Forever Autumn

by Mark Morris

  Amanda rose slowly to her feet. ‘What is that?’ she asked fearfully.

  ‘Trouble,’ said Martha. ‘How strong is that door?’

  ‘Pretty strong,’ said Chris.

  The rapid thumping abruptly ceased. There was a brief flurry of fluttering movement, like the sound of a bird trapped in a chimney. Moments later this was followed by the tinkle of breaking glass, and then silence.

  Martha and the Pirellis crouched – tense, motionless, listening – for maybe half a minute.

  ‘Have they gone?’ Rick whispered at last.

  ‘Maybe,’ Martha replied, thinking of the breaking glass, though she couldn’t honestly believe that whatever had been on the other side of the door would have given up so easily.

  She was right. The words were barely out of her mouth when the kitchen window shattered. Amanda screamed and jumped up as broken glass fell into the sink and something black and fluttering entered the room. The black thing flew straight at Martha. She had a split second to register that it was a bat, sporting a gaping mouth of needle-sharp teeth, and then she was swinging the Necris. More by luck than judgement she hit the bat full on. There was a green flash, enough to send a numbing jolt, like an electric shock, down both of her arms, and the bat flopped lifelessly to the ground.

  They all stared incredulously at it for a moment, and then in a high, chalky voice, Amanda said, ‘It’s made of rubber.’ She began to laugh hysterically, and then abruptly stopped.

  ‘Is it yours?’ Martha asked Rick, clenching and unclenching her hands to try and get the feeling back into them.

  Rick nodded. ‘I decorated the TV room with them, ’cos that’s where me and the guys were planning on hanging out later. I had a big bag of them. They were fifty for five dollars at the Easy Mart…’

  His voice tailed off as he realised what he was saying and a look of horror crossed his face.

  Martha ran to the broken window and looked out. ‘Oh my…’ she whispered.

  Swirling ten metres up in the air, like flecks of ash against the green mist, were the rest of the bats. Having abandoned their attack on the stout kitchen door, they had evidently exited the house to search for a more vulnerable point of entry. To Martha they resembled a small but deadly tornado, spinning in a fluttering, silent circle. Even as she watched, however, they re-formed. They stopped their spinning and gathered together in a dense, black mass. Then they began to stream downwards like an unspooling ribbon, heading straight for the house.

  ‘They’re coming!’ she yelled, twisting away from the window. ‘Run!’

  Martha stopped just long enough to grab a frying pan off the stove, which she handed to Chris. They all pelted towards the kitchen door. Rick had his hand on the handle and was pulling the door open when the rest of the kitchen windows exploded inwards.

  A second later, bats were swooping and diving towards them.

  As Chris swatted them with the frying pan and Martha fended them off with the Necris, Rick yanked open the kitchen door and all but shoved his mother ahead of him through the gap.

  Martha felt the needle-teeth of the bats scratching her hands, and threw up her arms to stop them plunging their fangs into her face. Chris grabbed the collar of her leather jacket and yanked her backwards through the door. Martha had the presence of mind to grab the handle with her free hand and pull the door shut behind her. One bat, caught half in and half out of the closing door, was crushed into a mangled lump of rubber and fell to the floor, bloodless and inert.

  Around a dozen bats had made it out of the kitchen with them. Martha and Chris did their best to fight them off as they ran towards the stairs. Martha had no real idea where they were going. Outside was a no-no; they would be sitting targets in the open. Their best bet was to find a small space that couldn’t be breached and lock themselves in. Preferably somewhere without windows – a wardrobe or cupboard, say.

  They ran up the stairs and along the upper landing. Chris leaped and whacked a bat with the frying pan as it swooped towards Martha’s face. He reminded her of a tennis player, performing a winning smash. Then he was grabbing her jacket once again, pulling her into the bathroom. When they were inside, Rick slammed the bolt into place. The few bats still pursuing them thumped ineffectually against the door for the next fifteen seconds or so, then stopped.

  Once again there was silence. With shaky hands Chris put the frying pan carefully on the floor and wiped sweat from his forehead.

  Amanda pointed at Martha with a trembling finger. ‘You brought this on us,’ she said.

  ‘Mom,’ said Rick, appalled, but Amanda silenced him with a glare.

  ‘You’ve endangered my family,’ she said to Martha, her voice full of quiet rage. ‘Why did you have to come here?’

  Martha looked shamefaced. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Rick vehemently. ‘Mom, I asked Martha to come.’

  Martha held up the hand that was not holding the Necris. She looked oddly as though she was swearing an oath on the Bible. ‘No, Rick, your mum’s right. I shouldn’t have put you in danger. I should have handled this on my own.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we’re here now,’ said Chris, ‘so instead of arguing let’s decide what we’re gonna do.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much we can do except wait,’ said Martha.

  ‘Wait for what?’ Amanda wanted to know.

  Martha looked at her. In truth she was a bit stumped. What indeed? However, she said firmly, ‘The Doctor.’

  ‘Your friend?’ said Amanda, unconvinced and still somewhat hostile. ‘So he has all the answers, does he?’

  ‘Usually,’ said Martha. ‘Or if not, then he makes them up as he goes along. He’s pretty good at that.’

  ‘And what if he doesn’t come back?’ Amanda said.

  ‘He will,’ said Martha.

  ‘But what if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to manage, won’t we!’ Martha said, more sharply than she intended.

  ‘Shh,’ said Chris. His ear was pressed to the door. ‘I think I hear something.’

  They all fell silent and listened. Faintly, but getting louder, they could hear an odd sound. It was a rhythmic series of dry, rattling clicks, like small pieces of wood or stone being rapped together.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Rick.

  Martha licked her lips. She was thinking of a scene from a movie she’d watched as a kid, where living skeletons had grown from the scattered teeth of a dead monster.

  ‘I might be wrong – I hope I’m wrong – but it sounds to me like bones,’ she said.

  The rattle-click of movement came up the stairs, along the landing and stopped outside the door. In some ways the few seconds of silence that followed its arrival were even worse than the approaching sounds had been. Chris stepped back from the door, staring at it warily. Martha and Rick exchanged a glance. Amanda retreated to the back of the room, pressing her hands to her mouth as if to stifle a rising scream.

  Then there was a crash, and a hairline crack appeared in one of the door’s upper wooden panels. Martha looked around desperately for something to defend herself with, but the best weapon available was the one she was already holding. She raised the Necris above her head, readying herself for action. Another crash, and the crack widened, slivers of wood falling inward.

  There wasn’t much the four of them could do except watch the thing smash its way through the door. With each blow more of the panel splintered and collapsed. Finally a sizeable chunk of wood fell onto the bathroom floor. Immediately a hand and part of an arm thrust its way through the jagged hole it had created.

  Just as Martha had feared, the hand was white, fleshless, skeletal. She shuddered at the brittle scraping the twig-like fingers made as they scuttled across the wood towards the bolt. Swallowing her revulsion, she stepped forward and brought the Necris down as if to squash a bug, hoping to disconnect the hand from its spindly wrist, perhaps even to pul
verise it. The creature, however, seemed to anticipate her attack and snatched its hand back through the hole just in time.

  The momentum of Martha’s swing made her stumble forward and drop onto one knee, her face within reach of the hole in the door. The living skeleton on the other side suddenly bent and lunged forward, filling the gap with its chalk-white face, its empty eye-sockets level with Martha’s eyes. The skull’s lipless jaw creaked wide open, and – though it had no vocal cords – the creature hissed at her. Its breath (How could it have breath? It had no lungs!) smelled of grave-mould and the dank, sulphurous odour of the Hervoken’s lair. Martha recoiled, sprawling on her back on the bathroom floor, coughing and spluttering.

  Even as she was pushing herself back up to a sitting position, the creature was reaching through the hole in the door once again. ‘Stop it!’ she yelled, but it was too late. The bony fingers wrapped themselves around the bolt and tugged it from its socket. A second later the door swung open and there stood the skeleton, bones clicking and creaking as it shifted its weight. Horribly, impossibly alive.

  The Necris was lying on the floor, a few inches from Martha’s hand. With frightening speed, the skeleton rushed forward, reached down and grabbed it.

  ‘No!’ Martha shouted and made a snatch for it herself, but her fingers closed on empty air. As the skeleton straightened up with its prize, Martha was half-aware of Chris stepping over her, his hands outstretched. She looked up, and saw that he was holding a toilet roll in one hand, a cigarette lighter in the other. She saw him light the toilet roll and then thrust it between two of the skeleton’s ribs, jamming it in place. The vertebrae in the skeleton’s neck clicked as it tilted its skull to regard the burning wad of paper.

  Then, to Martha’s astonishment, the creature burst into flames.

  It burned surprisingly quickly, fire racing along its network of bones, engulfing it within seconds. It opened its mouth in a soundless scream as it shrivelled and blackened, collapsing in on itself. Its spine snapped and its burning skull tumbled between its charred collar bones and into the crumbling ribcage. The Necris dropped from its lifeless hands and into Martha’s arms. Rick and Chris ran forward with wet towels and doused the flames before they could spread and set fire to the house. They smothered the heap of bones and trampled them into burning ash. Seconds later all that was left of the skeleton was black mush and a hazy pall of greenish smoke.

  Chris turned to face Martha as she rose to her feet. He had a smudge of soot on his nose and was looking pleased with himself. ‘I remembered the bats,’ he said.

  ‘Er… good,’ replied Martha, who didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  ‘I remembered they were made of rubber, even when they were alive,’ he said, ‘and it suddenly made me realise what the skeleton was made of.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. Now she understood. She looked at the wet towels and the black gunk dribbling out from underneath. ‘Paper?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah… well, cardboard. Though I’m not sure how something made of cardboard can smash its way through a door.’

  ‘Hervoken magic,’ Martha said, then thought of how the Doctor would frown if he heard her say that. ‘Science, I mean.’

  ‘What I want to know, Christopher,’ Amanda said, stepping forward, ‘is why you had a cigarette lighter in your pocket?’

  Suddenly Chris looked like a little boy who’d been caught raiding the cookie jar in the dead of night. ‘Er…’ he said.

  Etta was getting worried. The Doctor should have returned by now.

  ‘If I’m not back by three,’ he had told her earlier, ‘it means… or it probably means… though then again, it could just be that…’

  ‘In plain English, if you please, Doctor,’ she had said imperiously.

  ‘Well, it will almost certainly mean that the Hervoken are not… what’s the phrase? Open to negotiation.’

  ‘And what should I do then?’ she asked. ‘Call the police?’

  ‘Nah, they’d be about as much use as a sherbet umbrella. Your best bet would be to pack up and get out of town as quickly as you can. No, no, hang on… first cancel the Halloween Carnival, initiate some sort of evacuation procedure, and then pack up and get out of town as quickly as you can. See ya.’

  Three o’clock, he had said. She looked at the big metal clock on her kitchen wall, which had been chopping off the seconds of her life for the past twenty-five years. It read five past three, though, even as she glanced at it, it clunked on another minute. How long should she wait? Perhaps the ‘negotiations’, as he had called them, were more involved than he had anticipated?

  ‘Come on, Doctor,’ she muttered, desperate to hear the sound of his footfalls on the basement steps, willing him to appear like a manic jack-in-the-box in her kitchen. She had no doubt he was the spaceman he had claimed himself to be. He was simultaneously the most unsettling and reassuring man she had ever met, a mesmerising combination of boyish charm and ancient wisdom.

  Ten minutes later she stood up. ‘Right then,’ she said. She had come to a decision. It was the only possible decision she could come to. Etta didn’t think she was a particularly brave soul, but neither was she the kind of person who would leave a friend in the lurch. She wouldn’t flee, as the Doctor had advised, and there wasn’t time to fetch help. Which meant there was only one course of action open to her – she would launch a rescue mission. She would get the Doctor back, or die in the attempt.

  Arming herself with a torch, she descended the basement steps and lowered herself gingerly into the storage space beneath the floor. The metal door in the side wall was still ajar. She tugged it open and shone her torch into a cramped black tunnel. Rotting timbers, irregularly spaced, looked to be the only things preventing the tunnel from collapsing in on itself. Etta shuddered, took a deep breath and thought briefly of how this would play havoc with her arthritis. Then she got down on her hands and knees and crawled inside.

  ‘Ow,’ said the Doctor. Every time he moved, even just a little bit, the vines securing him flashed green and gave him a zap of energy. It was like being continually jabbed with a cattle prod. ‘Can’t you turn the juice down on this thing?’ he called. ‘It tickles.’

  The Hervoken ignored him. They had been ignoring him for the past twenty minutes. They were drifting about their central chamber, describing symbols in the air, occasionally chanting or muttering in their breathy, childlike voices. Their movements seemed arbitrary, but the Doctor knew they were conjuring something, that their actions were far more purposeful than they appeared. He hoped Martha was safe. He’d had no choice but to entrust her with the Necris, but he still knew that if anything happened to her because of it, he’d never forgive himself.

  He had tried various methods to get the Hervoken to listen to him, but they were having none of it. Perhaps now was the time to take a gamble, therefore, to mix a few home truths in with a dose of good old-fashioned bluffing.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘cards on the table. Your lot don’t exist any more. Your people were banished to the deep darkness by the Eternals when your endless, stupid war with the Carrionites threatened to bring this universe and countless others crashing about your… well, I would say ears if you had any.

  ‘Point is you didn’t know when to stop, did you? And so the Eternals kicked you out. The only reason they didn’t find your little group was because you were already under the earth, dormant. You’ve been there for thousands of years, that tiny speck of consciousness that kept you alive waiting and waiting for humankind to get clever enough to kick-start your resurrection. You’ve become legends on this planet, part of folklore. You’ve seeped into the nightmares of a thousand generations of children.’

  He took a deep breath: here came the bluffing part.

  ‘But the irony is, if you get this creaky old ship of yours working again, it’ll be like a beacon to the Eternals. They’ll find you and they’ll stamp you out. You’re nothing but a stray bit of dirt to them. A lone germ. A last surviving coc
kroach. Is that what you really want? A final glorious ascent into the heavens, and then – splat! Bye bye, Hervoken. ’Cos that’s what’ll happen unless you listen to me.

  ‘I can take you somewhere in my TARDIS where the Eternals’ll leave you alone, where they’ll let you live out your lives in peace. So come on, boys, whaddya say? Do this thing my way and everyone’s a winner.’

  Still they ignored him. And then they ignored him some more. The Doctor sighed, scowled. ‘All right,’ he muttered, ‘please yourselves.’

  Even while he had been talking, his mind had been working constantly, furiously, trying to think of a way out. He knew there had to be one. There always was. It was just a case of working it out before it was too late.

  Something to his left caught his eye: a glimmer of light, different to the swamp-like iridescence that pulsed and flickered and bubbled in the Hervoken’s lair. As surreptitiously as he could, the Doctor glanced in that direction. He didn’t know whether to feel heartened or dismayed to see Etta appear in the cavernous entrance to the central chamber. He was about to mouth at her to turn off her torch when she noticed the Hervoken for the first time and dropped the torch out of sheer fright. It landed on the ground and broke. A black vine immediately snaked from the wall and snatched it up. Green sparks flew as the vine tightened on the torch, crunching it into mangled pieces of plastic and metal. A nearby Hervoken, apparently alerted by the sound, drifted across. Etta could only stand there, transfixed with shock, as the alien loomed over her.

  The Doctor clenched his teeth, waiting for the inevitable. But then, to his astonishment, the Hervoken drifted away, as if the old lady wasn’t worth its attention. Why had it simply ignored her? Was it something to do with her age? Her lack of physical threat? And then it came to him.

  ‘Pssst,’ he said. Etta hadn’t spotted him yet. She was too overawed by the crawling walls and the Hervoken themselves.