by Doctor Who
And they kept on spreading. ‘Tell us the one about the armoured sharks!’ someone had shouted from the back of this latest, biggest crowd.
Even if he didn’t find Gryden, he was doing some good. He was doing what the Doctor had wanted: introducing fiction to this world.
Not that his stories were fiction exactly. He had continually had to reassure people that they were hearing only the truth, and indeed they were. Well. . . give or take the odd embellishment. You had to keep them interested, after all.
Nevertheless, he was engaging their imaginations, expanding their horizons beyond their dull little planet. And in the process he was sticking it up an unjust authority. . . Life didn’t get much better than this.
Jack was loving every second of his new-found fame. That was why, this time, he had stayed too long.
50
They were racing down a garbage-strewn alley, hemmed in by high walls from which the sounds of police sirens echoed until he had no idea which way they were coming from. The tramp was showing a surprising turn of speed, especially considering how much he’d drunk.
‘You should leave me,’ insisted Jack. ‘No need for us both to get nicked.’
‘Enough people have seen us together,’ the tramp reasoned. ‘I’m an accessory before and after the fiction. Anyway, I know these alleyways like the back of my hand. No way you’re getting out of this one without me, Cap’n.’
Jack didn’t argue as the tramp led him around a corner.
Into the path of a police bike.
It was charging towards them like an enraged rhinoceros, all armour plating. For an instant, the tramp was frozen in its harsh blue light, but Jack grabbed his hand and pulled him along. Towards the oncoming vehicle.
He had seen a gap in a row of rusted railings. He pushed the tramp through and scrambled after him, as the bike screeched past and came to a sudden, anti-gravity-assisted halt. Its rider leaped from the saddle,an imposing figure in his black armour and face-concealing helmet.
They were on a patch of wasteland, piled high with abandoned electronic goods. Jack seized a burned-out washing machine on a set of castors and set it rolling up to the railings as the cop tried to squeeze his padded shoulders through after them. He recoiled as the machine hit. It would delay him for a moment.
Jack leaped over a clapped-out robo-butler and found cover behind a mound of assorted junk. The tramp took the long way round, and joined him wheezing and gasping for breath. He didn’t pause, though, or complain. His eyes were alight with excitement. He was running on adrenaline. For now.
He wasn’t the only one. ‘We need somewhere to lie low,’ said Jack.
‘As soon as that cop calls in our location, they’ll move in to surround us.’
The tramp didn’t say anything. He took the lead as they threaded 51
their way through more junk heaps on a seemingly random course.
And suddenly the cop was there, a good distance away but fortu-itously in the right spot at just the right time for a clear line of sight.
He snapped off four gunshots, and Jack yanked the tramp back out of the path of the fizzing blue energy bullets.
They plunged back into the junk heap maze, turned left, left, right, and then the tramp was scrambling to climb a rotten wooden fence twice his height. Jack gave him a boost before attacking the fence at a run. His hands found the top, and his companion helped to pull him up and over.
They dropped onto a muddy incline, the tramp losing his balance and slipping and sliding until Jack caught him. He had almost toppled headlong into a rusty red river, which wended its way sluggishly between weed-choked banks.
They ran on, roots tearing at their ankles, overlooked by the boarded-up windows of old warehouses. They came to a spot where wooden crates had been dumped in the water, providing a series of precarious stepping points to the far side. A short way beyond that the river divided and they followed the right fork until finally they came to a halt beneath an iron bridge.
The tramp’s spurt of energy had deserted him and he sank to the ground, his knees to his forehead, breath rattling in his lungs. ‘They won’t think to look for us down here,’ he panted. ‘Not for a while.
Most of them don’t know about the river. They built right over it, you see.’ His words were almost swallowed by the thundering of traffic above their heads.
‘That was a close one,’ remarked Jack, when they had both got their breath back. ‘From now on, we’ll have to move on faster, never stay in one place too long.’
The tramp shook his head. ‘You can’t go out there again, Cap’n. Not dressed like that. The cops have your description. There’ll be bikes out all over the sector.’
‘I’m not gonna hide. I told you, I want to be found.’
‘You have been. He knows where you are. He’s always known.’
Jack frowned. ‘What are you. . . ’
52
The tramp climbed to his feet. ‘You wanted to get attention? You’ve been doing that since you arrived on this world, you and your friends.
I knew where you were staying. I was just waiting in that doorway for one of you to come by.’
Jack laughed. ‘I get it. Eyes and ears everywhere. You’re one of them, aren’t you? You work for him. You’re some sort of scout. You’ve been testing me.’
‘Not quite true, Cap’n.’ The tramp straightened his shoulders for the first time and drew himself up to his full height, meeting Jack’s gaze with a gleam in his eyes and a smile on his lips. ‘I am him. I’m the man you’ve been looking for. I’m Hal Gryden.’
53
T hedoctorswilltellyouthat all fictionisharmful,thatthe pleasure we find in good dreams is more than offset by the terror when those dreams go bad. I say that even the bad dreams are good for us.
Rose couldn’t place the voice. She squirmed in her bed, defiantly keeping her eyes closed, hoping it would go away and leave her alone.
There’s something alluring about monsters, about things that hide at the foot of your bed and go bump in the night.
If there weren’t, we wouldn’t dream about them. We want to experience that thrill, taste that fear.
She’d nodded off and left the telly on again. It was a wonder her mum hadn’t burst in to unplug it, whingeing about the electric meter.
There’s nothing wrong with a healthy scare. It sets our hearts racing, unleashes our adrenaline, lets us know we’re alive.
She was surfacing from sleep, despite her efforts, remembering where she was.
55
For after all, what could be more exciting – more stimulating
– than tackling those monsters head on?
She’d been lying awake again, the chorus of rush-hour horns from the street below blasting in her ears. She’d turned on the TV to drown them out and found it tuned to the static between channels where Domnic had left it.
The white noise itself had been comforting: a bit harsh, maybe, but a constant regular sound to blot out all others. Rose’s eyelids had sagged and she’d let the sound draw her into darkness.
In our dreams, we can do that. We can have that excitement, and yet be protected. Our dreams can’t hurt us.
What time was it? How long had she slept? Was the Doctor back yet?
What was she listening to?
This has been an editorial on behalf of Static TV. I’m Hal Gryden. We’re forced to cease broadcasting now, but we’ll be back this afternoon with our play for today: Castle of the Brain-eating Zombies . Look for us in the static.
Wide awake now, Rose sat bolt upright. She was just in time to catch a fleeting impression of a face on the TV screen before it was buried in a grey snowstorm. She leaped out of bed and went for the tuning controls, which Domnic had left exposed.
She scrolled through a dozen channels, finding the usual procession of newsreaders and narrated documentaries.
She lingered on the live feed from a courtroom, where a woman was petitioning for divorce on the grounds that her hu
sband had destroyed her confidence with a campaign of malicious lies: ‘He specifically and repeatedly assured me that my bum did not look big in that dress, and yet when I arrived at the restaurant —’
She turned off the telly and looked at the clock. She couldn’t make head or tail of the six numbers on its face. She didn’t know which way 56
round to read them, or even how many hours there were in a day on this world. But a glance out of the window told her that the sun was standing high in the sky.
And still no Doctor. She pulled on her jacket and found her mobile in the pocket: the one he’d gimmicked so that it never needed recharging and showed a signal anywhere, any time. She thought there might be a text or a missed call from him. No dice, though. One day, she was gonna make him carry his own phone – she knew he had one, when it suited him.
He’d find her. He always did. In the meantime, she should get on with it. Find Domnic. Rose and Jack had agreed he could be useful to them, if they could calm him down. He could be their local guide. Anyway, she wanted to make sure he was OK after last night’s freakout.
She scribbled a quick message for the Doctor – just in case – and was headed for the door when she heard a noise behind her.
A footstep, where there had been nobody a second ago.
Rose spun around, catching her breath.
The room was empty.
She smiled to herself. She was glad the Doctor and Captain Jack hadn’t seen her, jumping at shadows.
But just for a second there. . . Just for a second – and her smile froze at the recollection – she had been convinced, absolutely convinced, that she wasn’t alone. That there had been someone – no, something
– behind her.
And not just anything. A. . .
She could hardly bring herself to think the word. But the image was there, clear in her mind. A white-faced creature in ragged clothes.
Peeling skin, vacant eyes, arms reaching limply for her as if they were worked by strings.
A zombie, straight out of Domnic’s comic strip.
Rose shook her head to dispel the image. A leftover fragment of a dream, perhaps. But it stayed with her, itching in the back of her brain as she stepped out into the dreary hotel corridor and shut the door behind her.
57
∗ ∗ ∗
Domnic’s flat wasn’t too hard to find. The roads were numbered rather than named, laid out in a grid system, and Rose was relieved to find she had only a few blocks to walk. She hadn’t fancied trying to negoti-ate this world’s public transport system without any cash and without the Doctor.
The lifts in Domnic’s building were out, but fortunately he was only a few floors up. The bare concrete stairwell reminded Rose of the one in her own block, back home, but there was no graffiti. As if no one had anything to say.
She knocked on a flimsy wooden door for several minutes. She called through it, trying to reassure Domnic that she meant him no harm. She thought about kicking the door down, and would have done if she’d heard the slightest sound of movement from behind it.
He was probably at work. The call centre. She could have kicked herself for sleeping in, for leaving it too late.
What now?
She was trudging back to the hotel, deep in thought, when he leaped out at her from a table in front of a café. He’d been sitting, pretending to be engrossed in a newspaper in which the pictures seemed almost to outnumber the words.
‘Domnic!’ Rose squealed as he grabbed her arm and propelled her away.
He shushed her urgently. ‘Just keep walking. They might be following you.’
Rose resisted the urge to look behind her. ‘Who might be?’
‘You’ve been to my flat. They’ve had cops patrolling all day, in plain clothes. I’ve been watching them. The same man, circling the block clockwise every three minutes. And there’s someone in the flat across the road. I saw the sunlight flashing off an ocular lens.’
Rose did look now. ‘I can’t see anyone,’ she said dubiously.
Domnic was setting a brisk pace, weaving expertly through the crowd, and Rose was struggling to keep up. She kept bumping into people. They reached a junction and abruptly he set off at a right angle. A moment later, he broke into a run and darted down an empty 58
alleyway.
She caught up with him on the street at the far end. ‘Look, I think it’s OK,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone. . . ’
‘They’d been in my flat,’ said Domnic. ‘I stayed last night with a friend and when I got home. . . They’d tried to put everything back as they found it, but I could tell. It was like everything was just. . . just a fraction out of place, you know? I came down the fire escape.’
‘That’s getting to be a habit.’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I thought you were. . . well, I guess that was obvious. It must have been. . . The stress, the excitement, it must have made me a bit fantasy crazy. I realise now the chances of you being right there in that hotel room if you were. . . and, I mean, the police do lie to us, everyone knows that now, but the stories you were telling, they were too fantastic, unbelievable. They’d never. . . ’
‘OK, I get the point.’
‘He was on again this morning,’ said Domnic. ‘Did you see him?’
‘If you mean Hal Gryden. . . ’
‘Yeah,’ he said excitedly. ‘So you found him. What he was saying. . .
I mean, this morning, I thought it was all over. You know, the police have my name – they must have forced it out of someone in the group
– and I can’t go home, but I know now it won’t be for long.’
‘Why? What did he say?’
Domnic frowned. ‘I thought you –’
‘I only caught the last bit,’ explained Rose.
Domnic was getting twitchy again, looking around them. His eyes narrowed and he took Rose by the arm again and pulled her down another alleyway. Paranoid, she thought, definitely paranoid. But maybe he had good reason. She was just passing through, but this was Domnic’s life that had been turned upside down. She remembered how she had felt that first time, when the monsters had come to her workplace, her home. Like nothing made sense. At least she’d had the Doctor. Who did Domnic have?
Who else but her?
There was a scraping sound. As if someone had knocked against one of the bin lids behind them. They turned in unison, then looked 59
at each other.
‘There’s no one there,’ said Rose, trying to persuade herself as much as she was her companion.
Domnic nodded, but didn’t look convinced. They hurried on, back into the crowds.
‘You were gonna tell me about Gryden,’ Rose prompted.
Domnic’s voice was quieter, more subdued, than before. ‘A year ago, he was nothing, just a rumour. I didn’t think he existed. Now. . . ’
‘You really think he can change things.’
‘I know he can. People listen to him, and now they know the truth
– the real truth. And this morning. . . He’s hinted about it before, but he’s never actually come right out and said. . . A revolution, Rose.
Hal Gryden says it’s time for us to rise up and overthrow this police state. It’s because we don’t have a government, you see. There’s no one to. . . to look at the way things are, to listen to us and to make a difference. So we have to form our own government! Gryden says it’s time to repeal the anti-fiction laws, to demand our dreams and all the things they won’t let us dream about. Yeah, those were his words. . .
Rose, I think we’re being. . . ’
‘I know.’
It was nothing she’d seen, nothing she’d heard. It was more a sense of dread, something lurking in the back of her brain. The sort of feeling she would normally have dismissed, but this time she couldn’t.
She was scanning the faces around her, looking for the one that would meet her eye.
And she gasped as she saw it, a half-block behind them, standing at
the junction, its eyes black and vacant, its skin white and peeling.
And then the crowd closed around it and parted again, and it was gone.
Domnic must have seen it too, because suddenly they were both running.
They cut through a large department store, where everything was in plain black, white or grey packaging. She was beginning to doubt her own eyes. A zombie? How could there have been a zombie, 60
right there on the pavement? With people walking past it as if it was nothing, as if they couldn’t even see it?
Onto the street again, where they came to a stop because Domnic was out of breath.
‘Did we shake her off?’ he panted.
‘“Her”?’
‘I thought you saw her. The policewoman.’
‘Um, yeah.’ Now Rose really did feel stupid, seeing monsters where there had been none. But she’d been so sure. ‘Yeah, I think we must’ve.’
To her surprise, Domnic placed his hands on her shoulders and stared earnestly into her eyes. ‘I want you to know, Rose, that if we get caught, I won’t tell them a thing. I’ll say that I. . . I lied to you to make you help me. That in all the time I was with you I never heard you say anything that wasn’t the whole truth. . . ’
‘Shut up, Domnic,’ said Rose.
He recoiled, looking hurt. She had that dreadful feeling again.
There was something behind her. To the left. To the right. But everywhere she turned, there were just ordinary people, most of them ignoring her but some now staring – at her clothes again? No, at the way she was acting. All twitchy.
The way Domnic had been acting last night. And now.
And it occurred to Rose that maybe this was how he felt all the time.
As if there was something about this world. . . something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. But she remembered what the Doctor had said about things beneath the surface, where most people couldn’t see them. The feeling that, somewhere, there were monsters. If only she could work out where they were – and shake off the awful fear that, if she could see them, they could see her too.
