Forever Autumn

by Mark Morris

  He was peering into what looked to Martha like a rabbit burrow, quite narrow but so deep that she couldn’t see the bottom, even though the old lady was shining her torch into it. The old lady turned to look at the Doctor, and Martha was relieved to see that her profile was not witchy at all. She was plump and bespectacled, with a perfectly normal nose and chin.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, as if the Doctor was intruding on her property.

  ‘Is that really the most pertinent question you should be asking right now?’ he said blandly.

  She looked taken aback, but recovered quickly. Eyes flashing, she said, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘That’s the one!’ he said, and for a moment Martha thought he was going to slap the old lady on the back. Then his voice became sombre. ‘We’re investigating.’

  ‘Investigating what?’

  ‘We’re trying to find out who attacked Earl Clayton,’ said Martha.

  The old lady looked over her shoulder and fixed Martha with a fierce stare. ‘Earl’s been attacked? How is he?’

  ‘He’ll live,’ muttered the Doctor.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ Martha asked, and tried not to look too pleased at the Doctor’s expression of approval.

  The old lady’s eyes narrowed. She glanced at the Doctor. ‘Who’s she? Your floozy?’

  The Doctor looked at Martha, his face adopting an expression of wide-eyed innocence. In an equally innocent voice he asked, ‘Are you my floozy, Martha?’

  ‘I’m nobody’s floozy,’ Martha said, bridling.

  ‘She says she’s nobody’s floozy,’ the Doctor said.

  The old lady hmphed as if she didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘And she did ask a very good question,’ the Doctor continued. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The old lady seemed to puff herself up. Almost defiantly she said, ‘I was drawn here. I felt that something was wrong.’

  The Doctor’s expression hadn’t changed, but Martha could almost hear the cogs whirring in his head. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Now that’s even more interesting.’

  Although Martha hadn’t seen him do it, the Doctor had put his sonic screwdriver away when they had encountered the old lady. Now he whipped it out again and examined the hole with it.

  The old lady watched him for a moment and then asked, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s an alien device,’ said the Doctor casually, though Martha could see that he was watching her reaction out of the corner of his eye.

  She was silent for a moment, then she sniffed. ‘You from outer space then?’

  He shrugged. ‘Could be.’

  She turned to Martha. ‘Are you from outer space too?’

  ‘No,’ said Martha, ‘I’m from London.’

  All at once the sonic began to emit a high-pitched, warbling shriek. The black cat yowled and ran away.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said the Doctor quietly.

  ‘What?’ said Martha.

  ‘They know we’re here.’

  ‘Who do?’ asked the old lady.

  ‘Whoever dug this hole.’

  He turned the sonic off, jumped to his feet and spun around. This time Martha’s eyes were not playing tricks on her. Something odd was happening.

  Several mini-whirlwinds had sprung up among the mist-shrouded tombstones. They were ranging about like spinning tops, gathering up autumn leaves which were strewn about on the ground. Within seconds the whirlwinds had not only collected every leaf in the immediate vicinity, but had started to mould them into half a dozen roughly humanoid shapes, with thick stubby limbs and vaguely spherical heads.

  Martha watched in horrified fascination as, with an eerie crackling of dry leaves, the closest of the whirlwind-figures raised one of its lumpen hands and pointed at her.

  Next moment she was aware of something spinning towards her face. She ducked instinctively and the spinning object – a leaf, she realised in amazement – whipped past, though not before the tip of it had grazed her cheekbone and opened a thin, stinging cut.

  ‘Cover your heads!’ shouted the Doctor, turning up the collar of his coat as the leaf-creatures ambled towards them with a dry scraping sound. Martha pulled her jacket up over her black hair as all six of the creatures raised their arms and unleashed a flurry of razor-sharp leaves. She was half-aware of the old lady beside the Doctor flipping her grey shawl over her head, and then all three of them were running across the grass, taking care not to collide with the tombstones, which seemed to be rising out of the green mist in front of them, like obstacles conjured by their pursuers.

  Martha felt several leaves slice across the skin of her hands as she ran, leaving stripes of blood in their wake. Fleeing for the gates, leaves slashing and swooping around them, she was half-aware of the Doctor frantically searching his pockets.

  Suddenly he shouted, ‘Aha!’ and held aloft a packet of crisps.

  ‘All this exercise making you a bit peckish, is it?’ she yelled.

  His long legs still carrying him unerringly through the obstacle course of gravestones, the Doctor tore open the bag and started rooting through it, tossing crisps left and right with wild abandon. Finally he found what he was looking for: a little blue sachet of salt. Stuffing the empty bag back into his pocket, he tore open the sachet with his teeth and emptied the salt into his cupped hand. He muttered something, then flung the salt over his shoulder.

  Instantly the storm of murderous leaves swirling around them fluttered harmlessly to the ground. Martha glanced back just in time to see the leaf-creatures collapse into half a dozen lifeless mounds. The Doctor had turned and was running back towards the nearest of the mounds. As Martha thumped to a halt, panting, he thrust his sonic into it.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘just leaves.’ He scattered them with a kick.

  Martha bent at the waist, hands on knees, gasping with adrenalin. She was impressed to see that not only had the old lady managed to keep up with them, but she was barely out of breath.

  ‘What did you do?’ Martha asked the Doctor.

  ‘I chucked some salt at them,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I could see that, but… why?’

  The Doctor looked at the old lady and raised his eyebrows as if inviting her to answer.

  ‘Natural occult defence,’ she said, as if it was obvious.

  ‘Very good,’ he said, giving her one of his goofy grins. ‘You know your stuff. What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said waspishly, and then abruptly her expression softened. ‘But it’s Etta. Etta Helligan.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Etta Helligan,’ said the Doctor, shaking her hand. ‘I’m the Doctor and this is Martha.’

  ‘You said occult,’ pointed out Martha. ‘Like magic, you mean?’

  ‘Or a science so ancient and arcane it seems like magic,’ he said.

  Martha remembered her initial thought when she had seen the old woman. ‘Is it the Carrionites again?’

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘No, this isn’t their style. Too elaborate. Too theatrical.’

  ‘And you’re saying Shakespeare wasn’t theatrical?’ Martha said.

  Another grin. ‘Good point, well made.’

  Etta Helligan watched this exchange with interest. ‘Why are you people here?’ she asked.

  The Doctor tossed his sonic into the air, caught it and slipped it into his pocket. ‘We’re here to help,’ he said.

  ‘Intergalactic emergency services, that’s us,’ commented Martha drily.

  The Doctor suddenly leaned forward, peering intently into Etta’s face. ‘You’re old, aren’t you?’ he said. He turned, wincing indignantly, as Martha punched him sharply in the back. Then his face cleared. ‘Was that rude?’ He swung back to Etta. ‘I’m sorry, that was rude, wasn’t it? What I meant was… um… you’ve probably lived here a long time? You know a lot about the town? About its history?’

  ‘My great-great-great grandparents were one of the founding families,’ she told him pr
oudly.

  ‘Well… great!’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to yours then, for a chat. And preferably some cocoa.’

  ‘You’re a very forward young man, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Forward, backward, sideways. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’

  Etta raised an eyebrow and turned to Martha. ‘Is he always like this?’

  ‘No,’ said Martha. ‘Sometimes he can be quite eccentric.’

  Etta laughed, and suddenly Martha could see the young woman she had once been. ‘Is that so? Then your life must be very interesting, Martha.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Martha, smiling back at her, ‘it’s certainly that.’

  THE CHAMBER WAS deep underground, and filled with a ceaseless, insectile rustling. Bulbous growths tumesced from the undulating walls; nodular columns and contorted pedestals, black and jagged and somehow sinewy, jutted from the uneven floor.

  To an untrained eye, these strange, twisted shapes might have resembled the remains of lightning-blasted trees, or could even have been mistaken as the manifestation of some mad sculptor’s fevered imaginings.

  What they actually were, however, were the products of alien technology. And although they appeared inert, each separate component, and indeed the very fabric of the chamber, was threaded with a network of what appeared to be veins, through which pulsed – like sluggish, poisonous blood – a faint, green light.

  Dominating the centre of the chamber was a dais that was almost the height of a man, from which sprouted a dozen or more vine-like tendrils, connected to the walls on either side. A hollow appeared to have been scooped from the tangled knot of worm-like roots in the flattened crown of the dais, and in this hollow nestled the book that Rick and his friends had dug out from under the black tree.

  Silently a stream of figures drifted into the chamber and formed a wide circle around the dais. The figures were impossibly tall and spindly, with long, taloned fingers and massive, squashy, hairless heads. Even in this dank, windless place, their black rags seemed to float around their elongated bodies like the fronds of undersea plants. The last of the figures to enter the chamber appeared to be their leader, even though its appearance seemed all but identical to the others. It was this figure, however, which stood before the book and placed the hooked tips of its many-jointed fingers on the fleshy cover. It was this figure too which began to speak, or rather chant, words that seemed ancient and alien and somehow ominous. The creature’s voice, echoing around the chamber, was breathy, sing-song, almost giggly. It was the voice of a child that was sweetly and dangerously mad.

  As it had in Rick’s room, the book began to writhe and quiver, like something alive. Sparks of green light flickered and danced about its surface, and as each spark formed it was sucked greedily away by the chamber itself. However, this didn’t diminish the power of the book. On the contrary, as the chanting continued, the light produced by it gradually strengthened in both brightness and volume. Soon green light was flowing from the book like mother’s milk flowing into the bellies of many children. It flowed down the dais and radiated out across the floor in great gulping surges; it flowed through the tendrils attached to the dais and into the walls; it flowed into the nodular growths and contorted pedestals, invigorating them. The spindly figures looked around, grinning their horribly wide, jagged-toothed grins. They hissed in ecstasy and clicked their long, segmented fingers as the chamber came to glowing life around them.

  When the chamber had drunk its fill, the leader of the figures raised its right arm and turned its hand palm upwards, the fingers unfurling slowly like the legs of a massive, awakening spider. As if responding to this movement, a bubble of swirling light formed in the centre of the book and then rose slowly into the air before nestling into the palm of the leader’s outstretched hand. The leader brought the hand close to its massive mouth, as if to swallow the ball of light. Instead, however, the creature whispered a further incantation, almost as though giving the light instructions. Finally the leader stretched out an arm, raising its hand high above its bulbous head. The ball of light sat there for a moment, and then, as if propelled by some arcane purpose, it drifted away…

  Jim Tozier had decided this was to be his last Halloween. He’d struggled on for three years with Tozier’s Costume Emporium since Glenn had died, but his heart just wasn’t in it any more. It was Jim’s dad, Pete, who had started the business in the 1950s, and Jim himself had taken over the reins in 1978, when the old man retired. Jim had met Glenn whilst on holiday in Florida in 1983 and, though Glenn had become a partner in the business – with Dad’s blessing – a year later, and had worked side-by-side with Jim for the next twenty happy years, it was Glenn himself who had insisted that Jim keep the store’s original name.

  ‘TCE is an institution in the Falls,’ he would say.

  ‘Yeah, but so’s the sanatorium up on Blackwood Hill,’ Jim would joke.

  Secretly, though, Jim had been glad not to have to change the name. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to acknowledge Glenn’s contribution (he loved the man, and would sing his praises whenever he could), it was simply that Tozier & Reid’s Costume Emporium sounded kind of long-winded. Besides, it wouldn’t have stopped folk still calling the place Tozier’s out of habit, and neither would it have made folk any more nor less aware of what he and Glenn meant to each other. And so the name had stayed, and Glenn had stayed, and – apart from his dad’s death in ’99 – the next two decades had been the happiest of Jim’s life.

  But then in 2004 all those years of smoking (thirty a day from the age of fifteen) had finally caught up with Glenn and, on 15 December 2005, with Glenn insisting he would hang on for one more Christmas, the Good Lord had taken him for a sunbeam. People couldn’t have been kinder to Jim, and maybe for the first time he had discovered what good and loyal friends he had in the Falls, but even so the weeks and months and now years following Glenn’s death had been nothing but a struggle.

  So now here he was, not too far from the big six-oh, and every day the voice urging him to pack his bags and head out to Vancouver grew louder and louder. His sister, Mary, and her family were out there, and for the past couple of years they had been trying to get him to sell up and join them in what, Mary was constantly telling him, was the world’s third most liveable city.

  It was only last week that he had finally come to the decision he had been leaning towards for the past six months, only last week that he had decided the For Sale signs would be going up the Monday after Halloween. It was kind of sad in a way, but exciting too. Jim had already called Mary and asked her to start looking for an apartment he could buy, had already started planning his new life.

  Maybe it was this – the anticipation, the apprehension – that was making it so tough to sleep tonight. Or maybe it was this damn weird mist that seemed to be making the atmosphere heavy, oppressive.

  He looked out of his bedroom window, having woken from his fitful sleep for maybe the fifth time in the past two hours. He had certainly never seen mist this colour before. It was eerie, like something out of a horror movie. Jim hoped there wasn’t something sinister about it, hoped the mist wasn’t the result of some poisonous gas leak or something. He was a sensible man, and was not generally given to such wild speculation, but there was just something… well, not right about this.

  In the dressing-table mirror across the room, he caught a glimpse of himself sitting on the edge of the bed, and the sudden unexpectedness of seeing his reflection shocked him. Heck, when had he gotten so fat? He’d always been a big guy, but he hadn’t realised his belly had become quite so huge. With his thick white moustache and round-lensed spectacles, all he’d have to do was grow a bushy white beard and he’d be the spit of Santa Claus.

  He was resting his hands ruefully on the stretched T-shirt over his belly and wondering about maybe shedding a few pounds before embarking on his new life when he heard a noise downstairs. It was a vague noise, hard to pinpoint. Kind of a bump, kind of a scuff. T
he sound of something falling over maybe… or of someone moving around.

  Jim’s heart began to thump harder. Maybe it was this that was making him so restless tonight – the feeling that he was not alone. It was weird, but now that his mind had latched onto that thought, it didn’t want to let it go. He had a sudden, almost overwhelming conviction that someone was downstairs, moving around among the costumes. Someone who was up to no good. His imagination started to go into overdrive. He pictured a cowled figure brandishing a big, shiny knife.

  Stop it, he told himself firmly, you’re being ridiculous.

  Even so, he pulled on jeans, shoes and a sweater before heading downstairs. If there was someone down there, he would feel a little vulnerable dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt. He wondered about taking something to defend himself with, but couldn’t think of anything appropriate. He didn’t own a gun and he would never dream of using a knife. Plus he was neither a golfer nor a baseball player. In the end he settled on the long, heavy flashlight with the rubber grip he kept with his tools in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. If the worst came to the worst, he could rap any potential assailant over the head with it.

  Not that he would need to, he told himself.

  The building was over a hundred years old, and the stairs leading down from his apartment to the shop creaked. Jim winced the first time it happened, but by the third or fourth he had come to terms with the fact that he had well and truly lost the element of surprise. He clomped down the remaining steps and slid free the bolts on the door at the bottom. Bracing himself, he shoved the door open and shone his flashlight directly in front of him at face height. That way, if some ravening lunatic came at him he might dazzle them long enough to overpower them, or at least get away.

  But no one came at him. The shop was quiet and empty. Seemed quiet and empty. Shining his flashlight around, he couldn’t deny there were plenty of places where a potential burglar

  (or psycho)

  might hide.

  Take that rack of costumes over by the right-hand wall, for instance. Was it his imagination, or had he seen them move just a little, as if stirred by a non-existent breeze? And the Halloween masks displayed on pegs above the counter. They’d never bothered him before, but now he couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were watching him. And then there was the Evil Clown costume in the front window, draped over Sam the Mannequin. It was facing front, designed to leer at potential customers who might be passing by the store, but when Jim’s flashlight beam swept across it, didn’t he see it move its head just a little? Didn’t he see the faintest flicker from its floppy orange hair? Didn’t he see an odd greenish glint in the empty eye socket of its grinning rubber face?