by Dave Stone
Delbane sat up with a groan. Her head was pounding with a hangover from the anaesthetic and her skin felt slightly numb, as though it wasn’t properly connecting with the world. The hallucinations she had experienced while under the influence were already fading: something about hands and spider webs? She couldn’t quite remember.
There was no sign of the black-clad man (she was positive, now, that it had been a man, her recollections having obviously been disrupted by the anaesthetic spray) who had attacked her. On the floor where he had been was a fine mass of ash, of the sort you got from burning paper. It certainly didn’t look anything like a human outline, and nothing at all like those occasional ‘strange but true’ photographs of spontaneous human combustion, so why couldn’t she shake the automatic impression that her attacker had burnt up explosively, like a Hollywood vampire with a stake through its heart?
Delbane looked around her, and saw that the filing cabinets in Dr John Smith’s workroom were no longer in the positions in which she distinctly remembered leaving them. By the door, she saw the upturned metal wastepaper basket from which the ash had spilled. She clapped a hand to her uniform jacket and groaned again, this time not out of pain. Her zip-locked folder of appropriated notes was missing.
‘I’ve found another one,’ the Special Branch man was saying into his hand-held radio set. ‘Female, just coming round. She still looks like she’s out of it.’ He frowned at the tinny and indecipherable voice from the other end. ‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’
Delbane realised that, from the Special Branch man’s point of view, she had been staring around dumbly. She decided to take charge of the situation, get to her feet and start eliciting some solid facts, but her legs didn’t seem to be working properly at the moment.
‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. Her tongue felt thick and useless.
She realised that the Special Branch man hadn’t understood a word and was leaning down to hear her more clearly Just then, two new figures bounded through the door, jostling each other in their eagerness to get through it. Both were in their early thirties, but both wore leather trousers of the sort more common to pathetic old dads who decide at the age of forty-five to grow a beard and buy a Porsche. The one with curly hair was wearing a brown leather jacket and a kipper tie with a picture of a cocktail waitress on it. The one with close-cropped hair wore a shiny pale-blue jacket with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a turtleneck. Both were quite extraordinarily well endowed in the gold Rolex and chain department, and the cumulatively bilateral effect was, as objective observers like Delbane had on a number of occasions remarked, that of a pair of complete and utter tossers.
‘Don’t worry, love,’ the curly-headed one was saying. ‘You’ll be all right, the Provisionals are here now...’
They looked at Delbane and their faces fell.
‘Oh, it’s you, Delbane,’ the short-haired one said. ‘We thought there was some tasty soldier bird down in here.’
‘Yes, well, life’s just full of disappointments,’ said Delbane, dislike giving her full use of her vocal cords again. ‘Hello, Slater. Hello, McCrae.’
* * *
‘Well I must admit,’ Romana said as the TARDIS once again wheeled through the fluid chaos of the Vortex, ‘that was rather unexpected.’ ‘What, how I extricated us from being trapped out of time without having to wait for Wblk the High Councilman to release us?’ asked the Doctor, hanging on to the edge of the console as another quantum shock wave hit them as a result of their entirely unorthodox method of egress. ‘It’s just a notion I’ve been working on.’
‘You must have been working on it for a while,’ Romana said. ‘I don’t think I’d have hit upon such a complicated, ingenious and downright audacious idea in...’ She thought for a moment. ‘Two hundred and fifty-seven years. Two hundred and fifty-eight, possibly.’
The Doctor beamed proudly.
‘I have to admit that I sometimes have my on days. On the other hand, Wblk’s sure to tell all his friends precisely how I achieved the feat - I very much doubt if they’ll ever let me use it again. They’ll have safeguards well in place for the next time.’
Romana frowned pensively. ‘Well, I just hope it’s worth it. And I really wish it was in aid of going somewhere other than Earth. I loathe Earth in that century All those world wars and extermination camps. Things like that are always so miserable and depressing. This friend of yours must be very important to you.’
‘Well, you know how it is,’ the Doctor said. ‘Or possibly you wouldn’t. You haven’t been out in the galaxy at large long enough to form the sort of attachments I have.’ He peered at a display, worriedly. ‘It’s been a while since we got the signal, what with the transit lag.’ He turned to look out of the page at the reader with no small amount of concern. ‘I just hope we can get there in time without doing something completely stupid.’
* * *
The attack on the barracks had resulted in no casualties - or at least, none could be immediately verified. When the Special Branch and Provisional Department operatives had arrived on the scene in force, they had found the UNIT personnel mostly on the point of waking up. There appeared to be no permanent physical damage to them, as was subsequently confirmed by the reawakened MO and his staff, but more extensive medical tests would obviously take some time. Nothing of importance appeared to be missing - save for the one thing of paramount importance which could not properly be called a ‘thing’ at all. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had disappeared without trace, along with any trace of those who had, presumably, abducted him.
Delbane finally arrived at the Brigadier’s office to find a familiar figure already there: a craggy man in early middle age wearing a crumpled raincoat he never seemed to take off under any conditions whatsoever. The commander of DISTO(P)IA himself, Crowley, sitting behind the desk and fussing with the paperwork and pen set with the air of one trying such things for size before ordering them to his own liking. It seemed that the Provisional Spymaster was moving in.
‘Making yourself at home?’ Delbane said, more or less purely on the basis of something to say.
‘I’ve had my eye,’ said Crowley, ‘on this office for a while now. In a sense.’
He picked up and absently toyed with a smallish, greenish cube of a substance that appeared to be lucite and to have been used by the Brigadier as a paperweight. ‘You don’t imagine we’d leave you here without keeping an Eye on you?’
That explained the swift response from department forces, whether Delbane had actually managed to call them in or not. ‘Not Slater and McCrae, surely?’ she said. ‘I’d have spotted them a mile off if they were hanging around.’
‘We have other means and methods, to be sure.’ Crowley smiled slightly. Without it ever being stated overtly, Delbane knew that he shared her opinion of Slater and McCrae. The pair were a couple of incompetent louts, forever blasting around in a souped-up Ford Sierra, beating up anybody they thought they could get away with beating up and copping a feel of anything female they came into contact with, whether they thought they could get away with it or not. God alone knew why Crowley kept them on - Delbane was of the opinion that their primary function was that of decoys. They blundered around making a noise while the department itself quietly got on with the business in hand.
‘Well, if you had other methods and means,’ she said, a little bad-temperedly, ‘why did you need me here in the first place.’
‘You were our man, as it were, on the inside.’ Crowley set down the little cube he had been toying with and leant forward on the desk, steepling his fingers. ‘The woman on the ground, let us say I understand you came into close contact with the attackers. Is there anything you can tell me about that?’
‘I...’ Delbane paused for a moment, uncertainly. ‘I don’t know. What I saw - what I thought I saw - was so strange that it had to be...’
‘Strangeness,’ said Crowley, ‘is what I’m looking for. Has it not occurred to you that strangeness is precisely the matt
er with which UNIT is supposed to deal? What the tabloid papers call the paranormal?’
It quite simply hadn’t, not to Delbane, in the same way that it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder if UNIT’s big secret was that they were all angels of God with their wings hidden under their uniforms, or comic-book heroes with super-powers, tights under their trousers and secret identities. It was quite simply unthinkable, in any real world, to the point where it would not even cross her mind to be dismissed.
Only now, with the idea in her head, did she see how it could be made to fit: all those requisitions in the files for industrial-strength garlic concentrate and caesium bullets...
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said, as her mind flatly rebelled.
‘A UN-funded taskforce for dealing with flying saucers, the beast of Bodmin Moor and the fairies at the bottom of the garden?’
‘Not precisely,’ Crowley said, a hint of impatience making itself felt beneath his veneer of urbanity. ‘The true facts of the matter are rather more esoteric than that, but the fact remains that such forces exist and UNIT has the remit to deal with them. Had, I should say. This latest debacle, I think, together with your own reports, should be enough to make the case for the Provisional Department stepping in. Our function is to protect the country from the forces of subversion, after all - and what is the paranormal, when you come right down to it, but a subversion of our very reality?’
Delbane frowned. ‘So let me get this straight.’ What I’ve really been doing for the last month is helping to give you the opportunity to extend your brief?’
‘Not at all,’ Crowley said smoothly. ‘Although I’ll be the first to admit that I have every intention of capitalising upon that opportunity now it’s been presented. The Berlin Wall can’t last for ever, and the intelligence community is going to have to acquire new interests - and fairies at the bottom of the garden, if I may say so, are always going to be with us. Clause 28
notwithstanding.’
‘And the hunt for the Brigadier?’ asked Delbane. She didn’t quite know what she should be feeling. She was quite prepared to be used, even lied to and manipulated towards some greater good - that being after all a basic part of her job. She just wasn’t sure that an interfactional tussle for administrative power and influence was what could be called the greater good. The unworthy thought crossed her mind that Crowley himself could have in some way orchestrated the attack on the UNIT barracks in the first place. ‘What about the Brigadier?’ she said again. ‘Are we going to look for him or what?’
‘Of course,’ said Crowley sternly ‘The Metropolitan Police, Interpol, Customs and Excise and all the other appropriate forces of authority have been informed and mobilised. As have the press. An extensive manhunt, I gather, is already under way There’ll be no brushing of this matter under the carpet if I have anything to do with it. Lethbridge-Stewart is far too valuable an asset to leave in the hands of a person or persons unknown. And besides...’ he smiled slightly ‘I’d like him back to see his face when I tell him the new terms under which the British arm of his taskforce is going to be run.’
He regarded Delbane with frank seriousness. She found herself wondering if he ever actually blinked.
‘None of this concerns you at the moment,’ he said. ‘I merely bring it up to impress upon you that I want to hear the details of what you saw when the enemy attacked, however unlikely they might appear. So please, Delbane, do go on.’
The mannerly but firm tones of command were now entirely evident. Delbane groped for words to describe what she’d seen, when her her body had of its own volition plucked the hood from the figure that had advanced on her:
‘It wasn’t human,’ she said at last. mean, it looked man-shaped but there were things wrong with it. Let’s call it a creature. It was some sort of human-looking creature. Its face, when I saw it, kept shifting - I don’t mean moving around... I mean as though it was a face on a television screen, switching between channels, but in three dimensions...’
‘Like a hologrammatic projection, I believe they’re called?’
asked Crowley gather the Americans are doing some quite impressive things with portable lasers at the moment.’
‘No. This was solid. Forming and reforming into things I almost recognised. Insects, jackal heads...’ Delbane’s voice trailed off as she remembered how the creature’s features had just seemed wrong - she could spend an hour detailing the specifics and still be no closer to explaining why. In the way that a situation or person can anger you in such different ways and on so many levels that the only release is a single and violent expletive, there was only one description for the thing.
‘It was a monster,’ she said, somewhat lamely.
Crowley had been following her attempts at explanation with thoughtful interest, nodding occasionally and seemingly recognising her reactions even if he wasn’t taking in her exact words.
‘Did it have a mark?’ he asked, tapping his forehead with his thumb. ‘Did it have a mark here?’
Delbane was about to say no - and then realised that wasn’t true. As she had looked into that shifting wrongness there had been... something imprinted on it. It wasn’t any kind of pigment, any kind of visual thing that she could draw on a sheet of paper, but it had been a... well, a mark. Something perceived in a way that was unrelated to the usual senses, impossible to describe in their terms, but something distinct and recognisable. She would recognise it if she saw it again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There was a mark.’
‘Oh dear.’ Crowley seemed to have taken her meaning. Worry surfaced from the urbanity and etched lines on his face. ‘If what you’re telling me is true, then I’m rather afraid that...’
There was a knock on the office door; an urgent knock, the exigency of which was confirmed when the knocker entered the room without waiting for an invitation. It was one of the Special Branch men. He seemed flustered.
‘Mr Crowley, sir,’ he said. really think you need to see this.
There’s been a development.’
Dr John Smith’s workroom was more or less as Delbane had left it. The exceptions were a rather large number of armed Special Branch reinforcements, and the object they were pointing those arms at.
Slater and McCrae were still there. Slater, in particular, seemed to be in a bad way, as though he had recently experienced a profound shock. ‘I was looking at it and it was there,’ he was saying. ‘I mean, the wall. No I don’t. I mean I was looking at the wall and it was there...’ He had obviously been propounding variations on this theme for a while now, caught in a minor mental and verbal loop.
It was a battered-looking oblongatic blue box, occupying the space where Delbane had previously surmised a missing cabinet - in fact, this assumption had fixed itself in her head so that her first impression was that she was looking at a big filing cabinet. Then she realised her mistake: it was an old-style police telephone box, probably dating from the1960s and her reaction to its incongruity was rapidly blurred as she imagined all the hypothetical mental ways in which somebody could find it and haul it inside...
Past armed and watchful Special Branch men? And Slater, if you could believe him, was saying that it had appeared out of thin air.
‘Well, I suppose this is a development of some kind,’ said Crowley beside her, in the tones of one who had never been in this place before and so was completely underwhelmed by any transformation that might or might not have occurred.
‘Though I fail to see how it might prove useful.’
It was at that point that the door of the police telephone box drew back with a slightly unprepossessing clunk, and a voice spoke from the darkness beyond.
‘Come along, Romana, a quick poke around and we’ll soon see what’s what...’
A lanky man in bulky, horrendously mismatched clothing and a long knitted scarf stepped from the box, followed closely by a tall and beautiful woman with the bored-looking bearing of a high-fashion model, with raven hair and wearing a Chinese
silk and brocade gown.
The man goggled at the massed ranks of Special Branch men in a sudden and slightly overplayed double take. ‘Well, it appears that we have some visitors to our humble abode. This is nice.’
He turned to the woman and stage whispered to her out of the corner of his mouth. ‘I’m afraid the old place seems to have gone rather downhill since I left it last.’
Chapter Eleven
A Small Tour of the Perimeters
Victoria woke to the sound of a coaching horn giving obstreperous voice outside, repeatedly, to the tune of what she recognised as ‘Dixie’ - the anthem, as had been, of the Confederate South. It was coming from the direction of the window of the Shangri La Fantasy Motel cabin, as was the new sunlight of morning. She clambered off what, for the sake of propriety, she insisted on calling the bed and, yawning, padded across the unpleasantly surfaced floor.
Jamie Was sleeping on the floor by the wall in a curled-up posture that suggested he was missing the additional warmth and company of the family hounds. He stirred and opened his eyes, muttering a wordless, half-awake question.
‘I think it’s time we were up and about,’ Victoria told him.
There was another blast of mechanical ‘Dixie’ from outside.
‘ Someone seems to think so, in any case.’
Through the window they saw the Doctor sitting in an enormous automobile, his smaller than average form all but lost in it. The car was a violent and highly polished fire-engine red, with white-walled tyres and a canopy that was currently folded back, giving the vehicle the aspect of a massive, slightly flattened, shiny brick. Mirror-bright chrome gleamed on the grille and bumpers, and swept-back projections on the rear reminded Victoria of the engine pods of the suborbital rocket ships she had seen on a visit to the twenty-second century, though here these seemed quite obviously for show.
