by Dave Stone
The Doctor had come back to life as if he had never been unconscious, shrugged himself easily out of the grip of his captors and avoided the blade that was plunging towards him.
Now he looked down at the dead body of Dibley with alarm. ‘I, ah, didn’t mean for that to happen. Are you all right?’
He bent down to prod ineffectually at the body as though not quite believing that it could go from one state to the other quite so quickly, rather as a man might keep on chatting to some acquaintance for a few moments after the acquaintance had suddenly and unexpectedly died.
‘Doctor!’ Victoria shouted. Her original reason for the exclamation had been to point out that, while it was all very unfortunate and sad that somebody who had been just about to hack at the little man’s neck had dropped down dead, there were several other guards around, two with hands upon herself and Jamie, who might have something less than friendly to say about it... but as she shouted she became aware that the manner of the guards had changed. One of the policemen, who had previously just stood there implacably with her arm in an iron grip, had now let go and was stumbling about clutching its head as if, had there been some sense of human thought inside it, it thought its head might burst. The other guards were behaving in a similar fashion: lurching and stumbling as though in agony, banging their heads on the ground. A thin, keening sound was coming from each of them, as though something inside were trying to scream without quite knowing how to do it.
Victoria ran over to the Doctor, who was still looking down at the body of Dibley with dismay. ‘What happened to you?’ she said. ‘I thought you were dead to the world.’
‘Oh, I thought it might be an idea to feign unconsciousness,’
said the Doctor, vaguely. ‘I can do that a bit more extensively than most people. The idea was to keep our adversary from picking up my thoughts so that I could catch it unawares when I finally made my move, that sort of thing. Bit of an obvious subterfuge, of course, but I think our chap is getting more and more, well, unintelligent as its world slowly disintegrates around it...’
‘Well I don’t know about our man getting unintelligent,’
said Jamie in a worried voice, drawing their attention back to the massive shape that towered over them, ‘but I don’t think he really needs to be clever at the moment.’
The humanoid form was thrashing its limbs, though whether with pain or rage it was impossible to say. It began to roar, its human components howling and screaming in unison. In a parody of human demeanour, it turned its massive head to regard the TARDIS that it was holding, and shook the TARDIS
angrily Then it started to pound it against the ground, like an ape trying to break a particularly stubborn coconut.
Victoria tried to ask the Doctor what they could do but however hard she shouted, the multiple roar from the monstrous figure, which seemed to include every possible sound the human voice could make together with any number of entirely inhuman harmonics, drowned out her voice, even to herself.
The Doctor said something, realised that he couldn’t be heard, pointed to the monster and then shook his head frantically, waving his hands in a way that seemed to convey that 200-foot-tall giants who happened to be hammering the TARDIS into the ground weren’t important. When Victoria stared at him, trying to work out if this was what he really meant, he shrugged, turned to point dramatically at the screen on which the film of the Hell Planet Beyond Time was still playing, and set off for it at a bustling run, not so much as bothering to glance behind him to see if she, Jamie or anybody else was following.
Victoria looked at Jamie, who appeared as puzzled as she was, in the variegated light from the screen on one side and the monster on the other. He shrugged, as had the Doctor, but with the sense of exasperated resignation with which they had both become remarkably familiar at certain times during their travels. Then they both set off after the rapidly diminishing Doctorial form, hurrying to catch him up.
* * *
The Doctor and Romana spilled out of an imponderable hole and landed with a double and not entirely dignified thump on the console room floor. ‘I do not want to do that again,’ Romana said, climbing to her feet and rubbing at her slightly bruised self-regard. ‘That bit where the subdimensional soma-monsters lie in wait to suck the lymphatic juices of unwary travellers was particularly tedious - and quite what the Sontarans are doing mining the nether regions with soul-catcher bombs I have no idea...’
‘Well, the chances are we’re going to have to do it again,’
said the Doctor cheerfully, as though their unfortunate fifteen-subjective-year diversion in transit, and battle with an entity that for some obscure reason had called itself the Solstice Squid, hadn’t happened. ‘At least once, at any rate.’
‘Please don’t remind me,’ said Romana. She looked around the TARDIS interior disdainfully. ‘This is how you used to have it? I hope so - because I’d hate to think you were intending to do this some time in your future.’
The Doctor looked around slightly more charitably. ‘I seem to recognise the old girl. If it’s the me I’m thinking of, I was far too busy playing my penny whistle to the delight of all around me to bother much with interior decorating.’ He watched the external viewing screens until he was sure nothing interesting was going to emerge from the static, then turned to the console and fiddled with it for a while.
‘Well, the first problem seems simple enough,’ he said. ‘The plasmic shell of the old girl is slightly out of phase with the state-vector of her surroundings, occluding her from them and trapping me outside.’ He tapped at a keypad and flipped a couple of switches decisively. ‘That’s sorted out, at least. All I had to do was reverse the polarity of the...’
The floor of the console room shook and then overturned completely, flinging both himself and Romana off their feet.
* * *
The Mind had never experienced such pain before. In all of Its existence It had never imagined that such agony could be possible. In all of Its killings It had taken both parts, infusing certain qualities of Itself into the murderer, others into the victim, carefully controlling each action and response in what was basically a kind of abstract dance. None of that dynamic had been present in Its subsumation of the individual mind who referred to itself; when allowed, as Dibley The Mind had felt the full force of Dibley’s death, and the force of it had driven the Mind all but mad. It might seem strange that the loss of what was, after all, such a minuscule part of Itself would provoke such a strong reaction... but it was the difference between gingerly testing a cup of hot coffee by sipping it, and having that same cup of coffee flung without warning in your face. In any event, the Mind had been hurt, and hurt badly. In Its shock and pain, all It wanted to do was tear a hole in the World and crawl in and hide. The little blue box in Its Avatar’s hand contained the gateway to Worlds within it, and now the Mind, all other plans forgotten, was in an utterly Mindless manner trying to smash it open on the ground.
* * *
As its energies flickered and cracked around it, the thing inside the body of Crowley made the remains of the face grin. ‘Oh you’re strong, little one, you’re strong indeed - but you are younger than me, you have not had experience in the husbanding and direction of your Power. You never expend it all at once. You keep some in reserve for use when your enemy’s resources are depleted...’
‘Oh yes?’ The thing inside the body of Katharine Delbane felt its own power rebuilding, and rebuilding fast - but not quite fast enough. To show any weakness at this point, however, would be a mistake. ‘Why don’t you try it?’
The wreck of Crowley’s body looked thoughtful for a moment, if scraps of flesh adhering to a living skull can look thoughtful. ‘Yes,’ the thing inside him said. ‘Yes, I think I will...’
It was some moments before the thing inside Delbane realised what was happening. It had steeled itself for another destructive blast, prepared with every iota of its being to force it away. It didn’t realise it was pouring, actively forci
ng, its life energies into Crowley, who was quietly sucking them in, until it was too late.
‘You see, little one?’ said the thing inside him, as it sucked the creature inside her dry. ‘Always keep something in reserve, and keep it in plain sight, but so that it comes from a direction your opponent has forgotten to expect.’
* * *
‘Avatar?’ said Victoria. ‘What’s an Avatar?’ This far from the monster, close to the screen, it was possible to speak and be heard. ‘The simple embodiment of some vast and unknowable force,’ said the Doctor. ‘Not the force itself exactly, but what you might call its representative in the world, like the spokesman for some global manufacturing incorporation, or the way a pontiff was once thought to be the living embodiment of God.’
‘If that’s the representative of it,’ Jamie said, looking back at the enraged humanoid form, ‘then what the hell is the real thing like?’
‘You’re thinking in the wrong terms, Jamie,’ said the Doctor. He gestured up at the cinematograph screen which was showing a slimy sea monster, with three eyes and a mouth that appeared to be stuffed with the contents of a tin of raw frankfurters, dragging a struggling girl into a cave containing the silver-painted plywood bulk of a flying saucer.
‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘This is the representation of a strip of celluloid, thirty-five millimetres across and running through a shutter at twenty-four frames per second - or the representation of a group of people with hardly any money ineptly play-acting. It depends in which sense you look at it.’
He gestured in the direction of the humanoid form, which was now trying a different tack and attempting to unscrew the top of the TARDIS as though it were a pickle jar. ‘The size of something isn’t the important thing - and that thing there isn’t important. The ultimate truth is what matters and its source might be something quite different.’
‘And just where,’ Victoria said, ‘are we supposed to find this ultimate truth?’ Uncharacteristically, what with one thing and another, she was feeling distinctly ill-tempered. At some point this... this Avatar was going to realise that the people he had taken captive were missing, would attempt to do something about it, and the Doctor was just standing here and talking in riddles.
‘Well, I have my thoughts on that,’ the Doctor said. ‘I was wrong when I said that the city was the centre of some monstrous killing-bottle, I think. Cause and effect, and the physical law that produces them, work slightly differently here. This is the centre of things and the city lies in every direction from it, while still being in the same place. Do you see what I mean?’
He saw from Victoria and Jamie’s blank expressions that they did not. He gestured to the screen again. ‘Tell me, do you see anything odd about this? Ah yes, I was forgetting that the cinematic arts are a bit beyond both your times. Let’s just say that this thing works by way of light being projected on to a screen. Now, does anything strike you as odd?’
Victoria found herself piqued by the Doctor’s rather hectoring tone. ‘I’ve seen magic lantern shows,’ she told him loftily, ‘and they’re almost the same. There’s nothing here projecting the image from the front, so...’
The Doctor nodded and smiled. ‘Precisely.’
* * *
The Brigadier gazed dubiously into the chamber. After a strange and, frankly, not a little harrowing, journey through the TARDIS interior, it looked strangely prosaic and in short, a little disappointing. Fractured marble columns and a floor covered with puddles of greasy ash. The only other things visible were the two figures. The fact that they were floating, motionless, three feet off the ground seemed almost ordinary. One of them was a ragged horror, its flesh ripped and its viscera exposed in places, items of anatomy hanging by a twisted thread. For all that it was horribly mangled, this body seemed to broadcast a sense of, well... a sense of strength and vitality.
The other was different: the physically intact but horribly withered body of what had once, it seemed, been a woman in a regular army uniform. With a start, the Brigadier recognised it as Katharine Delbane.
Behind him, the Brigadier was aware that the two young men, Slater and McCrae, had taken the opportunity of this apparent lull in events to go limp and dazed again. Well, to hell with them, he thought. He had attempted to instil some backbone into them, to keep them going in the face of adversity, purely out of common decency. Leave ‘em to their own devices. This place seemed, remarkably enough, relatively safe for human beings to be in... but the Brigadier had seen enough strangeness in his life to realise that there were other dangers here, other battles being fought, on levels with which human perceptions couldn’t cope.
And they were battles, he could plainly see, that Delbane was losing. Delbane might have been in UNIT by secondment, and might - it now seemed - be other than human, or at least caught up in something that was other than human... but she was one of his own all the same. One of what he thought of as his
‘men’, in an old-school military sense. And so it was in the interests of helping one of his men that the Brigadier stepped forward and grabbed at the floating, mangled man.
What actually happened was this: the thing inside the body of Crowley was fighting the thing in Delbane on any number of power levels, but all of them, so far as human perceptions were concerned, were abstract. In the heat of battle it had entirely forgotten about the concrete, human level. So when the Brigadier so much as touched its barely held-together physical shell, it underwent collapse leaving its true self naked and exposed for an instant. And the thing inside Delbane took that opportunity to strike for all it was worth.
So far as the Brigadier was concerned, the mangled body simply fell rather messily apart, deliquescing and crumbling as it did so. Almost instantly, the body of Delbane was transformed, the flesh filling out and glowing with vitality.
Then she fell three feet to the floor and landed in a groaning heap.
* * *
There were no defences, no walls or barriers or steps leading down into a mysterious chamber. This was simply a place to which, by the basic nature of the world, the people living in that world would never go. It would simply never occur to them, and the circumstances that might have someone wandering in by accident would never happen.
It would take a person, or people, not indigenous to that world to so much as intimate that this place could even possibly exist.
Behind the screen was a... monstrosity. That was the only way to describe it. It seemed to shift and melt in a constant state of flux, constantly transforming and reforming, in one sense smaller than a large wardrobe, in another and barely perceived sense inexpressibly massive.
Little details of it were recognisable - in the sense that one saw something and instantly saw what it was and what it did.
One of those details was the mechanical projector, originally installed when the Lychburg Drive-o-Rama had been built. Its purpose was to back project cinematographic movies on to the drive-in screen every night, which it dutifully did and would dutifully continue to do for all time.
Other elements of the... thing were also recognisable, though not to human eyes or senses.
‘It’s a TARDIS!’ exclaimed the Doctor incredulously. ‘The remains of one, at least. At least, I think it’s a TARDIS.
There’s something ... well, there’s something primitive about it, even in this damaged state. Something unfinished, almost as if...’
Abruptly, he stuck a pontificatory finger in the air as recollected inspiration struck him. ‘I remember now! I never was much good at history at school, I’m afraid.’ He turned to the dumbfounded Jamie and Victoria and, still walking backwards round the... thing while they followed him, began to explain with a rather incongruously earnest enthusiasm.
‘When my, ah, people first invented time machines, they had to test them. So they sent out prototypes, you see, so they could see what would happen if -’
‘Did they send out beasties in them?’ asked Jamie suddenly.
‘What?’ The Doctor
was momentarily nonplussed by the question. ‘Why yes, Jamie, I believe that some of the tests were...’
‘Like yon beastie over there?’ asked Jamie, worriedly The Doctor turned.
They had by this time walked around the... thing to a point where they could see another side of it. A collection of cables ran from the twisted and partially melted remains of what looked as if it had originally been a TARDIS console. Squatting restlessly on the console, electrode leads running from it to its head, its claws - of which, as we shall see, it had a multitude -
scrabbling at the console controls, was a creature. It was the build of a medium-sized dog, but rat-like in nature save that it had fifteen elongated, partially furred and multiply-jointed legs in an arrangement reminiscent of a spider. Its body was wasted and its fur was thinning and grey. It was obviously extremely elderly, but its eyes glowed with an insane and alien energy, an energy also evident in its mad and dancing scuttle over the console controls.
‘As I live and breathe,’ said the Doctor, ‘that’s a Gallifreyan woprat! I thought they were long extinct. This certainly is a...’
He got no further. Victoria, given the tenor of her original times, was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude that even she had not known she had.
There were certain things, however, of which she had an innate and irrational fear. These included rats and spiders.
Ordinarily, she would have been quite able to control her fear, but recent events had drained her emotional reserves to the point of debilitation - and besides, if one is innately and irrationally afraid of rats and spiders, how much worse must it be if one is suddenly confronted by some large and madly hideous miscegenative offspring of the two?
