may be.

Chapter Seven: The Art of War
Still walking with the Eighth Doctor, Titania finally blurts out the reason she actually wanted to speak with him: though the Sidhe do not ordinarily interfere in mortal affairs on a large scale, they have become affected by World War II due to a rift of some kind in this region, which is causing damage to leak from the mortal plane onto their layer of reality. She then reveals to him that Sam Jones is still alive, as are all others who have "died" in the mortal realm since the rift opened, as none die in the Queen's domain without her permission. The Doctor realises that she's been saving them by essentially transforming them into fairies themselves, and he's disturbed by the fact that they get no choice in this; Titania agrees to start giving mortals an explicit choice in exchange for his help in closing the rift, and returns him to the hospital in the mortal realm.

Meanwhile, back in the faerie-realm, Oberon, Titani's husband, reveals himself to have been watching from the trees — incidentally revealing the cause of Titania's earlier amusement, namely that her name is in fact Titania. He mocks her for her flirtations with the Doctor, and she, in turn, chides him from his interference in the war via his "pet mortal".

At the Allied HQ, Lewis has made Jeff Kovacs responsible for building defences against aerial attacks. Muttering aloud his frustration with the "gossip" in Kovacs's presence, he is pleased to realise that Kovacs neither knows nor cares about the ghost-stories about the mist. Returning to his office, he wearily looks back on the original Philadelphia Experiment which ended with not only the USS Eldridge vanishing — seemingly disintegrated — but also with several sailors who'd been working around the shipyard at the same time vanishing midway through a bar-room brawl some days later. Lewis then receives a visit from Oberon, who complains at the slowness of the technological project with which he's been helping Lewis, and also berates him for not having warned him of "the Ever Green Man"'s presence, ordering him to have the Doctor killed posthaste.

Meanwhile, having returned from standing a shift on watch at one of the city’s roads, Bearclaw finds the Doctor still standing in the street, a little dazed. He thinks to mention the "secret agent James Bond" to the Doctor, who instantly realises he means Fitz and bursts out laughing, overjoyed. He quickly meets up with Fitz, who describes what he learned during his time in the Nazi base, and is floored when the Doctor confirms his disbelieving observation that the prisoner he rescued seemed to be nothing more or less than an actual elf. He then informs him that Lewis has his own plans, and has on his side Oberon, who, as Amadan na Briona, is tasked by the Sidhe's traditions with embodying chaos just as his consort Titania embodies order, meaning it is in his nature to cause trouble and it is against Titania's to stop him. Mortals, however, are free to try and hold him to accounts, whcih they resolve to do — just as soon as they figure out exactly what Lewis is even up to.

As a matter of fact, Lewis has driven out (or rather, gotten Kovacs to drive him out) to the testing site for his secret project, a farm on the edge of the occupied town, and Kovacs watches in bafflement as he tests one of the six speciallly-outfitted tanks, riding it all the way out of visible existence. Meanwhile, the Doctor explains the Sidhe's nature as beings capable of perceiving and existing in all eleven dimensions to Fitz, Wiesniewski and Garcia. They can scarcely believe him — until Sam materialises in the middle of the room in just the sort of manner the Doctor described as the Sidhe being capable of doing.

Meanwhile, Lewis gets to the secret meeting his invisible tank enabled — the latest in several background talks he's been having with none other than Jurgen Leitz. Though they do not let it interfere with their respective military operations, the two have been sharing informations on the elves and their "Marchenland"; they both consider the Soviet Union a more existential threat to their shared "West" than one another, and hope that whichever side gains control of the West, they will be able to use their discoveries in the forecasted future war against the Russians.

Chapter Eight: Natural History
While Sam reunites with Fitz and the Doctor, Oberon phases unexpectedly into Titania's chambers to berate her once again for her flirtation with the Doctor, uncaring of Titania's retort that their marriage is only political and he has no reason to care about her private affairs. He tells her, in any case, that in his opinion the Doctor will never return her feelings, being much more interested in adventure than romance; pursuant to which, he boasts, he has himself arranged more trouble for the Doctor to foil. When Titania asks, however, he inevitably refuses to provide any details.

Shortly after returning to Lanzerath, Leitz recognises a gown-wearing medic in the mess hall as a disguised Sidhe, forcing him to reveal himself; fleeing with much commotion, the elf is pursued into the forest by Leitz and his men, one of whom — going against Leitz's orders — manages to lehtally shoot the fae, who was too close to one of the metallic armoured vehicles to phase properly so as to become bulletproof. The death is felt at once by a raging Oberon (as it is by all the Sidhe of the clan), who decides to unleash the Black Dogs again; after saying as much to Titania, he makes this change of plans known to Lewis, and also makes it clear that he will not instruct the Dogs to spare Lewis's own men — partially a result of his general lack of concern for mortals, but also a punishment for Lewis failing to take action to kill the Doctor as Oberon had recommended.

Unaware of these developments, the Doctor has another heart-to-heart with Sam, asking her how she's feeling after her traumatic death and resurrection. Sam acknowledges that she is disturbed at the thought of now being alive thanks to the presence of fairy flesh within her, wondering if she's even human anymore, and if she's even actually Sam Jones or just a changeling who believes herself to be the original. The Doctor assures her that she's real, and explains that the Sidhe prompted a process best thought of as comparable to Time Lord regeneration, allowing her body and her biodata to stitch themselves back together on their own terms, albeit with a little "nudge" from outside. Telling her about his own kind's regeneration, and how it can affect their biodata to the point of retroactively altering their past, he wryly concludes: "[now] I'm half human and you're half human".

Having overheard Lewis muttering after his meeting with Leitz, Kovacs, unsure of who else he could trust, finds Ray Garcia and confides in him. He is overheard by the Doctor, who asks him to come back at dawn (when he's sober) so they can fill him in on the wider situation. Later, while working on his battle-plans, Lewis gets a surprise visit from the Doctor, who makes it clear that he knows about Lewis's activities with Leitz and the Sidhe. The Doctor claims to have photographic evidence of his meetings with Leitz, and threatens to release it — not just to his superiors, but to his men right here in the base, who might choose to exact their own emergency justice for such a betrayal. In exchange for his silence, he demands Lewis's help in recovering the TARDIS from the river. Confident that he can use such a risky operation as an occasion to assassinate the Doctor at last, Lewis agrees.

Meanwhile, Sam has convinced Galastel to show her the rift itself, a "tremendous glowing crack in the sky" over the Schnee Eifel. To her distress, she finds, swarming around it, a huge amount of the species of interdimensinal swarm-feeders known as the Beast (which Galastel more formally calls "the Bealsch"), as she previously encountered them in 1963, who seem to be responsible for the tear's existence. They consider killing the Bealsch, but naturally, the Doctor insists that this isn't an option, lest they cause a paradox relative to their earlier encounter with the nineteen-years-older version of the swarm. Fitz is left to contemplate the bitter fact that in essence, they have to make sure the Bealsch are in a position to kill his mum.

Chapter Nine: The Best Form of Defence
In the night, Ray Garcia, a lifelong Christian, gets drunk as he tries to reconcile what he's learned with his faith. Fitz Kreiner is able to comfort him, suggesting that there is no reason to think other aliens weren't simply created by God just like Earth's humans; to his anxiety about whether the Sidhe are "angels or demons", Fitz suggests that they, too, might just be people. Thereafter, Garcia goes to find Jeff Kovacs and, calling in his favour from earlier, talks him into accompanying him, the Doctor, Fitz, Bearclaw and Wiesniewski on an expedition to the Schnee Eifel to recover the TARDIS.

Kovacs reluctantly agrees, though he extracts a promise for another favour from Galastel: not money, surprisingly enough, but a request for him to transport Kovacs to the front of the Pacific line once all this is over. Since Lewis refused to grant them any equipment, the Doctor decides to try and steal some German tanks. On their way to the German lines, they come across an actual moving Panzer; the Doctor blocks its path, cheerfully declaring himself an Allied spy, and, as they open fire without stopping, he throws himself flat on the ground, between the treads, as it rolls over him then stops. Thanks to this distraction, Bearclaw, Kovacs and Wiesniewski successfully jump the Nazis and shoot them, something with which the Doctor is clearly not entirely comfortable (much like Fitz and Garcia).

However, they have little time to consider the moral quandary as, immediately after they climb aboard the tank, they receive a radio call from another, nearby Nazi vehicle, a larger King Tiger tank, which wastes no time before charging at them once they fail to answer. The Doctor manages to solve the crisis swiftly and non-lethally, however, by maneuvering this Tiger into firing at the other following it close behind, then shooting out its treads, with the crew managing to make it out of both tanks.

Witnessing this from afar, Oberon soon returns to berate Lewis for failing to kill the Doctor, to which Lewis replies that he was trying to, having given the Doctor and friends the faulty map which led them right into the German ambush. An aggravated Oberon reminds Lewis that the Doctor successfully closing the rift would be a much starker problem for Lewis and his invisible tanks than for Oberon's own, more fluid agenda, and orders him to hurry to the Schnee Eifel in person to take care of the Evergreen Man once and for all.

Chapter Ten: No Friendlies
While the Eighth Doctor and friends use the Panzer to pull the TARDIS out of the river, Sam Jones quick-travels with Galastel to the location of the rift through the lands of the Fae. After successfully recovering the TARDIS, the World War II men wonder how they're going to get it and the tank to the rift, only for the Doctor to solve both problems by materialising the TARDIS around the tank, revealing the ship's dimensional transcendentalism. Inside, they discuss the way to close the rift, which the Doctor will cause Lewis's modified phase-shifting tanks to stop working. Metal in large quantities disrupts the rift due to its electromagnetic component, for much the same reason it harms the Sidhe.

However, to close the rift, they'd need "about two thousand tons of steel", or hundreds of tanks; the humans are shocked when the Doctor reveals he has a plan in mind for how to acquire it, apparently involving the contribution of Lewis himself, but he refuses to elaborate and simply departs in the TARDIS with Sam and Fitz, leaving the humans to fell trees in order to create a roadblock on both sides of the crossroads, intending to block, or at least delay, any further experimentation with the rift by the pair of Lewis and Leitz. Though confused when what appears to be the real Sam appears with Galastel to help them, calling into question the identity of the Sam who left with the Doctor, they acquit themselves admirably. This proves well-inspired as columns of tanks from both sides try to get to the crossorads. After the logs successfully delay the American tanks, Wiesniewski decides to take a chance on explaining their commanding officer's treasonous plans to one of the Shermans' drivers, who reluctantly believes him, and tells the rest of the Americans to get out of their tanks. Meanwhile, Sam and Bearclaw think to use the perception trick Galastel and the other Sidhe can perform in order to lure the German Tigers into the forest and then get them to destroy the now-vacant modified American tanks, dealing with the threat of the phase-shifting war machines for good.

Lewis arrives on the scene, realising that the Doctor, Wiesniewski and Garcia have outwitted him. Wiesniewski, who does not realise the extent of the Colonel's immorality, draws him into the woods to try and win him over as well, and is caught off-guard when Lewis simply shoots him without even listening to the first words he says.

Chapter Eleven: All the Time in the World
While Bearclaw and Garcia work on luring the German tanks towards the position of the Shermans, the Eighth Doctor materialises the TARDIS a year earlier in Philadelphia. "Sam" and Fitz are aghast and amused all at once when they realise that he intends to steal the USS Eldridge, the ship from the original Philadelphia Experiment, and use it to plug the rift — thus accounting for its disappearance.

In 1944, unaware of the plan with the Shermans, Kovacs manages to ambush and kill Leitz when he arrives in his own tank, then take over the tank, and suicidally charges it back at the remaining German forces. Though wounded and knocked about, he survives, motivated by his monomaniacal determination to make it to the Pacific front. Enough German tanks are left that Bearclaw and Garcia successfully get them to destroy the last of the Shermans, though Lewis is left unharmed. Meanwhile, the Doctor has landed the TARDIS on top of the ship itself, which is a psychedelic hellscape as a result of the poorly-managed, primitive dimension-shifting experiment.

As he wires the ship to the TARDIS control console, he notices aloud that something had already been done to the ship to render it possible for Sidhe to tread upon despite its metallic nature; he voices his guess that these are not contemporary, 1943 Fae but Oberon or one of his cronies following them back through time, prompting "Sam" to reveal herself to really be Oberon under a perception-glamour. He orders Fitz to run back into the TARDIS and then enters a physical struggle with Oberon, who has materialised a "dagger of pure malice" out of the air. Despite Oberon's use of his ability to phase through solid matter, the Doctor's speed and cunning finally allow him to take the dagger out of his hands, and use it to cut off the degaussing circuitry Oberon was using to make it possible for him to walk on the ship. Trapped in place in a cage of electromagnetism, he rages and pleads for the Doctor to release him, but the Doctor quietly admits that he would have no idea how to do so even if he wanted to, and that Oberon will be destroyed when he materialises the ship into the rift. Before he returns to the TARDIS to help Fitz complete the dematerialisation process, he deduces aloud the Sidhe King's true purpose for having gotten involved in the War: not mere hedonistic malice as he had assumed, but a repressed need to push against the rules of his nature as far as they could go, and find out if he would ever reach a breaking point. "I think that’s what you hoped to gain from meddling in the war. I think you wanted the only thing you didn’t have – a limit. You risked the destruction of your own world and the humans, just to see how far you could go before you were stopped. Well, now you know."

- Eighth Doctor

Oberon is indeed unraveled as the Rift closes, with the explosion sending a shockwave that knocks down the remaining human fighters. As he goes to tend to the wounded, Garcia is speared with a bayonette by a German soldier he was trying to save, dying with "Why?" as his final words.

After one last, soulful conversation with Titania (who, though she will need to find a new aspect of the Amadan na Briona to replace the destroyed Oberon, seems to have abandoned her nuptial designs on him), the Doctor returns to the TARDIS. There, Sam, who ended up asking Galastel to restore her to a normal, human perception of the world, further decides that she wants to go home, fearing that she'll lose herself is she undergoes any more transformations, as she inevitably will if she keeps travelling with the Doctor. Fitz and the Doctor are both saddened by the abrupt decision, though she assures them it's not either of their fault but simply her own choice to assert her own identity. Having agreed to head for 1997 Earth or thereabouts, they leave again.

Characters

 * Dan Bearclaw
 * Cahill
 * Charlie Daniels
 * Dexter
 * Eighth Doctor
 * Farber
 * Private Fleps
 * Galastel
 * Doctor Ray Garcia
 * Doctor Ray Garcia's wife
 * Captain Graumann
 * Corporal Joe Harris
 * Colonel Von Hofman
 * Jansen
 * Jonas
 * Sam Jones
 * Ewald von Kleist
 * Sergeant Jeff Kovacs
 * Fitz Kreiner
 * Jurgen Leitz
 * Colonel Allen Lewis
 * Anthony McAuliffe
 * Emil Metz
 * Troy H. Middleton
 * Bernard Montgomery
 * Oberon
 * Jochen Peiper
 * Major Poetschke
 * Unnamed prisoner
 * Russ
 * Otto Skorenzy
 * Titania
 * Wade
 * Lieutenant Wiesniewski

Locations

 * The Doctor hides the ship from the Philadelphia Experiment underneath the Schnee Eifel.

TARDIS

 * Everytime the Doctor tries to leave Earth, the TARDIS is put into a temporal orbit.
 * The novel's title, Autumn Mist (Herbstnebel in German), was the final codename for to the.

Story notes

 * The Philadelphia Experiment was also at the heart of The Macro Men, a Doctor Who TV script developed in 1984 under Eric Saward's script editorship but ultimately left unproduced. Like in Autumn Mist, it was revealed that in the Doctor Who universe, the experiment was a genuine event with the USS Eldridge's disappearance actually representing its slippage into another dimension — though the storyline of The Macro Men was otherwise different. The audio story would go on to be adapted into an audio drama by Big Finish Productions as part of The Lost Stories as The Macros.
 * This story is unique in containing a pop-culture reference to Quatermass, suggested to exist in-universe as a fictional TV story. The vast majority of Doctor Who stories which nod to its fellow vintage BBC science-fiction series instead suggested Bernard Quatermass actually existed within the Doctor Who universe.
 * Fitz initially believes that the Doctor "do[es]n't believe in magic, elves, fairies or Santa Claus".
 * The Doctor speculates that the Sidhe may be "psychomaterial constructs from a parallel evolutionary path" relative to humanity.
 * Jeff Kovacs complains "None of us are John freaking Wayne".

Continuity

 * The Sidhe were first mentioned by David A. McIntee in PROSE: and had again been referenced in PROSE:, from whose aftermath regarding Sam Jones's timeline Sam and Fitz are still reeling as the book starts.
 * The Eighth Doctor still doesn't have a shadow, following his infection by the biodata virus in PROSE: . When he mentions his past lifetimes only for a soldier unknowing of his Time Lord nature to state that "the war" changes everyone, the Doctor absently nods "That too", evidently alluding to the way the biodata virus has rewritten him as a byproduct of the War.
 * When the Doctor states that bodies aren't supposed to go missing from hospitals, he "seem[s] to think twice" and adds "Well, except under some pretty exceptional circumstances", evidently referencing the circumstances of his own regeneration as depicted in TV:, where, after being declared dead and placed in a morgue, the Seventh Doctor regenerated into the Eighth, who promptly escaped.
 * Sam mentions that the last time the TARDIS was left to float in space, they were hauled off to Skaro, referencing the events of PROSE:
 * The Doctor still has a World War II identification number, as "John Smith", from his time driving an ambulance at El Alamein "several lifetimes ago". The Third Doctor previously claimed to have taken part in the Battle of El Alamein to Robbins in TV:, though it was not clear that he was telling the truth. The Fifth Doctor would again reference his presence at El Alamein in earnest in PROSE:.
 * The Doctor references his dealings with the female personification of Death, a recurring thread through the Virgin New Adventures which started in PROSE: : when he gives one of his professions as "cheating Death", and Ray Garcia replies "The problem with cheating Death is that he’s a sore loser at the best of times", the Doctor corrects "Yes, she is". When Garcia suggests there is some psychoanalytical reason for his association of death with femininity, the Doctor goes on to insist that he is simply telling the truth.
 * Sam compares the Sidhe's healing to that of the nanites on Bel, as seen in PROSE:.
 * Sam briefly believes the fairies and their realm to be Mictlan, explaining that "the Doctor warned [her] about how the Celestis take those on the brink of death to Mictlan to persuade them to enter their service", as he learned in PROSE:.
 * The Doctor inexplicably produces an intact cup of tea from nowhere in the middle of a crisis situation and refuses to explain, a beat later repeated by the Twelfh Doctor in TV:.
 * The Doctor reflects on how "for all humanity's violence, wherever [he] go[es], [he] still meet[s] people who passionately want to hold back death". The phrase "to hold back death" was pivotal in TV: as the lifelong dream of the Eighth Doctor's first companion, Grace Holloway.
 * On the matter of the Doctor's species, Titania states that "part of [him] is [ human ] ", referencing the revelation in TV: that the Doctor was "half-human on his mother's side". The Doctor, however, replies that the question is "debatable", referencing the way in which multiple prior entries in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures had cast doubt on the notion or suggested it was the product of fluctations in time, most recently the immediately prior book, PROSE: . The Doctor goes on to discuss the idea, discussed in that book, that due to the nature of a Time Lord's biodata, the Seventh Doctor's regeneration into the Eighth changed his past as well as his future, and is responsible for him now being-and-always-having-been half-human.
 * When the Doctor tells Sam about Time Lord regeneration, she asks if the Doctor could regenerate into a woman and "how that would work". The Doctor "pauses thoughtfully" before replying "I'll explain later". The phrase was used as a running joke throughout then then-recent TV:, which also ended with an alternative Doctor's regeneration into a female Thirteenth Doctor played by Joanna Lumley, the first explicit depiction in official Doctor Who media of the possibility of the Doctor changing sex via regeneration.
 * The plot turns out ot hinge on the Bealsch, alias "the Beast", who were previously pivotal to PROSE: . The Doctor, Sam and Fitz recall their adventure in 1963 upon meeting them again.
 * The Doctor materialises the TARDIS around the Panzer, making it appear in the TARDIS garage where he used to park his VW Beetle "before it was melted down" as established in PROSE:.
 * When Fitz brings up the possibility of "archaeologists from the future" being confused by the buried evidence of the adventure — particularly the USS Eldridge being buried in Belgium — the Doctor states that he can "think of at least one who'd see the funny side", referencing his former companion Bernice Summerfield, a 26th century archaeologist. Benny was introduced in PROSE: and met the Eighth Doctor in PROSE:.
 * The story acknowledges the idea, introduced in PROSE:, that the Eighth Doctor's Victorian TARDIS control room is a different control room from the classic white interior; when wanting to return to said room, he locks the TARDIS, flicks his wrist strangely at it, then opens the doors again, now revealing the white room instead of the Victorian one. He states that to go from one control room to the other, they'd otherwise have to "walk through three miles of corridor".