Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  Matheson Catcher. The worst of the lot.

  ‘Many primitive races worshipped nature’s tyranny,’ Catcher was saying, his voice a constant throb-throb-throb that made Erskine think of someone turning the handle of a music box. ‘The so-called goddesses of the druids, the sickly cults of Hecate and Astarte. But the architects of Peru understood the true horror of the natural world. Consider their greatest constructions, gentlemen, built in defiance of the jungle’s chaos. An example to the world. We are not primitives, we are men of Reason. We have a duty, a responsibility, to hold back the chaos of our own age in the same manner.’

  ‘By building pyramids,’ Erskine grunted under his breath. ‘Bloody stargazer.’

  Catcher paused for a moment, giving Erskine the irrational feeling that he’d heard. ‘There is a nobility in architecture, gentlemen. Architecture is purity itself, the triumph of the rational mind over the terrible Cacophony of nature. Only through this purity can we know the Wa...’

  Catcher tailed off, like a man who’d just caught himself giving away a secret.

  ‘...can we know God,’ he finally concluded.

  Erskine winced at the G-word, and cast a critical eye over the man’s audience. Certain members of the Society (weak-willed, pox-brained members, naturally) were incapable of staying away from Catcher. Erskine had become convinced that ‘unofficial’ Society meetings were going on somewhere, just Catcher and his ‘inner circle’ of hangers-on. If this goes on, thought Erskine, we’ll be no better than the damned Freemasons. There were even half-serious rumours that Catcher and his gullible friends had summoned up Baalzebub, rumours which the man had no doubt started himself in order to appear more interesting. Erskine had made several loud jokes about Catcher sprouting horns and drinking blood, but no one had thought they were funny, and even Isaac Penley – a humpty-dumpty little man who usually laughed at everyone’s jokes, and only seemed to have joined the Renewalists because he didn’t have anything better to believe in – had just turned away, embarrassed.

  Then Erskine became aware of a sound, a ticking, clicking sound; and, with a start, he realized that Catcher was staring directly at him from across the old pub. Catcher’s eyes were little grey pebbles. Little grey pebbles that blinked once every eight seconds – precisely, Erskine had timed them – as if there were a mechanism of clockwork inside his head.

  Ticking.

  Clicking.

  ‘Hellfire and sodomy,’ Erskine exclaimed, then realized that he’d actually shouted it out at the top of his voice.

  When Roslyn Forrester slouched back to the house on Burr Street – at about 19:30 hours, by her reckoning – someone was waiting for her on the stoop.

  ‘Want any help?’ he said.

  He was, by local standards, a boy. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, with the kind of face that would have found him a good role in a spaghetti western, had he been born two hundred years later. There were no teenagers here, Roz remembered. There were boys, and there were men, with nothing in between but wet dreams and bad complexions. The boy’s clothes fitted so badly that they could only have been stolen.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked, not trusting him an inch.

  The boy shrugged. ‘Can’t be easy, looking after the house by yourself. Me, I’m ready to work cheap. Just naturally generous, that’s me. So I got to thinking, well, give the woman a chance, let her know she should get me now ‘fore I’m in demand.’ He gave her a grin that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, except for the fact that it was yellow.

  Roz just scowled. He didn’t react, meaning that she was too tired even to scowl properly.

  ‘You know anything about temporal engineering?’ she asked.

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Restructuring local space–time in order to facilitate movement through the fourth dimension. Know anything about it?’

  The boy nodded thoughtfully. ‘Haaaahhh. Well, I can put shoes on horses. Don’t know if you could get them through your fourth dimension. Maybe you’d have to give ‘em a push.’

  Roz scowled again, reminding herself that sarcasm wasn’t exclusive to her own century. She failed to think of any witty or half-intelligent response, so she just told him to piss off.

  ‘Right,’ said the boy, as if it were perfectly normal for people to talk to him like that. He gangled to his feet. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘It’d better be a good one.’

  ‘You some kind of lunatic?’

  ‘I’m the best kind of lunatic. Dementus futurus, the lesser– spotted ranting bloody psychopath. Now get lost.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘Your loss,’ he said, and sulked off around a corner.

  Roz unlocked the front door with a carefully placed kick, and dragged herself into the main hall of the house. The hall was large but mostly empty, ringed with columns of fake marble that made no difference to the way the roof stayed up. There were a lot of houses like that in Woodwicke. America had just worked out that it was an expanding empire, so the architects had decided to make every building look like a Roman ruin. A cheap, tasteless, badly furnished Roman ruin, in this case.

  It wasn’t much of a house, Roz told herself, but it was home. Not her home, obviously, and the owner would get a hell of a shock if he unexpectedly came back to it, but it was the only place she’d been able to find, and even that had been a fluke. As far as she’d been able to figure out, the owner was some kind of second-rate businessman who’d waltzed off to Asia to deal in commodities that no one wanted to talk to her about; he wasn’t due back until spring, which gave her about two months more to pretend to be the housekeeper. Slave. Whatever.

  Six weeks, she’d been here now. Six weeks of sneaking and scraping that made a survival training course on Ponten Luna Sierra look like an all-expenses-paid holiday on Disneyplanet. Six weeks of very little sleep and even less food.

  Six weeks of looking for the TARDIS.

  As for the time before that... just random images. Arizona had opened up and swallowed her, Chris telling her to get out of the crukking way as she’d been sucked through a crack in the world. Then she was running, she was trying not to look back at the gynoid, she was falling, the sphere was spinning...

  And then she was here. Here in New York State. Here in 1799.

  At Christmas.

  Lost.

  As lost as you can get, in fact, with no way of letting the others know where she was or how to find her. There were no organizations here that might know the Doctor, no LONGBOWs or PROBEs, and no way of sending out any kind of distress call. The one possible means of communication she’d had – the damned amaranth that had presumably brought her here – had got itself lost. It had got itself lost. She was quite adamant that she hadn’t lost it. When she’d woken up in this time-zone, finding herself lying in a puddle of frost and dirty water in the woods on the edge of town, there’d been no sign of the thing. She imagined it trundling away of its own accord, looking for a more interesting owner than Roslyn Inyathi Forrester.

  Ah yes, Roslyn Inyathi Forrester. Professional fortune-teller and small-town oddball. A bitter, cynical woman who seriously believed that she used to travel to the stars with a diminutive magician, and who spent her poor, wasted life trying to find her way back to the delusion. Dementus futurus. The best kind of lunatic.

  Which is why she’d had to develop her own escape plan, why she’d spent the last two weeks planning, waiting and brooding, and why there was now something heavy and metallic and probably illegal nestling in her pouch. She’d only survived this long by setting herself up as an ‘attraction’, her tent supplied by showmen who took most of what she made as payment, but there was a limit to the time she could go on telling false futures for failed businessmen and using the same stories and answering the same questions and Goddess oh Goddess I have to get out of here this place is killing me I said this place is killing me.

  It was half past eight on Christmas Eve when Daniel Tremayne heard the call. Of course, as far as Daniel was concerne
d, the time was just ‘night’ and the date was just ‘today’.

  He was on Hazelrow Avenue when it started, standing in the shadow of the grey house on the corner, slipping into the dark spaces behind the porch pillars whenever a carriage rolled past. Making sure he wasn’t seen. No particular reason for that; Daniel Tremayne just didn’t like being seen. The people who lived in towns like this – the soft people, the ones who could stay in one place till the end of the world came for them, the farmers and the lawyers and the storekeepers – had built this world out of their queer politics, out of weird rituals like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Day of Independence’, and Daniel lived in the cracks of that world. Seventeen-and-a-half years of hiding in alleys. A lifetime of not being noticed.

  The house looked ugly in the moonlight, uglier than he’d remembered it. The windows weren’t lit, and there were pools of darkness around the top-floor balconies, so it looked like the roof was being held up by shadows. The house had been kind-of-square, once, but the owner had stripped it down and rebuilt it so often that the place just looked like a shape, now, instead of being any shape in particular. Passers-by looked away when they walked past it, like they were embarrassed or something. The other buildings on Hazelrow Avenue were fine, all pearl-white pillars and marbled walls and cosy gas-lit windows, but the house on the corner... Daniel remembered the soldiers who’d fought the Revolution, men who’d been out in the snow so long that their arms and legs had twisted and turned black. The house was like that, like the town’s dead limb

  Daniel Tremayne climbed up onto the stoop and stood there awhile, getting ready to knock. Rehearsing.

  Mr Catcher? Don’t know if you remember me...

  No. Catcher was too formal for that kind of thing. Last time Daniel had been through Woodwicke, the man had hired him to work on the cellars and the attics of the house, tearing out timbers and ripping up floorboards. Daniel hadn’t asked why, because he knew better than to ask questions, but Catcher had told him anyway. Something about the purity of the architecture, something Daniel hadn’t understood.

  Sir, regarding the circumstances of our previous dealings...

  Oh God, this was awful. Talking to Catcher was like talking to a clock; you could almost hear the ticking going on inside him, but you couldn’t expect him to smile, or frown, or do anything that might make him look half-human. Daniel was only here because he was desperate. A day and a half he’d been in Woodwicke, and he hadn’t found a single place that wanted him. He hadn’t even been needed at the McClellan house, where the new slave had asked about space–time engineering (hahh?), then told him to ‘piss off’ in a voice that made her sound like an English noblewoman. He’d spent the previous night in the ruins of an old pub, staying half-awake in case the watchmen turned up, because everyone knew what watchmen did to vagrants and wanderers and itinerants.

  Mr Catcher, sir, I was just wondering...

  And that was when he first heard the call, from somewhere on the other side of the door. Like a humming, like a hissing, noises twisted out of shape by half a dozen walls or more. Call? What kind of a call? Nothing important, Daniel Tremayne, nothing that’s any of your business. You’ve lived seventeen-and-a-half years by keeping your head down and not getting mixed up in other people’s fights, and it’s not a call, it’s just a noise, that’s all. Who’d be calling you, anyhow?

  But he was already hopping down off the stoop, checking the street – instinctively – to make sure no one was watching him, and creeping around the corner of the building, because Daniel Tremayne crept everywhere, whether he needed to or not. The shadows at the side of the house were thick enough to hide him from the eyes of any passers-by, and there was another door set into the brickwork there, in the narrow channel between the main building and the shithouse. An entrance for servants, salesmen and anyone else who was too poor to use the front door, Daniel guessed. He crept between the piles of junk and firewood that had built up around the entrance, listening for the call. The noise was stronger here, like a pulse, like a Negro rhythm. Or maybe it was just the thought of a noise, a kind of feeling you couldn’t pin down, like the way you could tell a storm was coming before it arrived?

  ‘This is none of your business, Daniel Tremayne,’ someone squealed, and he almost started to run before he realized that he’d said it himself.

  The door was locked. Daniel wondered how he knew that, then remembered that he’d just tried to open it, without even noticing what he was doing.

  ‘This is none of your business,’ he insisted, and the lock clicked open. Daniel knew maybe half a dozen ways of opening locks, but if anyone had asked him which he’d used, he wouldn’t have been able to say. Burgling. Didn’t they still hang you for that, in this town? You trying to get yourself killed all of a sudden, Daniel Tremayne?

  But the call was telling him to open the door, and the hinges were squeaking, and the sound was already rushing out of the darkness and going for his throat.

  ‘Catcher!’

  During his forty-three years on the planet Earth, many opinions had been formed about the temper of Erskine Morris. Some – mainly his close family, admittedly – claimed that his loud, aggressive nature was just a façade that hid a deeply lovable ‘inner self’, while others just wished that he’d keep the noise down. Even Erskine had to admit that, from time to time, his perpetually foul mood was a social drawback.

  Now, however, he had cause to be very, very glad of it. Because although he would never have admitted it – not even to the holy bastard son of Galileo, by Christ – right now, it was the only thing stopping him from being utterly terrified.

  ‘Catcher! For the sake of Saint Peter and all his baby catamites, man, you’ve got thirty seconds to show yourself or I’ll rip your damned heart out!’

  It had all started at the meeting, of course. Erskine had finally snapped, looking into Catcher’s blinking pebble-eyes and accusing him of any number of things, from being an irrational mystic to bringing the Society into disrepute. Catcher had taken it all remarkably well, except possibly for the ‘irrational’ part. He’d frowned, just for a second, the first time Erskine had seen that happen.

  ‘Are you a rational man?’ he’d asked, with deadly seriousness.

  Erskine had laughed once, loudly, and tried to ignore the funny looks he was getting from the other Society members. ‘Of course I’m a bloody rational man. Jesus Christ and his big Negro brother, Catcher, what kind of doughy-eyed stargazer do you take me for?’

  Catcher had nodded, and Erskine could almost have heard the cogs and wheels turning in his head. ‘Good,’ the man had said, humourlessly. ‘Good.’

  And he’d promptly invited Erskine to his house.

  It had taken Erskine a while to realize that he was being formally invited to a meeting of Catcher’s ‘inner circle’. Well, how could he refuse an invitation like that? He’d get to the bottom of the man’s madness, ohhh yes, even if he had to walk through the blistering gates of Hell to do it.

  But then it had all started to go wrong. When he’d arrived at the man’s disgusting house, Catcher and his little band of followers had been waiting in ambush. They’d blindfolded him – or rather, drawn some kind of cowl over his head – then tied his hands behind his back and led him, protesting in words of four letters or less, around more corners than he could count.

  ‘Catcher! Catcher!’

  He’d been right, all the time. Catcher was no better than a buggering Freemason. He’d heard the stories of the rituals the Masons put each other through, humiliation and symbolic execution, vows made until death, gullible idiots blindfolding each other and swearing to slaughter those who crossed them with fish-gutting knives –

  – oh, damnation.

  ‘I’m warning you, man! If all this ends with my good self tied naked with a spit up my arse, I’ll chew every inch of skin off your body!’

  No good. He was alone now, he was sure of it, no doubt locked in Catcher’s cellar or some such vile locale. Erskine felt his arm
brush against something solid, a pillar or a door-frame. He rubbed his head against the shape, pushing the hood up over his forehead until it fell away from his face.

  The first thing he saw was a column, like something out of an ancient Greek temple. Not cheap-looking, though, not like those ghastly mock-classical houses on Burr Street. Erskine squinted. Beyond the column was another, then another, then another...

  With a start, he realized that he was in a corridor, lined with pillars on both sides. The walls looked like marble, shot through with veins of some unrecognizable foreign material. He turned his head. The passage stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions, occasionally branching off into side-tunnels. The corridor was longer than Catcher’s entire house.

  Where in the name of sodomy was he?

  Io Ordo Io Io Ordo, a voice whispered in his ear.

  Erskine Morris felt the muscles in his legs begin to grind together, and noticed – almost as if it were happening to someone else – that he was moving, stumbling down the passage with his hands still bound. He had absolutely no idea where he was going. In fact, he had absolutely no ideas at all.

  Something cold and hard shifted inside Roz’s pouch. She tried to ignore the illusion that the shape was alive and impatient. Her stomach started singing protest songs when she came within sight of the church on Paris Street, so she drifted into the nearby general store and wasted the morning’s earnings on a pocketful of something edible and vegetable-based, hoping this would be the last time she’d need local currency. The shop was swamped with the usual festive decorations, the owner intent on pushing the local laws of commerce to their very limits and staying open right up until the dawn of Christmas Day.