Kampp pushes a burning head through the gap he has created. The black coral has utterly consumed the flesh.
Nothing remains but an obscene insect mask bearing only a token resemblance to what he once was. The mouth chitters and chatters as if too full of energy to remain contained.
Before Romana can act, before she can think of any way out of this, the door collapses and the two... things that were once men stagger in. They peer around, as if trying to focus on her.
‘Huvan, according to all the known rules of dramatic structure, the time has come to act. Now!’
Nothing happens.
Perhaps responding to her voice, the tottering pair reach out for her. Huvan does nothing, just lies there. Already Romana feels the tugging at her mind. A tugging she understands now, instigated by Valdemar. Her eyes begin to itch as she backs against the wall.
As the men approach she feels strangely disconnected, as if this were all happening to someone else. ‘Please, no,’ she tries to say, but cannot. She can feel their singed gloves as they reach her, the distorted hands clutching her face, sees the black mirrors of their eyes. But she is somewhere else, somewhere dark and cold that screams for release.
All that is certain is that we move, together.
We travel down a great, dark, rushing tunnel, understanding that it is not only space and time, but also other forms of universal movement and distance. A vista of the indescribable, of the greater.
At first, there is only a great unity, a single one Movement, brighter than anything before or since. The whole, all.
Slowly, sheets of movement become clear; spinning, immense
idiosyncratic
waves
separating,
becoming
arrhythmic. More subdivision, and again, as the single harmony becomes an infinity of eccentric movements that make up the whole.
We realise (for neither ‘perceive’ nor ‘see’ can do justice) that which, although us, is also beyond us. Smaller forms, with their own crystal activities that we once thought of as separate life forms travel through their cycles, spanning centuries. A great race, conical and many-limbed, flying through the universe on membranous wings; urged on by the solar winds, scouring planets, learning, until finally the patterns coalesce on to a shining world, a blue planet soaked in ocean.
The construction, from the raw matter of the Movement.
Beneath the surface, a circle constructed, controlled from the structure above – a great hammer with which to smash a way into the whole, to break it open. The race tearing and ripping a wound through the dance. We see them subsumed, their own movements zephyrs of swirling dust disseminated into the greater spinning clouds until nothing is left. The Old Ones.
(‘Romana’)
A seal, a patch bolted over the tear, the forces which are the Movement, which are us, held at bay. The closing, the blue oceans changing hue, altering their patterns for ever.
(‘Romana’)
Slowly, as the rhythm is regained, we correct ourselves.
Our damage, over centuries, is repaired. Until, later in the eternal Movement, we will see the actions repeated.
(‘Romana!’)
A sound, many sounds, harsh and angry, burst into her consciousness. There is a blinding light and something more.
Romana feels severed from herself.
As she realises that she is still in Huvan’s chamber, despite the centuries, something heavy and lifeless falls on to her.
Kampp’s corpse, his body stilled by bullets riveted into him.
A black film blurs Romana’s vision.
‘They have been touched,’ comes a voice she remembers from the distant past. When she was... Neville, his name is Neville. ‘Bring them.’
Part of her mind that she recognises as her own self-will forces her to resist this new consciousness. She needs a pathway, a track back to herself. Think, think back. The basic tenets, the Seven Strictures of Rassillon. Repeat them.
Repeat them! One at a time, over and over again. The Seven Strictures...
The immensity narrows and she can see herself, from above, the corpse of Kampp being lifted from her littleness.
With a swoop, she is back into her own small, separate self.
The Seven Strictures bounce around the box of her mind.
She feels the warm, scented air of the palace fill her lungs.
A guard, white-faced beneath his visor, pulls her to her feet. She pushes him away, trying to regain her composure.
‘Thank you,’ she says in her old voice. ‘I can manage.’
Neville is bent over the supine Huvan, examining his eyes.
Romana sees how old he has become, and also the black shadows in his face. This force, this unleashed power has touched him too. She wonders if he can see that.
As she watches, trying to regain her focus, Neville lifts the boy’s eyelids. ‘Valdemar is in him. He has been washed clean, ready for the possession. Praise to the Dark One.’
‘Praise to the Dark One,’ respond the handful of guards stationed in the room. They lower their eyes.
‘Bear him with us,’ says Neville, reverently. ‘Gently.’
He turns and Romana sees that he has been touched by more than Valdemar. His eyes shine with madness. ‘And you, his consort. It has been written.’
Despite the shock, despite what feels like near absorption into the stuff of the universe itself, Romana feels she is gaining in strength. ‘Neville,’ she says, steadier. ‘You must end this. I’m very grateful to you, I think you saved more than my life and I wish to return the favour. Leave this place.
There is nothing here for you.’
‘Really?’
Romana thinks about her – call it ‘communion’, for want of a better word. ‘I know the history of this palace, this planet.
The Old Ones were mistaken. They thought they could improve themselves by opening the higher dimensions.
Instead, the higher dimensions swamped them, overwhelmed their race. They, and you, were never meant to perceive the universe in its totality.’
Neville turns, ignoring her. With a crooked finger he indicates the guards are to bring her. They clasp her arms.
This is ridiculous, she thinks. What has got into him?
‘Valdemar isn’t a god,’ she cries. ‘It’s an experiment that went horribly wrong.’
No good. He just doesn’t want to listen. She struggles as the guards haul her out of the room. ‘Neville! If you don’t want to listen to me, listen to the Doctor. He is infuriatingly right, you know.’
At last, as she is dragged out into the corridor, he turns and looks up. Perhaps he imagines a halo over his own head.
‘My dear,’ he sneers. ‘Bride of the Chosen One. Fear not for the Doctor. The enemies of Valdemar attend a fool’s errand, for He cannot be fought.’
Through the verbiage, the messianic rubbish, Romana understands. She feels weak and her throat dries. He hasn’t... he can’t have...
‘The Doctor has gone, into the clouds of this blasted planet.
Gone, so the Magus might live!’
Oh yea...
Listen to the words of the Magus! He is calm now as he waits in his place above, looking down on his vessel, no longer the human Neville but The Red Right Hand of Valdemar. The Becoming is nigh! Hail to the Magus!
The final act draws near, the Dark One stirs. The Magus is His rod and His staff.
He bears the body of the Chosen One, and bride, to the tomb.
The road is long and fraught with danger. The Magus may see this and understand this is how it must be, for his foes lay many traps and tricks to hold His glory within.
The mighty Valdemar has foreseen this and given human Neville the power to overcome.
Bear the bridal couple gently through the thoroughfares of His mighty palace! Bear them gently. The acolytes line the route to the metal craft that will lower them to the place of opening. Past the bodies of the fallen, the sacrificed, with their trickli
ng streams and perfumed garden. Onwards! On!
To the airlock where the Doctor was banished.
The sacrifice of the Doctor was the final act, the blood quota that brought the Magus into full Becoming. Pelham was a nothing, a pawn in the game, but human Neville realised in the end that the Doctor was the final test, the last temptation.
At the head of the procession, the Magus turns, arms raised. He stares back at the line of guards, his disciples, and the offerings they bear. Huvan and Romana.
However, there are more. The Magus seems to see more, following in their wake. Black-shrouded disciples, thousands of them from thousands of planets. A multitude of faith that terminates with him, all focused on his glory. Their numbers reveal a diversity of races, odd faces and limbs, spectral and pale, all paying tribute to him, the one who released the Dark One.
‘Your suffering is almost over, my brethren!’ the Magus shrieks, fired with the Word of Valdemar. ‘All your work, your belief is imminently to find its reward, in me!’
The guards look around, the confusion on their faces no doubt due to the sudden realisation of the horde behind them. Even the palace walls have disappeared and the Magus sees he stands on a mount, a green, grassy mount in the open air, swarming with apostles of the cult. He roars.
Something is stirring deep inside Huvan. His last real memory is of Romana coming back to him, shutting herself in with him. Then there was nothing but a black tide and visions so shocking and obscene it would be wrong for me to detail them here.
I must tell the rest of this story quickly, Ponch, for I do not have much time left. I know it is galling that I am interrupted at this late stage, after you have been listening so carefully, so precisely. I was hoping to get to the end without further interruption, but even stories do not always travel along the paths you would wish them to. It may be months before you understand, before you realise the significance of this that I am telling you.
I tell it not because I think there is anything to learn, I tell it because I am old.
Take me back to the inn; I have my reasons. You must help me to my feet; I cannot walk in this snow.
Ah, age is a new life. When a woman is old, she feels that her body, her shell, is a different companion to the one she knew before. No longer a faithful pet, obedient to her every order, no matter how stupid or self-destructive. The body becomes demanding, selfish, unwilling to do as it is told. One day you wake up and you realise you are the slave, not the mistress. And later, you realise that, in fact, it was always like this.
Don’t be impatient, Romana and Huvan and the others can wait. I need a drink. Is it far?
All right, all right, I won’t stop.
How dare you! Don’t you think I know the dangers of splitting up a narrative, the loss of tension it entails, the dislocation? Young people today; they want it all on a plate.
Do you think I’m doing this just to be pretentious?
No, and I haven’t lost the plot. It’s just there seem to be a lot of characters and it’s hard to get the timing right. Fair enough, Mr Redfearn. Perhaps he is a little incongruous, but I like him. You’ll just have to accept it.
However – ouch, mind that stone – we aren’t doing the others at the moment. We’re doing Romana and Huvan.’
Oh, Huvan. He hardly knows what has hit him. Certainly, he has no idea of the forces that course through him. When Romana came back to him he felt a completion, a destiny that his addled mind was no longer able to comprehend or cope with. The demands of the palace, and the widening gap in the doorway to the tomb of Valdemar were simply too much for him. Imagine the force that is blasting through his mind, for he is one with the palace, the sole coordinator of its arcane intentions.
He is barely aware, caught in a loop of his own fantasies as he is, that he is being laid in the bathyscape, ready for the final opening of the tomb.
Neville is in the ascendance now, eyes wide and staring. He orders his retinue, his faithful followers to remain inside the palace; he says to provide a line of defence against any that might now try to stop Valdemar’s rebirth, but in reality because he doesn’t want to share the revelations with anybody.
Romana is subdued as she ducks into the tiny vessel, outwardly calm but a mass of emotions. Neville or, as he now knows himself, the Magus, is hardly aware of her presence, save as a symbolic fulfilment of his knowledge. It was all there, in the mythologies so meticulously collected by human Neville – the witch-bride of the Centauri, the duo consort of the Binarii, even the crude Nagwife fairy tales of the Ogrons –
all clues to the symbolism and meaning of Romana’s appearance.
The vessel must have his consort. The weak human Neville had failed to recognise the self-evident; his human blindness preventing him from realising the inevitable. He had groomed Miranda Pelham for that particular role.
She had risen up from the tomb itself, Pelham the bridesmaid and not the bride; the Doctor a test.
They had appeared out of nowhere in the tomb, just exactly at this moment, had they? It wouldn’t have fooled a child.
The problems of the past few days, the fears that human Neville might fail in his ambitions, now seem amusing. The Doctor and Pelham are nothing but liquid slops rising to the surface.
Neville pumps the sparking battery fluid, generating sufficient energy to ignite the power in the bathyscape.
Romana sits quietly, a cold expression of general disapproval on her face as she supports Huvan.
The engine fires and the bathyscape lurches. Automatic, computer-controlled bundling lifts the small vessel off the ground. The technology is human, bolted on to the side of this alien palace. It is clumsy, designed for weak, soft creatures. Upon the resurrection, there will be no need for such puny devices.
For some reason, this casual thought now perturbs the Magus. He has forgotten something perhaps, overlooked something? He feels the old Neville threatening to re-emerge.
What could it be?
‘Mr Neville,’ says Romana suddenly, ‘I really believe that if you gave me the opportunity to explain the situation you would think again about attempting to open the gateway.’
The Magus can barely hear her, instead operating the controls for the exterior hatches, the ones through which the Doctor and Pelham so recently exited. The metal, telescopic arm stretches out, lifting the bathyscape away from the deadly updraught of the planet’s core. The giant chains grind and rattle in the deafening gold-and-red of Ashkellia’s clouds.
Acid rain sprays with a hiss across the portholes, sending up spirals of liquid smoke.
‘I believe the effects of the higher dimensions stored in the palace are altering our beings.’ Romana is trying again, breaking into his triumphant moments. ‘Your butler was what we may all end up resembling. The key is this boy. By taking him to the heart of the Old Ones’ experiment, you will...’
‘Hold your prattling tongue!’ Neville yells at her as the bathyscape drops, making stomachs churn. At frightening speed, the chain over their heads unravels. Through the porthole, the Magus observes the palace shrink, and the clouds wrap themselves round it until it is gone from sight.
In truth, Romana knows her attempts at reason are at best halfhearted. She isn’t going to change his mind. Perhaps the Doctor might have done, but the Doctor is dead.
There is something wrong with Paul Neville, something very wrong. His schizophrenia has overwhelmed his personality to the extent that the situation is probably irretrievable.
The lowering of the bathyscape is echoing the lowering in her own mind.
She feels an emotional pull she has not encountered before.
One fact sits like a lead weight inside her. The Doctor is dead. Now this whole situation, this whole mess, has become her sole responsibility. And she knows she is not ready.
The whole concept of a Time Lord, of the Doctor, being killed, dying for ever, is a fact she could theorise, could rationalise. The truth, as she is now discovering, is very very different. She ha
s never known a life swept away like this.
Even after the recent, unheard of, Sontaran occupation, she had been far enough away for the deaths of those few Time Lords involved to be little more than horror stories.
What is she going to do? Just what is she going to do?
Romana feels she is starting to understand a little more about the Doctor. He had been someone who regularly faced such decisions. She had read what little actual evidence there was of his history – the famous Master affair, Omega’s dread return, his mission to Skaro. All heavyweight assignments and in each case he had returned, if not always triumphant, but at least with the situation resolved.
It is simply beyond her understanding that he should die now, at the start of a new, long and complicated mission, down a cul-de-sac not even related to that task. She had never thought the weight of responsibility could prove so traumatic.
Grief, she muses, it must be grief. Not a pleasant emotion but one so overwhelming, that it is paralysing her. She realises just how small she is compared to the universe she inhabits.
She must focus her energies, somehow and find her own Key. The Doctor, what would he have wanted her to do?
Think about that. She must not let his memory die.
Her experience at the hands of Kampp was important. She remembered the pull, the temptation to allow herself to be swallowed up by the universal whole, to subsume her identity back into the raw stuff of creation.
A new thought strikes her – perhaps the Key to Time mission, the details of which she is still foggy about, is only a minor ambition. What happened to her in Huvan’s bedroom, this was something that would, if released, affect reality itself for ever. If only she knew what to do.
She is not strong enough, not yet. She cannot feel it now, but the effects of the higher dimensions are inevitably warping her mind and perceptions without her knowing. This makes her unfit for the task. She must hand over the responsibility to those with clearer minds. A plan is forming in her head. They are travelling back to the tomb... no, no, the particle accelerator; there is no tomb. Here she will attempt to elude Neville if she can, and make her way back to the Doctor’s TARDIS. She will have to attempt to idiosynchronise the machine to respond to her metabolism, with K-9’s help, and contact Gallifrey. They will know what to do. They will relieve her of this intolerable burden. This is what the Doctor would have wanted, she understands that now.
The Tomb of Valdemar Page 19
