Tales of Terror

by Jacqueline Rayner, Mike Tucker, Paul Magrs, et al (retail) (epub)

  ‘Are you … trapped?’ asked Nancy, wide-eyed.

  Needles of pain suddenly stabbed into her outstretched hand. With a cry, she tried to jerk it away from the mirror’s surface – but found she couldn’t. It was stuck fast.

  The little-girl-lost look had vanished from the mirror-child’s eyes. She smiled a slow, sly smile.

  ‘Not any longer,’ she replied.

  With a grating, splintering sound, a crack split the mirror’s length, running through the point where the girls’ palms were bonded. Nancy watched in helpless horror as the child behind its fractured surface closed her eyes and let out a deep, satisfied sigh. A long wisp of luminous green vapour came snaking from her mouth. It spiralled towards the crack in the glass and began to seep through.

  ‘Right – I’ve got one!’ said the Doctor, at last. ‘And it’s a belter!’

  ‘About ruddy time!’ Donna sighed. ‘So – animal, vegetable or mineral?’

  ‘Nope!’ The Doctor beamed. ‘Next question.’

  ‘What do you mean, “no”?’ Donna gave him a look. ‘It must be one of those, you numpty. Or do you mean it’s a mixture?’

  ‘Another no! Two down, eighteen to go!’ Folding his arms, the Doctor leaned back against the TARDIS’s console, looking even more pleased with himself than usual. Behind him, the time rotor rose and fell in its luminous central cylinder. ‘You’ll never get it.’

  ‘But it has to be animal, vegetable or mineral. That’s how the game works.’

  ‘Really?’ The Doctor’s smug smile slumped into a sulky frown. ‘Well, that’s rubbish!’ he protested. ‘That’s ontological incorrectness gone mad! I mean, if we’re restricted to primitive Earth-bound classification categories like those, I can’t use any of my best ideas!’

  Donna gave another sigh. She’d thought a game of Twenty Questions might help to pass the time, as she and the Doctor passed through time. She hadn’t expected it to prove quite so problematic.

  ‘Maybe we should try I Spy.’

  Before the Doctor could reply, his entire demeanour underwent a sudden and alarming change. He lurched forward, one hand grabbing for the handrail at the edge of the console platform. The other flew to a sideburned temple. Grimacing, eyes screwed shut, he let out a grunt of pain through gritted teeth.

  ‘Doctor?’ Donna laid a hand on the stricken Time Lord’s arm – and could feel the tension in it. ‘Doctor! What is it?’

  A moment later, the spasm passed. The Doctor’s body visibly relaxed. His eyes flew open – wide with shock. He met Donna’s anxious gaze.

  ‘A scream,’ he told her shakily. ‘Proper blood-curdler.’

  Donna frowned. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Wasn’t on the audible spectrum.’ The Doctor shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘It was a mind-cry. Only perceptible by those with psychic sensitivity.’

  Donna’s frown became a scowl. ‘Not blockheads like me, you mean?’

  ‘Human minds are remarkable, Donna,’ the Doctor said earnestly. ‘Even psychically latent ones like yours –’

  ‘Even mine? Well, thank you so much,’ Donna huffed.

  ‘– but, however splendid Homo sapiens might be, only a handful of your generation are telepathically mature.’

  ‘So now I’m immature as well as insensitive?’

  The Doctor had already turned to the control console, and was consulting its unique hotchpotch of dials, gauges and indicators.

  ‘I’ve never known a mind-cry of such intensity. Looks like it came from the Vortex itself. The telepathic circuits picked it up. Relayed it to my brainstem, full blast.’

  ‘A cry for help?’ suggested Donna.

  ‘It didn’t sound like a scream of fear. Or of pain. More like a mental ululation.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘A wild psychic howl. Of triumph, I’d say.’ The Doctor frowned. ‘And there was something familiar about it.’ A spark lit his dark brown eyes. He pushed up the sleeves of his suit jacket. ‘If I’m right –’ his fingers began to dance across the console’s primary interface – ‘I should only have to isolate a telepathic signature … cross-reference it with any psychic profiles archived in the databank –’ he entered a final command – ‘and we ought to get …’

  With a toast-popping alert sound, the viewscreen flashed up a positive search result.

  ‘A match!’ The Doctor beamed.

  A moment later his smile evaporated. He stared at the displayed data.

  ‘What? Nooooo. No-no-no. That’s not possible.’

  He lunged to his right to release a tiny brass catch. Something sprang from the console like a cuckoo from a clock – a small, Bakelite-framed vanity mirror on a concertina-style arm. The Doctor hurriedly dragged it in front of his face. His eyes eagerly searched the reflection within.

  ‘Come on, come on …’ he muttered anxiously. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Doctor?’ Donna was looking on in bemusement. ‘It’s a mirror. The only one you’re going to see in there is you.’

  The Doctor continued to study the mirror for several more seconds before pushing it aside with a look of grim resignation. ‘I’m sorry to say you’re right, Donna. Which is not good. Not good at all.’

  Hurriedly turning his attention to the flight controls, he commenced a rapid and energetic sequence of dial-twists, crank-winds and lever-pulls.

  ‘Hold tight, Ms Noble …’

  A final expert switch-flick with his right sneaker completed his urgent resetting of the TARDIS’s space–time destination. The craft lurched violently as the course change took effect.

  ‘We’re jumping the tracks!’

  PC Mallik was sure he had just caught the sound of breaking glass. To a police officer’s mind, it was a noise that spelled likely trouble. It was hard to pinpoint its exact source, thanks to the hubbub all around him – the blaring pop music of the thrill rides, the yells of sideshow hawkers, the piping of the antique carousel’s fairground organ, and the whoops and screams of high-spirited fairgoers – but Mallik had an idea of the rough vicinity. He made his way through the throng in the direction of the MIRACULOUS MIRROR MEGA-MAZE. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look.

  The weather – which, for late autumn, had been glorious all day – was fast taking a turn for the worse. A chill north-easterly breeze had picked up, and an ominous bank of grey cloud was advancing across the darkening sky.

  Shame, thought Mallik. Nothing quenched the fun of the fair quite so fast as a downpour.

  As he approached the mirror-maze sideshow, a little girl in a bright yellow dress emerged from its exit. It was the youngest granddaughter of old Timothy Latimer, the Farringham veteran who played poker with Mallik’s elderly father once a week – and was a devil to beat, by all accounts.

  Mallik gave her a warm smile. ‘That’s a very fine balloon you’ve got there, Nancy. Having a good time?’

  Nancy Latimer didn’t reply. She returned his friendly look with an intense, searching stare. Mallik found it peculiarly disconcerting – even more so when she tilted her neck sharply to one side and continued to appraise him, unblinkingly, with her head at a most unnatural angle.

  ‘Everything all right, young lady? You don’t look quite yourself.’

  The little girl’s mouth slowly curled, as if she found this remark somehow amusing. Her strange smile – it was more of a sneer, in truth – only increased Mallik’s sense that something was amiss. It struck him that when he’d last spotted Nancy, at the Hook-a-Duck stall, she’d been with her elder sibling, Ruth.

  ‘Have you lost your sister?’ he enquired gently.

  The cold, scornful tone in which the girl replied was as out of character as her unpleasant sneer. ‘Sister?’ she hissed. ‘I have no sister.’

  Mallik’s concern deepened. She was clearly confused. With his best reassuring smile, he held out his hand. ‘Come along now – let’s you and I go and find your family.’

  Nancy regarded the proffered hand with obvious disdain, then fixed h
im with that unnerving stare once more.

  ‘I do not require assistance.’

  She took a sharp, hissing intake of air through flaring nostrils, as if seeking a scent. Her mouth curled unpleasantly again.

  ‘I know precisely where to find them.’

  Before Mallik could respond, Nancy turned and headed away through the crowd. The baffled police officer watched her go, wondering whether he ought to follow, but strangely reluctant to do so. The little girl’s red balloon bobbed wildly after her in the stiffening breeze. Mallik told himself that the same chill wind was responsible for the icy shiver that suddenly ran through his body.

  There was definitely a storm coming.

  ‘Doctor! Slow down, will you? Where are we going?’

  The raging wind drove cold, stinging rain against Donna’s face as she fought against it to catch up with the Doctor, who was pressing on up the slope ahead, oblivious to her yells.

  ‘If you insist on dragging me on some midnight helltrek to God knows where –’ Donna’s soaking hair lashed across her face, and she flicked it away angrily – ‘till I’m half drowned and up to my ankles in cowpats –’ in light of her growing sense of dread, she was employing her preferred coping strategy: get steaming mad – ‘the least you can do is to have the decency to tell me why!’

  Donna liked to think she didn’t scare easily these days. Since travelling with the Doctor, close encounters with a wide variety of terrifying alien creatures, from war-mongering Sontarans to fire-breathing Pyroviles, had left her little choice but to toughen up. It wasn’t so much her present circumstances – the dark, the storm, the deserted countryside – that had set her nerves on edge, though. It was the Doctor’s brooding mood. Since the baffling business with the vanity mirror, he had been grave-faced and withdrawn. Donna knew that if he was worried, there was something serious – and probably terrifying – to worry about.

  The gusting gale had stolen her tirade. It brought something tumbling across the rutted field, out of the darkness, to bump against her leg. As she looked down to see what it was, a fork of lightning stabbed from the night sky. Its electric flash momentarily lit the gloom, eerily illuminating the thing at her feet.

  It was a grisly imitation of a head, made of straw-stuffed sacking. Hollow black eyes and a grotesquely stitched mouth leered up at her.

  A violent crack of thunder, following close on the lightning flash, drowned out Donna’s scream.

  ‘Doctor!’

  The Doctor had finally come to a halt, not far ahead. With a shudder, Donna kicked the straw head away and hurried to join him. As she saw what he had led them to, she felt another wave of foreboding.

  It was a tall wooden cross; two rough timber stakes lashed together. It stood in the field like a vacant crucifix. Scraps of hessian sacking and spilt straw littered the ground around it. Recognising a rudimentary arm, Donna realised that she was looking at the remnants of a straw-built human figure. She thought of the grinning head. The bare stakes must originally have held a scarecrow, now reduced to scattered body parts.

  The Doctor had already drawn his sonic screwdriver from his overcoat and was busy scanning its flickering blue tip along the timbers. He seemed oblivious to the wild forces of nature doing their best to batter and drench him. The fierce intensity behind his eyes suggested he was a far greater force of nature himself.

  ‘What is it, Doctor?’ asked Donna, raising her voice over the wind and rain.

  The Doctor deactivated his sonic screwdriver.

  ‘She must’ve released him after she freed herself,’ he shouted back. His frown deepened. ‘And if she has the power to do that – to break open a temporal suspension envelope …’ With renewed urgency and purpose, he turned back the way they’d come. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Not so fast!’ Donna grabbed his arm. ‘Who released who?’

  The Doctor turned a grim face to hers. ‘It’s the Family, Donna,’ he told her. ‘They’re loose again.’

  ‘The family?’ Donna assumed the Doctor was not referring to Mafia mobsters. Or his own Gallifreyan relations.

  Another flickering lightning bolt forked across the sky.

  ‘The Family of Blood.’

  A thunder crack rumbled through the cold night air.

  The Doctor set off back across the dark, storm-lashed field towards the spot where his TARDIS waited. Donna hurried after him, her mind brimming with questions – including whether all Time Lords had such a flair for dramatic timing.

  Back in the quiet, dry haven of the TARDIS’s console room, the Doctor swiftly set about programming their next destination.

  ‘Where now?’ asked Donna.

  ‘Not far. Tiny spatial hop. We could’ve gone on foot, but I want the old girl close.’

  In the turquoise glow of the central column, the time rotor began its rhythmic rise and fall. The craft’s cavernous frame vibrated as its ancient engine extracted it from normal space.

  Donna pressed for more information. ‘This Family of Blood – who are they?’

  The Doctor squatted and dragged aside a segment of the console platform’s grilled floor, revealing a storage area below.

  ‘Four sociopathic predators acting in psychic union,’ he answered, as he delved through a jumble of equipment. ‘Mother, Father, Son and Daughter.’ He hauled out a coil of rope with a grappling hook at one end. ‘In their native form, they’re green, gaseous entities – but they have a nasty habit of hijacking the bodies of others. Their last hosts were human.’

  He slung the rope over one shoulder, replaced the grille, then hastily checked the instrument readings.

  ‘You’ll have seen one of them before. Many times.’

  ‘What?’ Donna’s brow creased. ‘When?’

  ‘When was the last time you looked in a mirror?’

  Donna flushed. ‘Well, that’s nice, I must s–’

  ‘Never noticed anything odd in the reflection?’ the Doctor pressed. ‘Someone behind you?’

  Donna fell silent. She stared at him, wide-eyed.

  ‘You mean … the sweet little girl? With the balloon?’

  ‘That sweet little girl was the Daughter’s host,’ said the Doctor grimly.

  Donna had long ago decided that her glimpses of a child in the mirror could only be her imagination playing tricks. The news that the girl was real was a bombshell.

  ‘The Family will stop at nothing to extend their own fleeting lifespans,’ the Doctor told her. ‘And there’s only one reason they crave more time: to create more bloodshed and chaos. Given the chance, they’d spread war across the stars.’ Anger burned in his eyes. ‘That’s why I locked them away.’

  Donna raised an eyebrow. ‘I might not be psychic, but I’m picking up a strong “this is personal” vibe.’

  It was a moment or two before the Doctor replied. ‘It was my fault they ever came to Earth,’ he said bitterly. ‘To England, in 1913. They were hunting me – for my Time Lord lifespan. They went on the rampage.’

  ‘But you stopped them, right?’

  ‘Not before precious human lives were lost.’ A shadow of grief crossed the Doctor’s face. ‘Including mine.’

  His last words baffled Donna. Before she could seek an explanation, the jolt of a heavy landing shook the TARDIS. Its double doors sprang open. The Doctor went bounding down the ramp towards them. Donna followed, hoping their ‘tiny hop’ had taken them somewhere rather less wet and windy.

  The TARDIS had rematerialised in a deserted tunnel. Square in cross-section, it had a variety of pipes, ducts and cables running along its walls. Weak strip lights in the ceiling cast a sickly glow. From the pressure in her ears and from the chill, musty air, Donna had the strong impression that, wherever they were, it was deep underground.

  As the Doctor set off purposefully along the tunnel, she kept pace, quizzing him as they went. ‘If you locked the Daughter in a mirror –’

  ‘In every mirror,’ the Doctor corrected her.

  ‘– what about the other three?�
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  ‘I suspended the Son in time,’ said the Doctor. ‘Inside that scarecrow back there. His sister must have found a way to free him. The Mother I trapped in the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy.’

  ‘And Dad?’

  The Doctor came to an abrupt halt. Just ahead, there was a large square void in the tunnel floor: the mouth of a vertical shaft.

  ‘He’s the reason we’re here.’

  He unslung the rope, secured its hooked end to a sturdy section of ducting, then tossed the rest down the shaft. Donna watched the rope tumble away into inky blackness.

  ‘You left him down there?’

  The Doctor’s expression was without a trace of pity. ‘Bound in unbreakable chains.’

  Not for the first time, Donna felt somewhat awed by her alien friend’s quiet, righteous wrath. ‘Remind me not to get on your bad side.’

  At the foot of the shaft, the darkness was absolute. The glow of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver reached only a few metres. Beyond that, all was pitch black.

  Casting the light around revealed no sign of the chained Father – only the opening of another tunnel.

  ‘Stay close,’ whispered the Doctor as he led the way. Donna didn’t need telling.

  After only a few paces, the Doctor stopped, crouching down to examine a vague shape against the wall. It was a heaped coil of heavy chain. The link at one free end had been sliced cleanly through so as to be parted from the other.

  ‘Not that unbreakable then,’ observed Donna.

  The Doctor frowned at the severed link. ‘This was cast in the heart of a dwarf star,’ he muttered. ‘What cuts through star-forged alloy?’

  As he continued to pore over the broken chain, Donna noticed something odd. Her own shadow was visible on the wall before her. That meant a light source behind her …

  A noise made her blood freeze.

  Both she and the Doctor spun round to find three figures silently observing them from the gloom. The smallest clutched the string of a red balloon, which glowed with an eerie crimson light.