Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  ‘Look at this,’ he said to the fat clerk, dropping his guards, speaking loudly and not in fact speaking to the clerk at all.

  ‘Your world is collapsing around your ears - if you have ears in any proper sense - even as we speak. If something isn’t done to stop it, we’re all going to find ourselves disappearing up our own quantum packet.’ He waved the magazine in front of the clerk’s face. ‘Something of you might survive in some form, I suppose, but I doubt it - and even if you do, what are you going to do then? You won’t have anything to feed on. You’ll just diminish until there’s nothing left. Why don’t you let me -’

  The clerk’s eyes, meanwhile, had glazed over and human animation had left his face. The thing that had taken control of him stared blankly and listened to the Doctor’s ravings for a while - then simply lunged for him.

  ‘Look, this isn’t the way you should be doing things at all!’

  the Doctor exclaimed, jumping back. ‘If you’ll just listen to what I’m trying to tell you...’

  He was answered by a fist swinging round in a bludgeoning arc, hard enough, he judged, to break human bone - in the clerk’s hand and in the jaw of anyone it hit. The Doctor ducked under the fist, turned whilst still in a crouch and darted from the shop.

  People outside turned instantly to look at him with that same blank stare. It had been a mistake, the Doctor realised, to open up his mind and attempt to talk about things reasonably. Even if he raised his mental shields again, the thing that could control these people had now fixed upon his position. First order of the day, at this point, was to try to give it and those it controlled the slip again. The Doctor ran down a marble-floored promenade, scattering shoppers as he went, vaulted onto a downward-going escalator and attempted to avoid the people on it by running down the moving handrail as though it were a tightrope. Centuries ago, he recalled, before catabolism had taken its toll upon his original body, he had been something of an acrobat and could have done this before breakfast while thinking six impossible thoughts. Unfortunately his new body, though resilient, was not entirely built for such feats.

  He plummeted thirty feet, landing on his dignity and bruising it more than was entirely seemly. No time to worry about that, though; the Doctor bounced to his feet and sped on through what appeared to be a food hall filled with people eating repasts from various vending kiosks.

  As he ran, every single one of them stood up and turned to face him.

  Something arced between them, a form of crackling energy that for a moment was physically visible: a flickering, bluish nimbus around each individual, tendrils of that same blue stuff intangibly linking them to each other. The air crackled with tension and ozone, the building charge of an oncoming electrical storm.

  Members of the crowd moved themselves in front of the Doctor’s course of flight, cutting it off. He skidded to a halt on his heels, looked around wildly for a moment and then became calm.

  ‘Now, I know for a fact that none of you really want to be doing this...’ he began.

  The blast of the discharge knocked him off his feet and set his clothes on fire. As the flames flickered around him and the alien energy crawled through him, the Doctor relaxed into a cavernous and insensate void.

  * * *

  The Mind did not breathe a sigh of relief - even if It could do anything with whatsoever feelings of relief It might have had in the first place. It did, however feel that things had gone well. This individual had, indeed, been the more powerful of the three, and as such would surely prove to be the crucial component in the Mind’s plans. The Mind now caused a certain number of those whom It controlled to take the quarry to join the other captives in Its place of Power The night was coming, now. Of course, the night could have come any time the Mind liked - Its intention and will being the physical law of Its World - but It knew that the individual creatures within the World functioned better with regular periods of darkness and light. In any event, it was good that the night was coming now.

  The Dark Time was approaching and this time, in accordance with the plans of the Mind, the darkness would be ultimate.

  There was a new World coming, and a World which the Mind had long forgotten to be reclaimed.

  Chapter Twenty

  An Attendance to the Opening of Hell

  The glowing, interlocking crystal column in the console in the centre of the chamber, ground to a halt with a sound like gears clashing in the engines of the universe itself. Katharine Delbane watched it dumbly; her body was still not under her control, her mind was in something akin to shock. Something appearing out of thin air, or being bigger on the inside than the outside, doesn’t sound like much - if the appearing or being bigger doesn’t happen directly in front of you.

  The effect of flat impossibility on the psyche is remarkably similar to the physical effect of being hit by a truck: imagine it all you like, and work out strategies to cope, but when it actually happens you just go to pieces. It was as though her mind had shattered, was only able to think in small and disconnected fragments.

  And underneath it all was... something else. It was like looking through a broken pane of mirrored glass that, previously, had reflected back nothing but the image of herself. Now, she thought she could glimpse what was beyond it. Something big, and dark, and moving, and alive. This had no problem at all with things being bigger in the inside. After all, it was able to fit itself into something as small as a human skull...

  Delbane realised that the Doctor’s head was in front of her, peering at her with a kind of barely restrained and murderous fury that... no, she thought, murderous was the wrong word. Without quite knowing how she knew, she realised that the Doctor was fundamentally incapable of murder as such, even if, like a veterinarian, he might sometimes find himself forced to put lives to sleep. Not murderous then, just toweringly, terribly angry.

  He turned his head to glower at Crowley - whom Delbane could not see as he was beyond her direct line of sight.

  ‘This is obscene,’ the little man said. ‘Stop it, stop it now.’

  There was a chuckle off to one side. ‘I’m surprised, Doctor,’

  said the voice of Crowley. ‘Killing and kidnapping and quite possibly torture you seem to pass off lightly, yet you’re disconcerted by the mere subsuming of a will to my Influence?’

  ‘Killing and kidnapping and quite possibly torture can be borne,’ said the Doctor, deadly serious. ‘In a sense. This is a desecration of the very human quality that allows such things to be borne. And as I recall, you were once rather hot on the basic sanctity of that. “Do What Thou Wilt” and so forth...?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Ah, Doctor,’ said Crowley. ‘It seems that you have intimated something of the truth of my nature...’

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘You never even bothered to cover your tracks. I never met you back then - or at least I haven’t yet

  - but from what I know about you, you seem to have changed for the worst, no matter how well you’ve worn in other respects. I’d very much like to know how you managed to survive for so long.’

  ‘Time,’ said the voice of Crowley, ‘has its effect. And there are... methods, let us say, for countering and even reversing its grosser physical effects.’

  ‘Oh, I know all about that,’ said the Doctor. He gestured towards Delbane, his face still burning with anger. ‘You have what you want, to the extent that anybody does, and holding the poor girl like this simply serves no purpose. Let her go. Let her go now.’

  The sound of a man sucking his teeth consideringly ‘Very well,’ said the voice of Crowley. ‘Although, I think, I’ll leave her slightly, ah, bemused for a while, just in case she attempts something unfortunate.’

  There was no transformation, no sense of something happening inside, but Delbane found that she was in control of her body again. She looked around, dazedly, at the white-walled room, at the complex octagonal console-array in its centre, at the Doctor and Crowley. Her feelings were too big for her even to feel proper
ly There was just an overwhelming, debilitating lassitude.

  ‘What...?’ she began, and couldn’t think of anything to say after that.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ said the Doctor, seriously, and she believed him - although a little voice inside her said that at this point, in this state, she’d believe anything, no matter who said it.

  ‘Your confidence is heartening, Doctor,’ said Crowley. He waved a hand towards a lever on the console-array. ‘And now, I think we should be leaving. The good people outside must be wondering what’s happening in here.’

  ‘Well, this is very nice,’ the Doctor said cheerfully, walking out of the TARDIS behind Crowley. ‘Very intimate and friendly.’

  He took in the hooded troops levelling their weapons at him, peered enthusiastically at the signs and sigils on the walls -

  then stared at the sensor and data-processing consoles. He let go of a still-dazed Delbane, whom he had half-led out of the TARDIS

  and, without a thought to the high-velocity muzzles tracking him, bounded over to the consoles.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ he said.’ Oh dear; oh dear, oh me. You’re attempting to manipulate reality with a cargo-cult set-up like this?’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said an ageing man in a US colonel’s uniform, who seemed to be more or less in charge around these parts. ‘This just allows us to gauge the fluctuations in the global state-vector. We’re not manipulating it.’

  ‘Oh yes you are,’ said the Doctor, darkly. ‘You just don’t know it. I should have realised. I should have noticed - but idiocy on this scale was unthinkable even to me.’

  ‘Now see here...’ the colonel began, possibly affronted by the Time Lord’s dismissal of his establishment.

  ‘I rather think,’ said the Doctor coldly, scanning the various readouts and displays with dismay, ‘that seeing anything at all is going to be slightly academic, soon.’ He turned back to glower at the colonel and Crowley, who now bore something of the aspect of shamefaced schoolboys. ‘I think now might be the time for you to tell me exactly what it is you’ve done.’

  Reliable sources of the time have it that Edward Alexander Crowley, otherwise known as Aleister, otherwise known as ‘the wickedest man in the world’ or the Great Beast, died in 1947, in the seaside town of Hastings. Reliable sources were wrong on several distinct counts. By the time of his rather boisterous funeral service in Brighton, he was happily ensconced several thousand miles away in a high-security research facility in the United States.

  Which particular state remains classified, but it was the sort of area where you couldn’t walk three steps from your house without stumbling over an ancient Indian burial ground, finding an entire town that had been mysteriously depopulated or falling down the shaft of a haunted mine.

  Such an area was rank with superstition and foreboding - the sort of place where horror stories, if not real horrors, grew with fecundity. The fact that ghosts, ghouls and things of a monstrous nature had about the same actual existence as the object of a medieval witch-hunt was neither here nor there - the psychic climate was perfect for Crowley’s particular work. The war had just ended, and the United States was busily appropriating everything it could from the remains of Nazi Germany. The relocation of rocket technicians and nuclear scientists was well known - it would in fact serve certain interests to have the global population living in fear of the well-documented A-bombs that were subsequently produced.

  Other things, however, were appropriated, too. Certain discoveries made when the death camps were liberated were preserved, and such accumulated procedural data as remained was extrapolated and worked upon to produce, in the fullness of time, any number of results in the military and commercial fields, from mycotoxins used in germ warfare, to medical gene therapy, to a method for preserving the ‘toasted freshness’ in the contents of a box of cereal. Such things were kept secret on the basis that (a) germ warfare and the like are by their very nature classified, and (b) it’s not exactly a winning marketing ploy to draw a through-line from your breakfast treat of choice to injecting a pair of twins with strychnine just to see which of them dies first.

  On another level, the semi-science of propaganda developed explosively using Nazi methods - not just in the crude processes of commercial advertising, televisual programming or the rigging of political elections, but in the basic psychological processes capable of subsuming and transforming an entire culture and its mythologies over years instead of decades or centuries.

  Under Nazi control the German people had believed in such unmitigated, hastily invented and reinvented tripe as Manifest Aryan Destiny, Pellucidor, the lost island of Mu and the World Ice Theory as sincerely as any tenth-century peasant had believed in the imminence of Judgement Day and the Divine Right of Kings.

  It was this transformation of mythology that was of particular interest to certain sections of the US security services - an interest that dated back to the war itself, when the likes of Tolkien and his inkling ilk had written reams of bombastic and semi-coherent cod-legendary garbage under the direct instruction of the Allied command in an attempt to counter the Nazi world-view.

  What interested them most, however, was the fact that Germany’s leaders were documented proponents of the Black Arts - and that practising them appeared, from such evidence that survived (only to be immediately hushed up), in some strange sense to work. Such evidence included engineers’

  circuit diagrams designed to control V-2 rockets by summoning the Vandertoten, or ‘roaming dead’, to inhabit them; notes attributed to Albert Speer (though subsequently disavowed) on the practical functions of Sacred Geometry in State Architecture, and apparently genuine footage of Paul Joseph Goebbels using the fat of a ritually murdered Jewess to levitate a full three inches off the ground.

  The possibility that magic might actually work defied all logic and reason - but the mere existence of that possibility was enough to merit further investigation. The atom had only recently been split and harnessed, and who knew what other, supposedly impossible phenomena might be fact rather than fiction? With the US economy shifting from a war footing there was money in the national coffers to spend on such possibilities, even something abstruse as this, purely on the off chance. Besides, intelligence reports from Stalin’s Russia spoke of secret experiments involving the paranormal, based on findings in the Polish death camps - and the last thing the United States needed was for the Soviets to get ahead in what might effectively turn into a Charms Race.

  The problem was, looking into this possibility was not like debriefing technicians and scientists who had worked on formulating jet propellants or refining heavy water. If magic had been used at all to obtain unnatural power it had been used by the inner circle of the National Socialist Party - by the people who had actually got that power - and now the vast majority of those people were dead. Those concerns interested in investigating the matter were forced to look further afield, to the sources from which those ideas had originally come...

  ‘It was a godsend.’ Crowley said, as the lights from displays flickered about him in Hangar 18. ‘In a sense. My notoriety in England was starting to prove a positive hindrance by that time, and my new American friends allowed me a fresh start. Now I had the funding and resources to make the greatest leap in the Hermetic Arts since the age of John Dee...’

  ‘To what end?’ asked the Doctor, frowning at the various consoles with distaste. ‘I’d be the first to agree that what you call Magic has its uses, but all of this doesn’t exactly seem to be benign.’

  ‘Well, I have to admit that the arrangement was that I find military applications for my work,’ Crowley said, looking towards the US colonel, whose name was apparently Haasterman.

  ‘The Soviets were loading for bear,’ Haasterman said. ‘Joe One had already been tested. Russia was a nuclear power, and sharing that technology with China back then. If there was something extra we could put in the hat, we went for it.’ He seemed neither apologetic nor proud: he was simply statin
g how things had been.

  ‘And the results were beneficial rather than otherwise,’

  Crowley said. ‘The solution to the Cuban missile crisis - to take but one example - involved certain processes that you might find surprising, even now. Without going into irrelevant details, our work has saved the world as we know it from destruction more than several times.’

  ‘A destruction,’ said the Doctor, ‘almost brought about by your Cold War mentality in the first place, I have no doubt.

  You won’t justify yourselves that easily.’

  ‘Well, be that as it may,’ said Crowley ‘Great things were achieved.’ His face fell a little. ‘All in all, it made the failure of what was, perhaps, our greatest enterprise, more galling.’

  ‘That always seems the way,’ said the Doctor dismissively.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it, at great length.’

  ‘The practice of Magic is,’ said Crowley, with a slight sense of offended dignity, ‘in its ultimate sense, the exercising of Belief.

  The words and protocols, the specifics of the actual rituals are meaningless in themselves, merely being tools to instil and direct a sense of absolute faith. The Nazi inner circle proved that. They basked in the unconditional faith of their subordinates, of their entire nation and its annexed states, feeding off this to turn their delusions into physical fact, transforming the very reality around them, for a time. The fact that they didn’t know quite what they were doing, led in the end to a catastrophic loss of faith in themselves every bit as debilitating as their military collapse on the Eastern Front...’

  ‘Our idea,’ said Haasterman, who seemed to think that Crowley was meandering off into needless reminiscences, ‘was to consciously utilise those so-called Magical processes, to open up a portal between our own world and another...’