by Paul Cornell
The spotlights swung up into the night sky and locked on something.
A tiny shape was floating down into the heaving auditorium.
A naked baby, spinning and laughing as it flew towards the stage.
The audience were fighting now, and mounting each other, and yelling in tongues. It was the air, Lang realized somewhere deep inside, the air was changing them. Like whatever they'd put into his stomach had changed him.
The baby, illuminated like a star, floated into the circle of the stage. It reached for the cup and drank a long, hungry draught of Lang's steaming blood.
The lights of the stadium flickered upwards, and the audience gasped.
Standing around the walls of the stadium was a circle of shadowed figures. Evenly spaced, they stood there grandly, waiting.
"They've come for us!" Lang laughed. "Our children have come for us, our children, to take us away!" He grabbed the baby by the hand, and allowed himself to be hoisted up into the air, kicking his heels. "They don't care if we're monsters. Look into your hearts, good people." Lang laughed in delight as the Child swung him around the stadium, gazing down into the great, mauling, bloodletting, copulating mass below him. "Look into your hearts and see!
"We are the monsters!"
The Doctor frowned as Yarven connected the terminals to either side of his head. "Are you sure you know how to work the controls?" he asked.
"Oh, I think so ..." Yarven glanced at the frozen and sweating figure of Ruath. "I've secretly been learning the basics of Ruath's technology. I can't pretend to understand how it works, of course, but I think I know which buttons I have to push."
"Do you really think I'll co-operate with this?"
"There's no need for you to co-operate. The machine simply uses your time-sensitive brain as a power source. You will be able neither to help nor hinder the process. But I gather it will be painful."
"You'll never get away with this, you know." The Doctor addressed his words to the assembled audience of vampires. He had been imprisoned in a similar box to the one that Sanders still sat in. Nyssa was standing in that mass of the Undead, close to Yarven, and the Doctor thought that it was obvious who Yarven intended to be his new consort.
"What makes you think that the Earth will just give in? They'll fight you on every street corner."
"Oh really, Doctor, you are a romantic. We live on every street corner. We're staging what might be called a show of strength in the city near here at the moment. And it's a show that should rather shake the faith of the population. We placed a slow-release package of my DNA in Victor Lang's stomach. As we speak, he should be experiencing the delights of vampirism in front of an audience of thousands, a good proportion of whom, thanks to my airborne seed, will be transforming themselves. From what you know of humans, Doctor, do you honestly think that, within a few hours, there will be any form of human civilization remaining?"
The Doctor lowered his head. "No."
Two of Yarven's lieutenants dragged in a recovered Tegan. She gasped when she saw the Doctor's predicament. "My God, Doctor, what are they doing to you?"
"Ah, Tegan. Glad you could make it." His gaze fixed on Yarven and his voice became harder. "I hope that she's going to remain unharmed."
"You may hope. Personally, I was thinking of having both Miss Jovanka and my dear Ruath made into soup."
There came a cry from the other box. Yarven looked up sharply. "No more delays, Doctor." He checked the linkages to the Time Lord's temples, making sure that the Doctor was connected to the circuitry of the laboratory. Then he grabbed the lever that would transfer the power demand from Sanders to the Doctor. "Any last words?"
"Yes," the Doctor shouted. "By Rassilon's command... dematerialize!" The ring on Ruath's paralysed finger glowed silver.
Lang had returned to the stage and was fighting off a great horde of people who had scrambled up to drink from his cup. "There's enough for all!" he was calling. "Sinners, sinners, let my blood wash your guilt away!"
Amongst a squalid knot of writhing vampires, a pool of blood forming around his feet, stood a boy who was staring at the stage. His head was a wrecked mass of blood and hair. His face was terribly scarred, and there were callouses on his hands. The marks of sunlight.
Matthew was looking at the giant cross as Lang danced around it. He'd come up out of the sewers when the night had fallen, and had made his way with so many of his new brothers to the stadium.
Watching Lang, Matthew made a decision.
He started to walk towards the stage, jumping over the bodies and the corpses and the transforming Undead. There were quite a few semi-digested piles of ashes too, where the passionately faithful had taken on the vampire DNA and set themselves ablaze.
Matthew's walk became a determined run.
"Say it loud!" called Lang. "We're guilty, and we're proud!" He had leaned back against the cross, its shining white silhouetting him. There was no faith in it now to hurt him. The baby had perched on his shoulder, blood dripping from its mouth, as more and more of the ordinary folk of Lang's congregation leapt up to drink from his cup.
Matthew was nearly at the stage when it happened.
The sun appeared back in the sky.
Two o'clock in the afternoon it had been.
Two o'clock it was again.
There was a moment of silence. Then the fire began.
Russet light sparkled off Piccadilly station, ran in a great amber river down Oxford Road, made the crescent estates of Moss Side into tangles of lengthening shadows. A wave of it swept across the stadium and the greater city outside it, and the country and continent outside that. The Undead who had come to treat the world as their place to walk free caught fire and exploded.
In the stadium, bodies thrashed to and fro with the flames. A mass of decaying biology smashed against itself and flared again, a spiral of ashes winding into the bright sky.
Around the walls of the amphitheatre, the watching vampires flared like candles, burning where they stood or falling into bundles of cinders off the walls.
The Child stared, its face suddenly red with sunburn. It took a deep breath, its first in decades. Then it exploded in a ball of flame.
Lang looked around in terror, wondering if Christ had come to chastise him. Looking at the devastation before him, he felt something else give inside him.
Burning tears started to trickle down his cheeks.
"My Lord. My girl," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."
Matthew was on fire as he sprinted up onto the stage.
He grabbed the microphone stand from Lang, and spun to face him.
The evangelist looked him in the eye. "Well then?" Matthew ran at him. The microphone stand pierced Lang's chest, sped through his heart and embedded itself into the shining cross behind him.
Matthew's momentum couldn't be abated. He careered into Lang's arms, a disintegrating bundle of ashes.
Lang held onto him, comforted by the strength of the cross behind him as his flesh began to blaze into clouds of dark and sickly smoke. To his comfort, he suddenly realized that the wood at his back was burning him too. "He forgives you," he told the evaporating boy. "He forgives us both. Despite everything."
The blaze grew higher and higher, engulfing the two of them until they were only shadows inside it. And then they were ashes, and the ashes blew away on the rising breeze.
The cross stood surrounded by debris, a microphone stand piercing its heart. The cloud of heat rising from the stadium condensed the moisture from all the blood and vapour in the air.
It began to rain.
From backstage stepped Olivia, untouched. She stared at the empty stadium, its seats full of the scattered remains of humanity. She stared at the cross, electrical cables shorting out all around its charred frame.
She stared until she was soaking wet.
And then she went back in to get an umbrella.
Castle Yarven had dematerialized, taking its Time Freeze with it.
The feudally design
ed TARDIS whizzed through the vortex, the moat spinning around it.
Inside, the Doctor leapt out of his seat, ripping the connections from his head. The vampires around him were staggering, disorientated by their sudden plunge into the timeless netherworld of the vortex.
"Doctor, how did you - ?" Tegan gasped as the Doctor grabbed her hand.
"You can't confine a vampire, Tegan! My hands were just a mist for a moment there."
Yarven recovered first, and grabbed the Doctor by the shoulder. "What have you done?" he bellowed.
"The right thing" the Doctor replied, his voice just a little too high to carry conviction. But his fist did. It caught the vampire Lord across the chin, sending him staggering backwards. The Doctor wrenched Nyssa from his grasp. "Come on Nyssa, people to see, places to go!" The three of them raced up the stairs from the laboratory, the Doctor slamming the door behind them and locking it.
"After them, you fools!" bellowed Yarven, stumbling to his feet. "After them!" The Doctor and his companions jogged through the pit room, passing as they did so a bundle of staggering vampires.
"They won't be disorientated for long, but the journey's a short one!" the Doctor gasped.
"You mean you know where we're going?" Tegan asked.
"I'll explain later. At the moment, we need a turret, some way to get out!"
"I know of one," Nyssa spoke up. The other two stared at her. She was back to her normal self, full of dignity and poise.
"Nyssa!" Tegan exclaimed. "You're - "
"Human again," Nyssa smiled. "Yes."
"The vampire who bit her must have been destroyed," the Doctor grinned. There came a crash from the laboratory. He grabbed his companions by their shoulders again. "Come on!" The stained glass window in the turret that Nyssa had found before had been repaired by Ruath. A quick adjustment to her chameleon circuit was all that had been necessary. Now it was shining with psychedelic colours, the glass prisming the butterfly blues of the vortex outside.
"I managed to send the navigation circuits the coordinates for a destination and the chameleon circuits the idea for a new shape." The Doctor shrugged off his coat and rolled it around his arms, silencing Tegan's questions with a stern gesture. "It shouldn't be long now."
"But Doctor," cried Nyssa, "this tower is very high. How are we - ?"
"Hush, Nyssa, we have to time this just right" The blues and purples of the vortex faded from the window. Tegan and Nyssa waited for the familiar clunk of landing, but before it happened, the Doctor shouted, "Ready? Now!" He ran at the glass and jumped through it, his arms before him protected by the coat.
"Geronimo!" Tegan grabbed Nyssa's hand and jumped after him.
The three adventurers leapt out onto a strange landscape. A distant sun was sinking fast, its violet light diffused through the gaps between the mountain tops, and reflected off the slopes of snow and ice. A cluster of grey trees stood in the middle of the snowy plain.
Tegan shouted, expecting a long fall.
But they hit the snow after a moment. They'd jumped only a few feet.
She looked over her shoulder at the castle.
But it wasn't a castle any more, it was a flat, open disc of metal, with a TARDIS console standing in the centre of it.
And on that disc stood hundreds of disconcerted vampires. They hissed and held their hands up to shield themselves from the sun, but swiftly realized that it was setting. Within seconds, the planet's surface was dark. The sun had set. The vampires straightened up and rumbled with anger.
The Doctor turned to face them. "We jumped in that second when a TARDIS is deciding on its new shape," he whispered to Tegan. "Stay where you are, by the way. There's nowhere to run."
Yarven stepped forward, pointing a finger at the Doctor. "You did this!" he shouted. "How?"
"Rassilon was rather a control fanatic, I'm afraid," the Doctor called. "Circuits for his personal operation have always been fitted into TARDISes and, like a lot of Gallifreyan tradition, there seems to be a method to its madness. A friend of mine told me about that ring that Ruath wears, how it's a key to Rassilon's devices. Odd that it should become an item of reverence for the Undead, hm?"
"For all your Gallifreyan conceit, Time Lord, you still seem to have miscalculated!" Yarven snarled. "Did you not mean for us to land here in the daylight?"
"I wanted to make you an offer. I gather that my companion Nyssa went some way towards developing an artificial blood substitute, at least, if the traces she left in the TARDIS labs were anything to go by. The two of us, perhaps with Ruath's help, could work to devise a mass-production process. You could have a permanent and harmless food source, and we could find you an uninhabited planet to make your own. This one, if you like it."
He looked at the splendid night sky that had spread above them in the darkness. "You have the chance, Yarven, to really make a difference for your people. To turn them into a true culture, rather than a race of parasites that preys on others. What do you say?"
Yarven drew in a great breath. "I say ... die!" He launched himself forward, his cape billowing into great wings as he leapt the hundred yards or so between him and the Doctor.
He caught the Time Lord by the throat, and the two of than struggled. Behind them, the vampires rushed forward. Nyssa and Tegan could only stare at the Doctor in terror.
"You haven't much time left, Yarven!" the Doctor shouted. "Consider my offer, while you still have a chance!"
"To live on one world, supping swill and settling things with endless debate and argument?" Yarven matched his strength against the Doctor's, trying to reach his throat. "That is not the way of a noble race. Haven't you read Ruath's books? We are destined to - A certain heat touched the back of his neck, and Yarven stopped. He released the Doctor and turned to see the terrible reality. A few feet from Nyssa and Tegan, the vampire army had seen it too. Across the crags, a new light was shining.
"No!" Yarven bellowed. "It cannot end like this! It cannot!" A second sun broke from beneath the horizon, its giant body shimmering through all the hues of the spectrum. The vampires cried out in fear. Some dashed straight up and flew, attempting to outrun the dawn, but the speed of the planet's revolution was clearly faster than Earth's. They shot up like fireworks, to explode in flames high in the atmosphere. Those on the ground became a sea of crumbling fire, the ice surface reflecting the sun into every crevice where they might have hidden, boiling them away into a blaze of screaming bodies.
Yarven began to crumble, his skin giving way and fluttering off into ashes. He did not cry out. He straightened up and looked at the rising star calmly. "So, Doctor. Destiny is not all it is reputed to be."
"It never is. I'm sorry."
"Are you really?" Yarven raised an eyebrow as his flesh caught fire. He looked down at the scar on his chest, the wound he'd taken so long ago. It had been erased as his flesh fell away. He opened his arms to embrace the rising star. "I am not. It was a glorious design. It should have succeeded. The Children of the Night will have their moment still, Doctor. When they do, you will not be able to contain them. You were a worthy adversary. Until we meet in the next life, I bid you farewell!"
The Lord of the Vampires exploded.
His flesh billowed into a ball of flame. It flared bright blue for a moment, and then collapsed back to a withered skeleton. The skeleton fell around its axis and withered into a pile of bones on the icy ground. And then the bones were only dust, and the dust fluttered away on the wind.
The Doctor lowered his head.
A horrible thought had struck Tegan. "Doctor, get under cover!"
"What?" The Doctor raised a hand and winced. It was red with sunburn. "Of course, I hadn't thought of that. But that means . .
"Shut up and get out of it!" Tegan pulled the Doctor's coat from his shoulders and threw it over his head, adding her own pullover to it a moment later. She grabbed the resultant bundle and fell to the ground with it, smothering the Doctor.
"Tegan" Nyssa murmured, "I think that from my
own experiences I can safely say that exposure to sunlight doesn't destroy somebody who's been a vampire for only a few hours."
"Doesn't it?" Tegan looked at the bundle in her arms. She sat up and pulled the pullover from the Doctor's face. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"You didn't give me a chance," the Doctor sighed, "but thank you for your concern."
It took a few minutes to locate all the dazed and shaken people in the mass of organic debris. Jeremy Sanders lay against the console, his body a crumbling husk. Those who had been novice vampires, like the Doctor, were suffering from nothing more than sunburn and had returned to their human state. The process of being bitten wasn't as ruthless that way as ingestion of the genetic material would be. There were over a dozen of them, and they initially reacted to the Doctor and his party with fear.
"It's all right," the Doctor told them, his hat carefully placed on his head and his hands stuffed in his pockets. "All we want to do is get you home. If that's where you want to go."
There was general agreement. "We didn't want to be vampires," one of the young boys ventured. He was brushing the ashes off his jacket. "We never bit people or nothing. We got carried along with it all."
The Doctor looked at his shoes. "There's no need to explain."
"We were just - "
"I said - " The Doctor's voice had risen in tone for a second. He calmed it again and grinned. "There's really no need. Let's get you home."
They stood around the console of Ruath's TARDIS, and the Doctor tapped out some instructions on the chameleon circuit controls. The walls folded upwards to form a neat white cabinet, and the ex-Undead crowded around the console, until they realized that the space inside was just as great as it had been previously. The Doctor set to work on the co-ordinate controls. With a screech of technology, the box faded away.
The big sun set, less than an hour after it had risen. By now the ashes had scattered far across the planet, and there was nothing to be seen of the army that had once threatened the cosmos.
