Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Everybody Comes Together

  The Whappaho Beach Weekly High School Glee Club Wiener Roast was, by this point, well underway. A number of dorks in trunks and stripy vests were doing some strange variation of the Twist with a collection of girls with bulletproof bouffants and the extensively covering sort of bikinis that would drive any man wild with carnal desire had he the can-opener or quite possibly the hydraulic jackhammer necessary to get through them.

  On the boardwalk a bespectacled rock-’n’-roll band was playing electric guitars without any amplification leads or indeed, strings and doing a prancingly choreographed dance that had all the sophisticated sex appeal of Freddie and the Dreamers appearing on an episode of Blue Peter , without the sophistication or indeed, the sex appeal.

  Off to one side of this happy group, Dirk Brugman held in a stomach temporarily bereft of corsetry and spoke sternly to his girl, Lana Wilburry, who was wearing the half-inch décolletaged black one-piece and lipstick that denoted a nasty piece of work who didn’t appreciate what she’d got.

  ‘Juliette saw you around town,’ Dirk gritted, patently trying to be reasonable and control his perfectly justifiable anger

  ‘Riding around with Ratso Doodie and his gang of roughnecks.

  You’ll be getting yourself a reputation if you’re not careful, Lana.’

  ‘And what’s it to you?’ Ms Wilburry snapped spitefully.

  ‘You’re far too busy doing your science in your laboratory.

  Trying to feed the world’s hungry nations with your so-called cheese generator Hah! You and Juliette...’ she made the name sound remarkably similar to ‘conniving bitch’... ‘are well suited to each other! And now, I think I want to go for a swim.’

  She stalked off into the water barely shuddering as it froze her lower extremities slightly blue. And beneath the surface, on a completely different grade of film stock, something stirred...

  The Doctor had once told Victoria, during a trip to Earth’s twentieth century, that if the contiguous population of five billion souls, give or take, could have stood together in one mass they would barely cover an island the size of the Isle of Wight.

  Victoria hadn’t quite believed him at the time but now, looking at the bodies as they piled into the Drive-o-Rama - those who’d had vehicles having by now left them behind - she could see how such a thing might be possible. She looked at the sea of bodies and faces, welling ever closer, and knew that she, together with Jamie and the Doctor, would soon be engulfed.

  The people made no sound as they moved - at least, they made no verbal sound. Their accumulative breathing, the susurration of it, however, was all but deafening. And still they moved forward, with unified precision. The mass of bodies rippled slightly as individual components walked across some imperfection in the underlying ground, but there was no other variation to its inexorable pace...

  And then the mass, quite suddenly, stopped.

  A minuscule piece of it broke away, and walked towards her.

  Victoria recognised it as Dr Dibley the Mercy Hill surgeon, all jocularity gone from him, his face as slack and inanimate as all the others. He was carrying a big black medical bag.

  Dr Dibley halted before the little group of captives and their guards. His head tracked around slowly, eyes taking in Victoria to one side, Jamie to the other, finally coming to rest upon the unconscious Doctor.

  ‘The subjects are not One with Continuity,’ his mouth said, in lifeless and unanimated tones. ‘They must be Converted so that Continuity shall be properly achieved, in this World and the next.’

  As he spoke there had been a change in the motions of the mass behind him, a sense of something passing through it and intermixing with it, like swirls of cream stirred into a cup of coffee. The crowd pressed even closer to itself, if such a thing were possible, gathered itself into itself and began as a whole to congeal.

  It began to grow in height.

  It happened extraordinarily quickly, individual people climbing on their fellows’ shoulders and being themselves overrun, in turn, by new people. It was like watching some massive human pyramid take shape in a circus big top... a pyramid so huge that those at the base, men, women and children alike, must surely be crushed by its weight.

  As the mass consolidated itself, however, Victoria saw that a glowing was issuing from it, brightening by increments until it rivalled the light from the flickering cinematograph screen on which a young lady was currently being pulled under the water by some hulking form of sea creature. The people themselves, from what Victoria could see of them, seemed more-or-less physically unharmed. Were they being protected in some fashion by the glowing energies that surrounded them?

  Were they aware now, or would they be aware if they were ever disassembled again, of what was and had been happening to them? It was a horrible thought to consider, either way.

  Now the mass heaved and transformed itself, the various human pieces slipping over each other and contorting, reforming the whole into a massive, lumpen and vaguely humanoid shape.

  A human shape several hundred feet high.

  It turned, slow as the beginnings of a mountain rockslide, and then lumbered off some way into the distance. The ground -

  the entire world - shook to its footfalls. There was the splintering crunch and crash of crushed and falling trees.

  Long before its glowing form could even begin to be lost in the darkness, it stopped, and bent itself down. It picked something up. And then it turned back, once again, and ponderously returned to the open space of the Drive-o-Rama.

  Clutched in a massive and rudimentary-looking hand, reminiscent of a child’s mitten if the child happened to suffer from giganticism, was the tiny-seeming form of the TARDIS.

  ‘The gateway to worlds other than this,’ said the thing that was controlling Dr Dibley There was, remarkably enough, emotion in its tone. Not so much gloating or triumphant, more a sense of expectation. ‘New worlds for Continuity.’ It seemed slightly plaintive - as though the thing controlling Dibley was, rather pathetically, anticipating all the new things it would be able to kill and eat.

  Dibley’s head turned to one of the policeman guards. There was no sense of communication, verbal or otherwise, but the policeman stepped forward and, without preamble, Dibley pulled a scalpel from the big black medical bag and slashed it across the man’s throat. Victoria stared, aghast.

  The dead policeman fell to the ground, to his knees and then his face, calmly and with no fuss whatsoever. The blood-sprayed Dibley, equally without concern, knelt down and whittled at the nape of the body’s neck with his blade. Using a pair of forceps from his bag, he extracted an item from the hole he had made in the back of the policeman’s head. It was an egg-sized lump of what Victoria recognised from her travels as electronic circuitry, though she couldn’t begin to guess what purpose such an implantational device might possibly serve.

  ‘The link shall be made,’ the thing controlling Dibley said, walking to where the unconscious Doctor was held between two guards, and standing behind him. ‘The primary subject shall be subsumed within Continuity. It will open the gateway, for Continuity. Continuity will expand.’

  Victoria tried to scream to Dibley, to the thing inside him, that it wouldn’t work, that the Doctor had already tried and failed to access the TARDIS since they had come here, but it was too late. The scalpel was already plunging for the back of the Doctor’s neck.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Arrangement and Expeditious Disposal of

  Artefacts

  As they turned left at the kitchens and ran through the swimming-pool chamber, leaving the protective influence of the console room behind, the Doctor became aware that certain things were very wrong indeed. This was partly due to his rarefied senses as a Time Lord, and partly due to the basic precognitionary senses available even to humans, which are in actual fact a simple integration, on the deep-subconscious level, of minute nuances of data of which the con
scious mind is unaware... but mostly it was due to the fact that the walls were turning themselves inside out at random and the pool was filled with marmosets and purple custard.

  ‘Either the world is going increasingly strange,’ he said, ‘or I’m going mad.’ He thought about it seriously. ‘No,’ he decided at last, ‘I think it’s the world.’

  He realised that he was talking to thin air - or rather, air that at that moment chose to manifest a shoal of insubstantial lantern fish going by. They popped like soap bubbles when he put his hand through them. The Doctor hoped it hadn’t hurt.

  Romana was some way ahead, along a corridor that suddenly, despite all probability and visual taste, was walled with variously jarring varieties of tartan. The human woman, Katharine Delbane, was with her, held by an elbow to stop her wandering dazedly off, but there was no - the Doctor looked around - no sign of the Brigadier or the two young men. It was a disquieting sensation, feeling the spaces which had been his home for centuries change around him, without him having anything to do with it - and since the companion who had shared those spaces was at least in sight, he hurried to catch her up.

  ‘You wouldn’t have any idea what’s happening, Romana, would you?’ he said, trying for a tone that would convey he knew perfectly well what was happening and was merely testing her to see if she did, too.

  Romana, still moving at a run and by now basically dragging the dead weight of Delbane, turned her head to regard him sardonically.

  ‘I might do,’ she said, perfectly calmly, as though her exertions were no more than a gentle stroll. ‘Why don’t you tell me, so I know I’ve got it right?’

  ‘No, no, you go first,’ said the Doctor, managing to bow with gracious courtesy while in the midst of a full-tilt run. ‘Feel free.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ said Romana.

  ‘Positively,’ said the Doctor.

  Martial-sounding music suddenly blared from nowhere and a brigade of ghostly Royal Fusiliers, circa the Napoleonic Wars, trooped in through one corridor wall and out through the other.

  ‘I received another visit from Wblk the High Councilman,’

  Romana said as they waited for the fusiliers to pass by.

  ‘And did Councilman Wblk have anything interesting to say?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘To some degree, yes. It appears that the anomaly everyone was so worried about, the one created by the Gallifreyan prototype, was actually destabilised by another space/time conveyance materialising inside it. A particularly decrepit and ineptly repaired TARDIS, for example, with half its safety protocols disabled or not there at all. Sound familiar?’

  ‘I never did!’ said the Doctor indignantly. I’ve never been in a discontinuous singularity in my life. Not one I can’t account for, in any case.’

  ‘Well, there’s no reason why there should be any overt indication of the singularity’s true nature,’ said Romana,

  ‘within the singularity itself. Or possibly some future version of yourself is involved. Or you might have just forgotten.’

  ‘There is that, I suppose,’ the Time Lord conceded. ‘The problem with the occasional forced regeneration is that it leaves you with little time to pick and choose. You sometimes forget to take things along. I’ve always regretted losing the knack for making soufflés for example; flat as a pancake, they go now...’

  ‘Culinary digressions aside,’ said Romana, a little pointedly,

  ‘the fact remains that some version or other of the TARDIS is currently trapped in there and disrupting things catastrophically, with no way into it or out... by conventional means. The only way to access it would be to take another version from some different point on its time line and -’

  The Doctor looked at her, aghast. ‘You didn’t.’

  Romana shrugged, and gestured to where one of the corridor walls had spontaneously produced a banjo and was playing Swannee River’.

  ‘But that’s breaking...’

  The Doctor paused and totted on his fingers, ‘...fifteen thousand, four hundred and seventy-three Laws of Space and Time, not counting codicils.’

  ‘The High Council gave me special dispensation,’ said Romana. ‘In this case. The idea is that it will create a nexus point, a point of convergence where we can pass from one point on the internal time line to another...’

  ‘But materialising the TARDIS in a space containing itself,’

  said the Doctor, ‘even a discontinuous space, is incredibly dangerous.’

  He scowled as the floor turned momentarily into rats’ milk cheese. If we’re not very careful, we could be sucked out of reality like bathwater down a plug hole and end up disappearing up our own interstitial noumena.’

  ‘All the more reason to find the nexus point soon,’ said Romana. She looked critically at the barely conscious Delbane. ‘I think we’d make better time if we left the girl.’

  ‘Very possibly,’ said the Doctor, firmly,’ but we’re not going to. We do not leave innocent people in danger - especially, so it appears, danger we’ve contrived to create for ourselves.’ He became grave. ‘And speaking of innocents in danger - I do hope the Brigadier’s doing all right. I hope we haven’t finally managed to do for the old chap.’

  ‘This isn’t real,’ said Danny Slater. ‘It’s just a dream. It isn’t really happening.’ It was, if anyone had been counting, the 127th time he’d said it, with minor variations. ‘It’s not real,’ he said for the 128th time as a hydra-like monster appeared, the eyes on its many heads clustered like rings of frog spawn around circular and needle-toothed mouths. ‘It’s just a dream. It isn’t really happening...’

  The monster lunged for him but fortunately melted away into plates of manticore sandwiches with little toothpick flags stuck into them before vanishing completely.

  Jim McCrae might have thought that his friend had finally and completely lost his mind - had his own mind not been almost entirely focused on his own sense of gut-clenching terror. It seemed to be thinking lucidly, strangely enough; it was just that it couldn’t seem to think about anything other than the devastating changes in his life.

  A leisurely afternoon of surveillance, possibly broken by a two-hour pub lunch on expenses, had turned into one in which he was drugged and abducted by international terrorists and taken to their secret base (his neurasthenically confused mind had thrown up emotional-level interpretations from old spy movies and TV that seemed to fit the observed facts

  - consoles, hooded troops and hi-tech wall screens) from which he had been plunged into this terrifying hallucinatory hell. It was probably due to some villainous terrorist mind ray or something.

  A logical remnant of his mind pointed out that this was probably not a true reading of events. Assassins with three nipples, bowler-hatted henchmen, sexy female double agents with double-barrelled, single-entendre names and such don’t exist in real life, so at best this was just the real-life equivalent of such things.

  Unfortunately, as that rational piece of his mind insisted on pointing out, one James Angus McCrae was going to have to deal with this using the real-life equivalent of a laser-firing watch and a pocket full of miniature grenades - that is, a market knock-off watch that had the stealth capability of looking a bit like a Rolex, and a pocket containing a crumpled fiver borrowed from petty cash and a handful of loose change. Dark shapes were coming down the corridor, hard and distinct against the whiteness that seemed to be the default state between transitions. They seemed more substantial, more real and actual, than the other hallucinations. This was not exactly a comfort. McCrae yelped, and tried to push himself back against the corridor wall, which pushed back in lots of complexly shifting little ways.

  Later, McCrae was rather proud of the fact that he had unthinkingly grabbed Slater, who was obliviously still saying how this wasn’t real and was a dream, and hauled him out of the way of the approaching creatures. It didn’t do any good though; the misshapen forms were bearing down on them, unstoppable and snarling, their eyes alight with a hellish
glow that McCrae’s stern but not particularly lurid Presbyterian childhood upbringing couldn’t touch. The way they held themselves and moved, triggered responses that were wired into the human brain when we all lived in the Kalahari, sharing it with carnivores: these were hungry monsters and they were going to pull him down and eat him up...

  They passed Slater and McCrae without so much as a sniff.

  McCrae noticed the rags of combat uniforms still on them.

  For a while he leant back against the squirming wall, hardly daring even to breathe - the movie-going portion of his emotions knew precisely what happens to people just as they’re heaving that final, as it were, sigh of relief. The shifting, insubstantial visions of the corridor, though, were now something of a relief by comparison. At least, so far, they hadn’t actually hurt -

  Something else came for him. This time, McCrae screwed his eyes shut and actually screamed.

  ‘Pull yourself together, man!’ a voice thundered. ‘Carrying on like this, you’ll be no use at all!’

  McCrae opened his eyes and looked at the man standing in front of him. Vaguely, out of the confusion of recent events, he recognised him as Lethbridge-Stewart, the Brigadier.

  ‘It’s not real,’ Slater was saying off to one side. ‘This isn’t happening. It’s just a -’

  ‘And you can stop that as well,’ the Brigadier snapped. Slater shut his mouth so quickly that the click of his teeth slamming together, and possibly chipping with the force, was plainly audible. It was as if he had been waiting all this time for somebody to simply tell him to stop.

  The Brigadier turned his steely gaze back to McCrae. ‘You.

  Name, rank and number.’

  It occurred to Jim McCrae that he didn’t have an actual rank in any recognised sense, his role being defined by duties that were basically those of a general dogsbody, and no serial number save his national insurance number, which in the present trying circumstances he couldn’t for the life of him recall.