The Tomb of Valdemar

by Simon Messingham

  Then, the weight is gone and the crones scream. A high-pitched, piercing noise Hopkins will take to his grave. A fusillade of rapid shots thuds into their wasted forms.

  Hopkins punches himself clear, feeling the bullets whine over his head.

  He rolls over to see Mr Redfearn firing, faster than even he has ever seen him fire before. The marksman is calm; shooting two-handed, pumping bullets into the witches, blasting them away from him.

  ‘Ah suggest you crawl towards me, Citizen,’ says Mr Redfearn, smoothly flicking the smoking barrels open to reload. Hopkins obeys, hearing the dreadful laughter dying behind him. Mr Redfearn helps him to his feet.

  Hopkins turns and sees the riddled bundles jerk and cease their scrabbling movements. ‘Nice to make yo’ acquaintance, ladies,’ says the sharpshooter.

  The bundles begin to move. If Mr Redfearn is affected by this, he doesn’t show it. He raises his guns again. ‘Well, now there’s a thing.’

  ‘Get out of here,’ says Hopkins, ‘Get out!’

  The bundles rise. ‘Not polite,’ says Diana.

  ‘Most impolite,’ says Juno. ‘Feed us!’

  Mr Redfearn fires enough bullets to bring them down once more. The air is sickly with cordite and smoke.

  Hopkins has had enough. He turns and bolts into the corridor.

  He should have been more cautious. Of course he should. It is his own fault Neville has so successfully routed his entire task force. For the first time in his life, Hopkins has been guilty of overconfidence. Or perhaps over-eagerness; after all, he knows his determination to bring the cult leader in is becoming obsessive.

  The element of surprise simply hadn’t worked. These fiendish traps are the result of careful planning on the part of his rival. Pelham must have betrayed him. That is the only possible reasoning. Odd really – he had felt he understood the woman’s weaknesses better than anyone, her morbid fear of her own mortality that underlined everything she did. This made her particularly malleable, or so he had thought.

  As he waits for Mr Redfearn in the lip of an anti-grav shaft, he broods over his mistakes. Never blame others. The only failure is the failure of one’s own conscious will. Still, the game is not over. Neville hasn’t escaped him yet. There is still time.

  Gunfire blazes down the corridor. ‘Redfearn!’ Hopkins bellows, no longer caring whether he is heard by anything his rival has left prowling for him. Time is of the essence; he must get back to his ship.

  The gunslinger finally appears, very quickly indeed. The hat has gone, his long grey hair flows behind him. As he runs, he thrusts his smoking pistols back into their holsters.

  ‘Ah do believe nothing in creation can satiate that partic’lar hunger,’ he says, skidding to a halt. ‘Even with nothing left of

  ‘em but strung-together holes.’

  Indeed, Hopkins hears even now their dreadful screeching.

  Without a word he leaps into the shaft, forgetting his previous suspicions concerning such devices. Mr Redfearn follows, hawk eyes trained on any potential pursuers.

  ‘Where’s the Doctor?’ asks Hopkins.

  Mr Redfearn allows an eyebrow to rise, a sure sign of intense rage. ‘That gen’leman is full o’ surprises. Used some underhand trickery to wrap that scarf o’ his around my legs afore my pistol was even out of its holster. The devil take him for a quick draw; said somethin’ about takin’ lessons from Doc Holliday and disappeared with his lady friend into thin air. Ah look forward to sparring with that particular gen’leman again, trust me on that.’

  Hopkins doesn’t need to berate Mr Redfearn for his failure.

  He knows only too well how the marksman is feeling. If the Doctor wasn’t worried about Hopkins’s avowed intention to destroy him before, he will definitely be worried now. Mr Redfearn looks up at the shaft stretching ahead of him.

  And then Hopkins takes in what he has just been told. The heights into which they are ascending are turning warmer.

  ‘Did you say he disappeared into thin air?’

  ‘Ah am not reputed to bandy falsehoods, Citizen. Especially where the Doctor is concerned. He muttered a few choice phrases, touched a panel on the wall and faded from view, like a phantom.’

  ‘You mean he operated a transmat-beam.’

  ‘Do not presume to tell me what ah mean.’

  Their movement seems to be slowing. Hopkins is on the verge of replying when there is a loud boom from above. The lift suddenly shakes and all his old fears of the anti-grav return. He imagines himself and Mr Redfearn dropping to the far-distant base of this shaft. The palace rocks again, violently.

  ‘Oh what now?’ Hopkins moans. ‘What more?’

  Something liquid drops on to his cheek with a sizzling hiss.

  It hurts, a lot. In fact, it burns into his face. He screeches and clutches at the burning droplet, wiping it away with his gloved hand. All around, similar hisses send up smoke signals from the casing of the shaft. ‘Acid!’ he bellows. ‘It’s raining acid!’

  ‘The time has come to depart this particular thoroughfare,’

  states Mr Redfearn.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ snaps Hopkins. ‘Why can’t you talk properly?’

  Before this rather unwise comment provokes a response from the icy Mr Redfearn, both hear the rumbling and look up. A great ball of cloudy acid is dropping towards them.

  Through it, they see that the roof of the palace has gone, the flaming sky of Ashkellia clearly visible over them.

  Without further ado, both men flail their way back down to the nearest doorway.

  ‘What is it? What could it be?’ Hopkins asks as they dash away from the shaft. All around them the palace is falling apart, loudly. From far distances they hear roaring, as if the structure is a great prehistoric beast sinking into a tar pit.

  There is another explosion, somewhere below, and the whole palace tilts, sending the two men spinning and rolling over each other.

  Mr Redfearn rolls and rights himself, whereas Hopkins cannons headfirst into a wall.

  When the stars stop spinning in his eyes, he stares at the gunman, who is listening intently, his eyes narrowed to snakelike slits.

  ‘What do you think has happened?’ Hopkins asks.

  ‘In mah considered opinion, ah have the feeling we have no more tub up there ready to ferry us out of here. Something, or someone, has exploded it and lifted the lid from this fine building in the process.’

  ‘Oh...’ Hopkins lies there and considers their predicament.

  Neville has won. There is nothing they can do except wait for this structure to collapse in on itself, or blow up or whatever it is going to do. Another few tilts and rocks and groans seem to confirm this hypothesis.

  No. This cannot be the end of it. There has to be a way out.

  It is a question of will and intelligence. For every problem there is a solution.

  The palace begins to list. All over, the bangs and crashes of the slow turn ring through the corridors. Already the angle is steep, soon they will be walking on the walls... assuming the palace holds together that long. There has to be something, some way to get back at Neville. He cannot be beaten by that fake, that bearded charlatan! He will not!

  ‘No way out,’ says Mr Redfearn. Strangely, he is smiling, pink tongue licking his lips, a gleam of triumph in his eyes.

  His hands dance over his pistols.

  And then it comes. Yes! Hopkins grabs Mr Redfearn’s arm.

  The gunslinger pulls away. ‘Ah will not be pawed at, suh...’

  ‘You remember the way to where the Doctor disappeared?

  This panel you talked about?’

  Mr Redfearn nods, ‘Ah do, Citizen. However, without the words he spoke aloud, we may find a similar feat beyond our means.’

  Hopkins glares at the man. ‘But you heard him say whatever it was!’

  ‘Once. Ah cannot be expected to remembah the exact words.’

  Hopkins thinks through his repertoire of techniques for helping people to remember. He
has a small leather pouch full of aides-mémoires tucked away in a pocket in his blouson. Be prepared, the iron-clad motto.

  ‘Oh, you will remember all right, believe me.’

  And, for the first time ever, Hopkins is treated to the sight of Mr Redfearn turning as pale as his pistol grips.

  Mr Redfearn may have derived some comfort – in fact it seems most likely that he did – from the knowledge that although he had been outdrawn, for the first time in his life, by the Doctor, he hadn’t entirely missed a target.

  He had still managed to fire when the scarf brought him tumbling over. However, instead of hitting the Doctor, he had planted his bullet in Miranda Pelham’s upper left arm.

  She lies now, on the hard ground of this strange new cavern, inside the tomb where they suddenly found themselves, the Doctor staunching the unyielding flow of blood. He has been at this for half a day now. The pyramid chamber is trembling, as if in the grip of a permanent earthquake. The Old Ones’ planet-circling particle accelerator is racing round, building up for its headlong crash through reality.

  Pelham is semi-conscious and, worryingly, the Doctor is not convinced the wound is entirely the cause of this.

  ‘Help me,’ she moans. ‘Where are we?’ She looks up at the hollowed-out rock, its banks of instrumentation matching the control room in the palace.

  ‘The reciprocating station. A minor control centre, at a guess.’

  ‘You were right then, about the Old Ones having a transmat.’

  ‘Indeed, although I had my doubts. I half had a horrible thought that they could simply fly down here. I’m glad I was wrong.’

  Pelham winces and looks down at her arm. ‘Oh God, I’m going to die...’

  The Doctor is forced to admit to himself that this is a distinct possibility. He gingerly wraps the arm in a strip of her torn clothing. ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ he says cheerfully.

  ‘There are far more unpleasant potential deaths waiting for us.’

  She is drifting away from him, her mind seemingly fixated on the image she unexpectedly described earlier. ‘I’m cold,’

  she says. ‘Cold in this tomb. I can see myself. Already dead.’

  He thinks about saying something, then thinks better of it.

  He doesn’t really know what is wrong with her, but can’t escape the notion that somehow the vaccine isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Her human mind seems to have reacted with its arcane formula after all. Like an overloaded computer, Miranda Pelham has crashed, her brain frozen on one single image. It’s probably worse because she’s storyteller, her imagination over-sensitive and abnormally fertile. At least, that’s how he presumes writers are.

  How long before he is affected in the same way?

  ‘What am I seeing?’ she asks, almost delirious. ‘Please, don’t let me die. I don’t want to be nothing.’

  ‘It’s the pull of the higher dimensions,’ the Doctor replies, seeing no sense in lying. He has never been very good at these personal moments.

  ‘What... are these higher dimensions? Valdemar? Is that it?’

  How to explain, when even Time Lords can’t be sure? He looks up at the cavern around him, trying to understand the Old Ones and what they had unleashed. Did they know?

  Even at the end when it swallowed them, had they understood?

  ‘Doctor?’ Pelham moans, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here.’ Perhaps talking about it would help him He tries to find some definition. ‘The higher dimensions,’ he says after a long think, ‘are everything we do not understand. The raw universe, its symbolic code broken. The total and absolute perception of primal reality.’

  ‘I thought you were explaining this to me.’ She attempts a laugh.

  ‘I can’t explain. No life we know of can. There is a myth among my own people, among many peoples, that says the universe sprang from one single entity. Not a thing, not anything we could understand, just a singularity. The Time Lords call this “the Kinetic Dance”. Unusually imaginative for that lot. Others personify this force and give it names: Eru, Azathoth, take your pick. Gradually, the singularity grew and grew until it was unable to sustain itself as a single entity. It divided, split, like...’ he searches for an appropriate image, but can only rely on the facile, ‘like chunks of ice falling from a glacier.’

  ‘Ice... glacier...’ She is listening. She is forcing herself to listen, he understands that. This is helping her.

  ‘Only these chunks didn’t separate from the singularity, they just became different. And these chunks kept splitting and splitting until they forgot where it was they came from.

  They began to form their own rules; rules we now designate the proportional dimensions – time and space and so on up to the full ten.’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘Never mind. Anyway, life got itself going, not remembering that it had ever belonged inside the singularity. Well, not entirely. Many species, many individuals, feel a sense of loss, of being apart from something greater than themselves. Of being away from home. Many individuals spend their lives trying to find it again. We call this separation ‘mortality’. And inside us, even inside the lowliest amoeba, dormant organs lie unused, atrophying. Organs which once bound us to the singularity. Until now, of course.’

  ‘So... so you go back to the singularity when you die... is that it? Is that’s what’s going to happen to me?’

  With her good arm, Pelham clutches the Doctor’s coat. ‘Is that what happens?’ she yells, and there is fever in her voice.

  He takes her hand. ‘I don’t know, Miranda. Perhaps.

  Perhaps.’

  She falls back. ‘I don’t want it to happen to me; don’t let it happen. I don’t want to lose myself, in a singularity or anything.’

  The Doctor cannot answer. He is unable to reassure her.

  Because, deep down, he feels exactly the same way?

  Don’t think about it. Action. There must be action to take his mind off this painful subject.

  ‘The thing is, the Old Ones didn’t want to wait until they died to find out. Perhaps they had even conquered mortality but still needed more, nearly destroying the universe in the process. We have to act to stop it happening again. Get up, you’re not dying. We’ve got work to do.’

  She is going again, head slumped back, mouth moving in cold, cosmic horror. He must break this seizure once and for all. ‘Pelham!’ he barks. ‘Get up! I won’t have you turning all weak and feeble on me! You started this whole Valdemar affair and it’s up to you to stop it.’ He looks around in theatrical self-righteousness, as if the idea has just come to him. ‘This whole thing is your fault!’

  She reacts; she has heard him. Her eyes begin to focus once more. Best keep going, he supposes. He stands up and declaims to this ancient, long-abandoned stone monument.

  ‘The universe will end! All life will be altered beyond recognition! And all Miranda Pelham can do is sit here and whinge in her own self-pity...’

  He doesn’t need to go on. He grins as he hears her scrabble up to her feet. He spins round.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are? I’m dying here!’ She is shouting, but stops as she spots the smile.

  Actually, he realises, she looks dreadful. Face grey and ashen, eyes shrunken with agony. Her clothes are in shreds and he is doubtful she will ever use that left arm again. Still, she is up. Amazing what a bit of willpower can do – in moderation of course.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ she says, grumpily. ‘That’s low.’

  ‘Shall we go?’

  She staggers and he rushes to help her. Pelham pulls away from him. ‘I can manage, thank you very much.’

  ‘Funny, I have the uncomfortable feeling you’re not the first who’s said that to me.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Where are we going, anyway? I’m not quite sure where I am any more.’

  The Doctor points a finger towards the only way out, a dark tunnel leading down into blackness.

  ‘Oh, right,’ says Pelh
am. ‘Look... look, before we go rushing around getting into more trouble, can’t we use this stuff in here to blow everything up? There must be something in all this fancy machinery with dials and countdowns and things.

  I mean, that’d stop this higher dimensions whatever, wouldn’t it?’

  She already appears to know the answer. Her expression is hopeful rather than realistic.

  ‘It might,’ he replies. ‘It might. But it’s the boy we need. I doubt if Neville understands his importance. He is the key to everything. The power of the palace is all that has been released so far and it’s all flowing through him. Immense power. In fact, I’m surprised the gateway isn’t already open.

  Huvan could easily have done it. I’m hoping that’s Romana’s influence, calming him down. We’re going to have to be extremely careful dealing with him. He’s undoubtedly been driven mad and probably possesses the ability to destroy the entire solar system. It’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?’

  There is a tremendous thump from somewhere. The cavern shakes even harder than it has shaken before. That tickle, that fear in the back of his mind hardens into certainty. He’s too late. The boy knows, knows everything. The roof feels like it is about to cave in. Dust and blocks of stone rain down on them. Pelham has fallen over again and he rushes to help.

  The Doctor can guess what has happened. Somehow Neville has found out about Hopkins’s incursion into the palace, probably from Huvan. With his fear of the New Protectorate official, Neville would immediately have ordered the palace to be destroyed. What they’re getting here is the resulting energy wave. This whole situation needs getting under control, and never mind the blessed Key to Time for now. He knows it’s going to have to be his job to sort the whole mess out. Once again, he’ll be the one who has to get his hands dirty.

  ‘Doctor,’ groans Pelham, sinking to her knees. ‘Leave me.

  I’m dying. I mean it this time.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he replies and lifts her up. He is certain she has more to contribute in this game. He’ll carry her if he has to.