by Jacqueline Rayner, Mike Tucker, Paul Magrs, et al (retail) (epub)
Contents
1. MURDER IN THE DARK
Written by Jacqueline Rayner
2. SOMETHING AT THE DOOR
Written by Mike Tucker
3. THE MONSTER IN THE WOODS
Written by Paul Magrs
4. TOIL AND TROUBLE
Written by Richard Dungworth
5. MARK OF THE MEDUSA
Written by Mike Tucker
6. TRICK OR TREAT
Written by Jacqueline Rayner
7. THE LIVING IMAGE
Written by Scott Handcock
8. ORGANISM 96
Written by Paul Magrs
9. THE PATCHWORK PIERROT
Written by Scott Handcock
10. BLOOD WILL OUT
Written by Richard Dungworth
11. THE MIST OF SORROW
Written by Craig Donaghy
12. BABY SLEEPY FACE
Written by Craig Donaghy
All that could be seen through the darkness were two glowing eyes and a fiercely fanged mouth. Dodo yelped – before bursting out laughing. She ran forward, the Doctor and Steven following more slowly.
‘It’s only a jack-o’-lantern!’ she called. ‘Now I can see why people used them to see off evil spirits. They’re dead creepy.’
More pinpricks of fire-lit eyes glowed in the distance, and Dodo ran on ahead. ‘I think they’re marking a path,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’m sure they are. Let’s follow them!’
It would be a lie to say the Doctor and Steven were enthusiastic about this course of action, but since returning to the TARDIS was their only other option, they carried on after Dodo as she called back a running commentary.
‘I think I can see a house in the distance … The path’s leading towards it, I think … Ooh, it’s a big house – a mansion! I wonder who lives there? Hang on, I can see someone at a window. It’s –’
She’d briefly gone far enough ahead to be out of sight of her companions. As her scream rang out, Steven leaped forward. Within seconds he’d caught up with her, and he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder as she buried her face in his chest.
‘What happened?’ he asked urgently, scanning the dark for any imminent threat but finding nothing.
‘Oh, Steven, it was horrible! A monster!’
‘Where?’
Dodo lifted her head and looked back towards the mansion. ‘Oh, it was there, Steven. It was! A face at the window! A monstrous face! With only one eye! I thought it was … well, you’ll laugh at me, but I thought it was a Monoid.’
Steven did laugh, but it was a half laugh, intended to be reassuring rather than mocking. ‘A Monoid! Well, I don’t know where we are, but I don’t think it’s Refusis Two! Anyway, there’s nothing there now. There’s not even a light. I don’t think anyone’s at home.’
‘It was there, whatever it was. It pulled back the curtain and I saw it.’
The Doctor, breathing rather heavily, had joined them now. He too dismissed Dodo’s fears. ‘A Monoid? Oh, goodness me no. You’re imagining things, child. Imagining things!’
‘Maybe …’ said Dodo, knowing that she wasn’t. It might not have been a Monoid – one of the green, one-eyed adversaries of a recent adventure – but it had been something.
The three carried on together towards the mansion, Dodo too nervous now to run ahead alone. The jack-o’-lanterns led them to a huge door of black wood, a lion-head knocker looking uninviting in the flickering light from the pumpkins.
Dodo raised a hand towards the knocker, then pulled away, scared. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should go back.’
‘Nonsense, child!’ said the Doctor. ‘We need to prove there are no monsters here!’ He reached past her and gave a firm rat-a-tat-tat with the metal ring.
The door swung open with a horror-film creak. A figure stood in the doorway, and it was the Doctor’s turn to give a sharp intake of breath. Embroidered robes, a mandarin hat and a blank, pale face. But the face was so blank, so pale …
The Doctor snorted with laughter and turned to Dodo. ‘For a moment I thought … But it’s just a mask! Just a mask. They’re all masks!’
‘Why, it’s a fancy-dress party!’ Dodo beamed with delight. ‘How super.’
The masked mandarin spread out a hand in invitation, and the three friends entered the house. The Doctor pointed out a figure wearing a green ogre costume, the mask’s single eye seemingly staring at them. ‘There, you see! That is no more a Monoid than this fellow is the Celestial Toymaker, or that gentleman over there –’ he gestured at a man wearing a ten-gallon hat – ‘is one of the gunfighters we met recently!’
They were in a huge hall, lit by a thousand candles. Masked figures in costumes stood all round the edges of the room – not milling about, as might be expected at a party, but watching and waiting. In the centre of the room was a ring of children, each also in costume, as still as statues. The door creaking shut behind the new arrivals was the only sound to be heard.
And then music exploded into the hall. A masked figure dressed as a gypsy violinist was scraping his bow wildly against the strings, and the music coming from the fiddle echoed around the space, louder than seemed possible. The children were up, dancing – a tiny witch was waltzing with a small scarecrow, while a bandaged mummy hopped from one foot to the other and a black cat galloped around all of them. The adults moved too – although they weren’t dancing; they were still just observers – and a vampire came over to the newcomers to offer them goblets of deep red fluid. ‘Bat’s blood,’ he whispered, his fanged mask muffling his voice, and Dodo turned to the Doctor in alarm.
‘Just fruit punch, my dear,’ he told her, having sniffed it, and the three drank deeply.
Dodo watched the violinist appreciatively. ‘I tried playing the violin at school,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get much further than “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. Wish I’d stuck with it. He’s fab.’ But, as she spoke, the music stopped. The violinist froze, and everyone else froze too.
‘I think the music’s controlling them,’ Dodo whispered to the Doctor, suddenly scared.
‘You’re right,’ said the Doctor, unconcerned. ‘Well, in a way. Have you never come across the game Musical Statues?’
She grinned. ‘Oh, of course! Hey, I wonder if they’d let me play?’
Although still whispering, her voice must have travelled in the silence, for a moment later an Egyptian pharaoh had taken her hand and was dragging her into the centre of the room, among the still-rigid children. When the music started again, Dodo danced with the rest of them, taking the hands of a girl dressed as a ballerina and a ghoulish boy draped with chains.
The music stopped again. All froze – except one small red devil who carried on jigging regardless. The pharaoh who’d brought Dodo into the game took the boy by an arm and removed him from the dancefloor. Dodo felt sorry for him – how embarrassing to be the first player out! – and as the dancing began again she looked for the boy (his costume made him easy to spot), and saw him being led out through a far door.
The game continued. More and more children failed to hold their poses and were led one by one from the room. Soon only Dodo and six others were left. When the music stopped once again, the little ballerina beside Dodo had been in the middle of a pirouette and now started to wobble. Wordlessly, an adult zombie grabbed her by the arm and began to drag her away. The ballerina gave a gasp of pain, and Dodo, indignant, leaped forward in her defence. ‘Hey, you’re hurting her!’
The zombie ignored Dodo – but one of his fellows didn’t. Another zombie now took Dodo’s arm, pulling her in the same direction. ‘Hey!’ she said again.
Suddenly his hand was ripped from her arm. ‘Let her go,’ Steven demanded.
The zombie turned to face the newcomer. ‘But she moved,’ he said, and Dodo almost laughed – it sounded whiney, petulant, and made her remember that all they were doing was playing a game, and she’d lost. These were just people and this was a Hallowe’en party, not a monster’s castle. Not every place they landed in the TARDIS contained a threat.
‘He’s right, Steven. I did move,’ she said with a shrug.
The zombie beckoned and she followed him out of the room, although Steven, still looking wary, now accompanied them.
They went into a smaller room – smaller than the huge hall, that is; it was still about eight times bigger than the largest room in Dodo’s house back on Earth, the room her great-aunt still insisted on calling the ‘best parlour’. Funnily enough, there was a slight great-aunt smell here: a faint mixture of lavender and candle wax, the scent of dull Sunday afternoons in Wimbledon. She turned to say something to Steven, but he was already being led through another door, and Dodo realised that all of the children in this room were girls. At the zombie’s insistence, she took a seat on the floor next to her ballerina friend. ‘What happens now?’ she whispered. The girl just shrugged her shoulders.
A green-wigged witch and a skeleton with fluorescent painted bones walked into the centre of the circle, each holding a basket. The witch put a hand in her basket and drew out an apple, shiny, red and green.
The apple from ‘Snow White’, Dodo thought. Safe on one side but poisoned on the other. She fought from shying away when the witch offered it to her. But it was just an apple. Just an ordinary apple. She took it.
Then the skeleton stood before her and dipped its fake finger bones into its own basket and drew out a knife. A huge, sharp knife. She gasped, but the skeleton began to laugh – a disquieting sight as its grinning jaws never moved – before turning the knife round and offering it to her handle first.
‘It’s a game,’ the ballerina told her, as she too took an apple and a knife. She sounded slightly exasperated at this teenager who was behaving more like a scared child than the actual children present. ‘You have to peel the apple all in one go, without breaking the peel. Then you throw the peel over your shoulder and it’ll show you the initial of the person you’re going to marry.’
‘Oh, that sounds like fun!’ said Dodo, even though she wasn’t entirely certain she wanted to get married to anyone. You probably had to stop travelling through time and space if you got married, unless your husband or wife was incredibly understanding.
She began to peel her apple. The first time she tried, the knife slipped slightly halfway round and left her with a sadly short and limp piece of peel of no use to anyone. The witch, after tutting at the waste, was finally persuaded to let her have another piece of fruit.
The little ballerina, meanwhile, had finished hers in record time, the first of the girls to do so. She flung the long green strand over her shoulder, calling out, ‘Apple peel, please reveal, who will be my love!’
The other children shuffled over to look at the result. ‘It’s a T!’ they decided eventually.
The ballerina went off in ecstasies. ‘Maybe it’s Tommy! Or Timothy! Or Tony!’
Other girls completed their peeling and found out they would marry a D–, or an M–, or an S–. Dodo tried to block out their excited screams as she concentrated on her own task. Finally she had a single, unbroken spiral of apple peel. Copying the others, she called out, ‘Apple peel, please reveal, who will be my love!’ and threw it over her shoulder. She turned round. And gasped.
The peel hadn’t landed in the shape of a letter. There, clearly in front of her, was an outline of a skull.
‘What is it?’ asked one of the others. ‘A weird sort of A, maybe?’
Dodo just shook her head, staring.
‘Maybe a Q gone a bit wrong?’ said another, sparking off an argument as to whether there were any boys’ names that began with Q.
But there was no way it was an A or a Q. It was quite clearly a skull, an impossibility of curves and shadows making a death’s head out of the single line, and she couldn’t understand why the children weren’t seeing it as she was.
Married to … death?
No. That made no sense.
Perhaps her future held no wedding, but only death?
She shivered. ‘What a silly game,’ she said. ‘I hope the next one’s more fun.’
‘I think you’ll find it will be,’ said the skeleton.
When all of the girls had finished, the remnants of apple were cleared away, and a new figure entered the room. He wore no mask, but there was no sign of his face – instead a shirt, topped with a ruff, covered his head, giving the impression of a decapitated man. A model head was carried under one arm.
‘Ooh, the headless horseman!’ said Dodo.
‘He hasn’t got a horse,’ the ballerina pointed out, but Dodo ignored her.
The witch and skeleton carried a carved wooden chair into the centre of the circle and the horseless headless horseman sat on it, placing his head on his knees. The chair was carved from ebony, with back and seat padded in red satin, and gave the impression of not being a chair so much as a seated coffin.
I’m being ridiculous now, thought Dodo as that crossed her mind. Whoever heard of such a thing? She smiled at the man and sternly told herself not to let her mind run away with such silly notions.
‘A man has died,’ announced the horseman, and Dodo kept smiling, because obviously this was part of the game and not a pronouncement of actual death. ‘We do not know how. The only clue left behind was the body itself.’
The girls in the circle giggled and shuddered.
‘It is our job to make that dead body talk and so discover the truth. Let the autopsy commence!’
There were little shrieks of nervous excitement as the room was plunged into darkness. ‘First the eyes!’ said the man, and Dodo also shrieked as two slimy objects were suddenly dropped into her hands.
‘Here, take these,’ she said to the inky blackness on her left-hand side, where she knew the little ballerina to be, and the ballerina gasped as the spheres were passed on to her. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dodo. ‘I’ve played this one before. It’s just peeled grapes or something.’
‘They’re too big to be grapes,’ the girl pointed out.
‘All right, maybe they’re … I don’t know, apricots. Or plums. Ugh!’ This last was as something new was passed on to her: a mass of slimy strands. ‘Spaghetti, I bet,’ she said, as the horseman announced, ‘Now his guts!’
The game continued, with more and more slimy and strange items being passed round – ‘His liver! His fingers! His heart!’ – until they got to the grand finale: ‘His brain!’
Something cold and clammy, a lump of bumps and ridges, landed in Dodo’s outstretched hands. ‘Cauliflower?’ she said out loud.
There was a deep, rumbling, unpleasant laugh. Suddenly a number of candles flared to life around the room. The light was hazy, but Dodo could see clearly that in her hands she held something grey and wrinkled.
It was not a cauliflower.
She looked up at the headless horseman, who was still laughing away. The laughter was coming only too clearly from the severed head sitting on his knees.
At this point, Dodo realised that this really wasn’t a normal party after all. She screamed.
Steven had also ended up in a separate room, herded together with all the boys who had played and lost at Musical Statues. From the ceiling hung strings, evenly spaced out, each with a pink-iced ring-shaped doughnut tied to the end. Steven’s upbringing had been worlds apart from Dodo’s twentieth-century childhood and Hallowe’en parties were something he’d never come across before, so he just stared, bewildered, at this display, wondering if it was some eccentric form of
interior design. But when a masked cowboy shouted ‘Go!’ and all the boys ran forward, their hands clasped firmly behind their backs, it didn’t take him long to work out that this was a game where they had to try to take bites of the swinging doughnuts using just their mouths. Not caring much for games or for cakes, he stayed where he was.
Some doughnuts had been nibbled, but it was a few moments before the first full bite was managed. ‘I did it!’ cried a small boy dressed as an astronaut. (Steven approved of the costume, even though for him the spacesuit seemed laughably primitive.)
‘I did –’ The next cry of triumph became a shout of disgust. All around the room boys were yelling as their teeth pierced the doughnuts and a red substance ran out.
‘What on earth is that?’ demanded Steven.
‘Jam,’ said the cowboy. ‘Just jam. Doughnuts have jam inside. Didn’t you know?’
‘I’ve never seen a child react like that to jam!’ said Steven. He took a step forward, but the cowboy blocked his way.
‘It’s just jam,’ the cowboy repeated.
‘Jam isn’t that runny,’ said Steven. He made to step round the cowboy, but was blocked again. Behind the cowboy, a man in a vampire mask was removing the remaining doughnuts, while the boys, some still looking upset, sat back down, cross-legged, on the floor.
‘The game is over. It was jam,’ said the cowboy. He indicated that Steven should also sit on the floor. Reluctantly, unsure what course of action he should be taking, Steven complied.
The vampire and cowboy now pulled a large tub of water into the centre of the room. Apples floated on the surface. Again, Steven had little idea what this represented. Bath time for fruit?
The cowboy asked the spacesuited boy to join him, but Steven leaped to his feet and barred the boy’s path. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I think I’d better try this one out first. Just in case there’s anything nasty on offer.’ He marched up to the tub and looked down at the apples. ‘So … what am I supposed to do exactly?’
‘It’s apple-bobbing,’ said the young astronaut. ‘You have to pick up an apple using only your teeth.’
‘What is it about all these games and only using your teeth?’ muttered Steven. He leaned over the tub – and two pairs of arms grabbed him. Steven, caught by surprise and off balance, was unable to prevent the vampire and cowboy from tying his wrists together.
