by Mark Morris
The frustrating thing was, he could not recall the specifics of any of these nightmares. If something beyond his usual anxieties was bothering him, he had no idea what it was.
‘Sorry, just... erm... just collecting my thoughts,’ he mumbled in reply and, twisting round, attempted a grin that he couldn’t help but feel sat awkwardly on his face.
The group in the back, his eight-strong workforce, four lining each interior wall of the truck, stared back at him sullenly. Jack felt sweat trickle down his forehead, moisten his armpits. At forty-four he was a good quarter-century older than every one of these boys. They made him feel dull, fat, ugly and unaccountably nervous. They made him feel like a teacher in dubious control of a class of students who felt nothing for him but contempt, or perhaps, even worse, pity
‘Right,’ he said with hollow bonhomie, ‘let’s get to it then,’
and he rubbed absently at the rash that had sprung up on his arms in the past week, and which in the muggy, sweaty heat was itching more than ever.
They climbed out of the truck, carrying the paraphernalia they would need to clear the beach of rubbish left by both holidaymakers and the outgoing tide. Jack had been doing this job for a long time and had seen enough stuff washed up on the beach to put him off swimming for life. As well as the usual rubbish - bits of old fishermen’s netting, plastic bottles, rusty tins - there had been dead animals (dogs and cats mainly, and once half a horse, trailing bluish-white guts bleached of blood), syringes, surgical dressings, raw sewage and chemical drums rusted and punctured. He had never found a person, or bits of a person, but he knew one or two workers who had. Mike Salters and Craig Branch had once found the body of an old woman floating in on the tide, her face black and eyeless, shrimps and baby crabs spilling from her mouth as the waves dragged her up on to the beach. And there was talk that Tony Carver had once found a man’s decomposed head in a Sainsbury’s bag, the victim of a gangland killing whose dismembered body - minus the hands
- had apparently been recovered later from a skip behind one of Tayborough Sands’s plusher hotels.
Jack adjusted his spectacles and looked out over the clay-coloured expanse of beach. Although it was already muggy, the day was still struggling to open its eyes. Dark clouds smeared the sky like old mascara. On the horizon, the rising sun was a blur of lipstick-red. As they trudged down the uneven stone steps on to the beach, a sea-breeze ruffled over them, which, while bringing welcome relief from the humidity, carried with it a stench of rotting seaweed and dead fish.
Vaguely Jack waved his troops off to cover different sections of the beach, noting that their grunts of acknowledgement were becoming surlier by the day. He ought to do something about it, he supposed, assert his authority, but he felt both too intimidated and too lethargic.
As he moved down the beach armed with his shovel and his roll of refuse sacks he noticed that one of his workers, Simon, a thin seventeen-year-old with straight blond hair cut in a pageboy style, was scratching feverishly at the crook of his elbow through his overalls, his teeth clenched in a grimace.
If it had been anyone else, Jack might not have said anything, but Simon was quiet, softly-spoken, generally polite.
‘You all right?’ Jack asked.
Simon looked momentarily dazed, as though Jack had sprung up from nowhere, then he blinked and nodded.
‘I’ve got this rash. On my arms and across my chest. Itches like mad.’
‘Me too,’ said Jack, and felt compelled to rub at his own arms. ‘Must be the heat. These overalls. Make you sweat a bit, don’t they?’
He offered an uncertain smile, which wavered when Simon shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s the overalls.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. I think it’s this stuff.’
Simon jabbed at the sand with the toe of one booted foot.
Jack looked down and saw a few stringy clots of the strange deposit that the tide had been leaving behind for the past week or two. It was like half-set jelly, though colourless and transparent. It had been everywhere recently, each rolling wave bringing more of it up on to the sand. Jack and his team did their best to clear it from the beach, but they were fighting a losing battle. Jack held up his gloved hands and announced, ‘It can’t be that. If we’re careful it shouldn’t get on our skin, whatever it is.’
‘I know that,’ continued Simon, his brows crinkling in a frown, ‘but what if it’s giving out fumes or something and we’re breathing it in? I mean, what is this stuff? It might be some killer chemical; it could be nuclear waste for all we know. I mean, there was that thing in the paper a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t there, about that lighthouse keeper who saw some weird light come down in the sea? Why hasn’t anyone come out to investigate that? Why isn’t the government doing anything? I mean, it might have been some Russian secret weapon, mightn’t it? Maybe they’re planning to poison us all by contaminating our water. I’ve read all about that sort of stuff, chemical warfare and that.’ He came to a sudden breathless stop, his cheeks red, eyes wildly searching Jack’s face. Then, as though embarrassed, his gaze flickered away, he turned his head and re-focused on the sea.
They stood in silence for a moment, then Jack murmured,
‘Maybe I ought to report it. Just to be on the safe side. I could even save some in a jar and take it to a laboratory or something.’
For a moment Simon didn’t respond, then he nodded.
Dreamily he said, ‘The sea’s such a big place, isn’t it? I bet there’s stuff out there that no one’s ever seen.’
Jack followed his gaze. His arms were itching. He shivered.
The sun was tearing itself from the water now, leaving blood on the ocean.
As he walked up the steps to the front door of Ambrosia Villa, Captain Mike Yates couldn’t help feeling guilty. Although his little trip to Tayborough Sands wasn’t exactly a holiday, it felt as though it was, as though he was having a jolly at the taxpayer’s expense.
‘Light duties,’ the Brigadier had called it, and then later, registering Mike’s dismay, he’d amended that to, ‘Vital intelligence work. I need someone I can trust, Yates,’ he’d said, ‘someone with integrity. Someone with a clear head, who can sort out the wheat from the chaff.’
A clear head. That was a joke for a start. It was precisely because of his inadequacy in that department that Mike had been given this assignment. He couldn’t believe that almost six months had passed since it had all begun. It seemed like no time at all since he had been sitting behind the desk at Global Chemicals in Llanfairfach, purporting to be the ‘Man from the Ministry’. As usual things had gone a bit haywire before the Doctor had managed to sort it all out. Turned out the company, which had been pumping lethal industrial sludge into the village’s abandoned mine workings, was being run by some sort of super computer which called itself BOSS
and which could scramble its employees’ brains, turning them into mindless zombies.
For a while Mike himself had fallen under its influence.
BOSS had dismantled his thoughts and put them back together in a different order, had made him believe his friends were his enemies. He’d nearly shot dead the two people he trusted most in the world: it had seemed perfect sense at the time, before the Doctor had shown him the error of his ways with the aid of a blue crystal he’d picked up on some far-flung planet or other.
After that, Mike had been fine for a while, had felt better than he’d felt for a long time in fact. But then weird thoughts and feelings had started to spring up, like weeds in a well-ordered garden. He had begun to suffer odd bouts of depression, feelings of futility. Despite the vital part he’d played in repelling the many and various threats to Earth over the years, he had started to convince himself that his life was meaningless.
Eventually, inevitably, this emotional instability had affected his work, and the Brigadier had ordered him to undergo a course of pathological assessment and then to take some compassionate leave. Perhaps if the Doctor and his blue
crystal had been around all of that might have been avoided, but he had been distracted and irritable ever since his assistant, Jo Grant, had quit UNIT after announcing her intention to marry Llanfairfach’s resident eccentric, Professor Clifford Jones. The Doctor had spent most of the past six months going off for solitary jaunts in his TARDIS, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch.
He had been absent when Mike’s problems had come to a head three months ago, and was absent again now, having slipped away in the night two weeks ago, much to the Brigadier’s chagrin.
It had taken Mike a month or two to sort himself out, but now he was back for good and itching to get down to some proper soldiering. However, his return, and the Doctor’s increasing absences, had coincided with a lull in the type of incident UNIT usually dealt with. Perhaps that was a good thing, Mike thought. Perhaps it was better to ease himself back in gently rather than throwing himself head-first into the fray.
It didn’t feel better, though; that was the thing. It felt to Mike as if he was cheating. He set his jaw, gripped the handle of his small suitcase more tightly and rapped sharply on the lemon-yellow front door of the guesthouse. ‘I am making a difference,’ he whispered to himself as he waited for an answer, and instantly felt a little better, as his psychologist, Dr Cutler, had assured him he would.
As the door opened a pair of seagulls began squabbling directly overhead, as if some flapping, screeching entity had been released from the house. He quickly recovered his composure and smiled at the woman who stood on the threshold. Her birdlike face was austere, her lips pressed so tightly together that they seemed bloodless. She looked disapprovingly at Mike’s burgundy cords and brown suede jacket.
‘Mrs Macau?’ he enquired, pronouncing it ‘Ma cow’.
‘Macau,’ she corrected, so sharply that he bit back the response that sprang to mind: ‘Ah, like the exotic bird.’
He covered his near faux pas with a smile and said smoothly, ‘Of course. My name is Mike Yates. I understand you’re expecting me?’
‘I expect we are, Mr Yates,’ replied Mrs Macau coldly, and turned into the house. ‘Please follow me.’
After the brightness of the sun, the hallway seemed dingy, the walls cluttered with clocks whose sombre, somehow ominous symphony of clunks and ticks made him think of little knives chopping away the seconds. Mrs Macau asked him to sign the register, then gave him a perfunctory tour of the guesthouse: the lounge where two old ladies sat knitting, their faces rouged by the effect of the red flock wallpaper; the dining room where breakfast was served between 7.30 a.m.
and 10 a.m. precisely (she scowled as if he had already contravened this rule); the bathroom on the second floor, with black pin-mould collecting in the corners and ever-present condensation fragmenting the sunlight through the stippled glass of the window; finally, his own room on the top floor, which instantly became his favourite part of the house.
It was an attic room with a sloping ceiling, a brass-framed bed and a small window in an alcove offering a seagull’s-eye view of the fishing harbour.
‘Thank you, Mrs Macau,’ he said, putting his suitcase on the bed. ‘I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable here.’
She started to list the rules of the house. No alcohol. No pets. No visitors after 10 p.m. Mike listened patiently till the end and replied, ‘That all sounds perfectly fine, Mrs Macau.’
With a final suspicious glance she left him alone. Mike pursed his lips and expelled a heartfelt sigh of relief, then snapped open the catches of his small suitcase and lifted the lid. Although he had been booked into the guesthouse for two nights with an option to stay longer if required, he was hoping to be back on a train to London by tomorrow afternoon, his business concluded.
Not that he would only do half a job, of course. No, Mike was too thorough, too conscientious, for that. It was simply that he expected nothing to come of this little investigation.
From his suitcase he took an army-issue toiletry bag, the latest in a series of psychology textbooks he had been reading recently (his immediate subordinate and good friend, Sergeant John Benton, had picked this one up from his desk a couple of days previously, flicked through a few pages and then replaced it with a baffled, slightly troubled expression), and a small selection of clothes, which had been meticulously ironed and folded by his own fair hands.
He put the clothes and the toiletry bag away in the chest of drawers that stood against the wall beside the door and placed the book on his bedside cabinet. The suitcase now contained only three further items - a file pertaining to his assignment in an anonymous, buff-coloured document wallet, a chunky two-way radio and a Colt .45 semi-automatic handgun in a body holster.
He felt rather foolish bringing along a gun when all he was required to do was chat to a local lighthouse keeper about a strange light he had seen come down in the sea twelve days ago, but the Brigadier had insisted, ‘Always be prepared, Yates,’ he had said in that brash, rather pompous way of his.
‘First rule of soldiering.’
‘I thought that was the boy scouts, sir,’ Mike had replied with gentle good humour.
The Brigadier’s moustache had twitched. ‘Same principle, Yates. You’ve worked for UNIT long enough to know that you should always expect the unexpected.’
Mike put the radio in the drawer beneath his underwear, placed the gun on the bedside table next to the book, tossed the document wallet on to the armchair beside the alcoved window, then closed his suitcase and slid it under the bed.
He spent the next twenty minutes reading the documentation, which didn’t amount to much: a local police report comprising a short statement from the witness and a photocopy of the story as portrayed by the local newspaper, which treated the whole thing as a bit of a joke.
Mike sighed. Ninety-nine per cent of such incidents proved to have no basis in fact, but UNIT were obliged to follow up each and every one of them as a matter of course. Often it was the Doctor (and, before her departure, Jo Grant) who undertook such assignments; indeed, this was one of the tasks which the Doctor performed only too willingly - largely, Mike suspected, because it gave him the chance to distance himself from the military activity at UNIT HQ and to whiz about the countryside in Bessie, his little yellow car.
This particular arrangement worked out well for all concerned, not least because the Doctor had an uncanny knack of distinguishing between the genuine and the bogus, a sixth sense when it came to detecting alien involvement or even a serious home-grown threat to planetary stability.
Mike, however, suspected he would speak to Mr Elkins and come away with nothing further to add to what he had just read. Although his mother had always described him as ‘the sensitive one’ of her four boys, he was not adept at picking up on the subtle, hidden clues that the Doctor seemed to pluck from the air with ease. Indeed, watching the Doctor at work, Mike often felt like a dull and plodding beat constable confronted with the dazzling and enigmatic presence of Sherlock Holmes.
It was raised voices from outside that plucked Mike from his reverie. Putting the folder aside, he stood up and crossed to the window. There seemed to be some commotion down by the harbour, several uniformed policemen holding back a crowd of curious onlookers. From his vantage point, Mike could see that the object of their attention was a small, battered-looking fishing trawler. Already other policemen were in the process of erecting an exclusion barrier of sawhorses and yellow tape around the trawler, effectively closing off the jetty. From here Mike could see what he suspected the crowd couldn’t. Scattered on the deck were a number of red blankets, clearly covering some irregularly shaped objects.
That could mean only one thing. Hastily he picked up his holstered gun and strapped it to his body. Then, patting the back pocket of his cords to ensure that he had his UNIT
pass, he hurried from the room.
‘You mean we’ve actually arrived where you said we were going to?’ Tegan muttered scathingly.
The Doctor looked pained. ‘Well, of course.’ Then his v
oice dropped as he hunched over a panel on the TARDIS’s hexagonal control console. ‘Give or take a year or two.’
Tegan shut her eyes briefly. ‘Don’t tell me. We’ve landed in the Bronze Age.’
Turlough, standing beside the Doctor like an attentive pupil, the fingertips of his hands pressed together as if he was about to lead them in prayer, tilted his head and gave her a look of condescending disapproval. ‘Come on, Tegan, be fair,’ he said mildly. ‘The Doctor’s doing his best.’
Tegan grunted, meeting his pale blue gaze for only a moment before looking away. Despite being thrown into a series of life-threatening situations with the sallow-faced, red-haired public schoolboy, the bond between them was not particularly strong. Tegan was all too aware of her own failings - her brashness, her quick temper - but at least she was honest, at least people always knew where they stood with her. Turlough, on the other hand, was devious, underhand, duplicitous, and not only that but he was smarmy with it. And a coward, too. Tegan suspected he’d sell his grandmother if it meant saving his own skin (if he had a grandmother, that was; he had always been as evasive about his origins as he was about virtually everything else).
When he had first wriggled like a maggot into the core of the TARDIS crew, he had been working for an entity called the Black Guardian who wanted the Doctor destroyed.
Turlough had apparently seen the error of his ways at the last minute but Tegan still didn’t trust him. The boy always seemed to be working to his own, hidden agenda; always seemed to be striving to divide and conquer, playing her and the Doctor off against each other. And the thing was, he did it so slyly, so subtly, that all too often Tegan didn’t see the trap until she had fallen right into it.
It was maddening, even more so because the Doctor seemed oblivious to his male companion’s mind games.
