The Nightmare of Black Island

by Mike Tucker

  'But things didn't end then and there, did they, Nathaniel? This story doesn't end with the explosion of a spacecraft on a remote stretch of Welsh coast, does it?'

  'No, Doctor. As I said, we were young, inquisitive. We thought that the world was ours and that we were indestructible. We picked ourselves up and made our way carefully through that shattered, smouldering wood, determined to see where the saucer had crashed. You know the new estate on the hill overlooking the village?'

  The Doctor nodded.

  'All that was once woodland, razed by the fire from that doomed ship. The crater was vast, a great ragged gouge in the earth. Through the smoke we could see sections of the saucer: the metal, twisted and scorched, huge lumps of it, and machinery scattered as far as the eye could see. The flames were tremendous, the air like an open oven, but nonetheless we went as close as we dared, shielding our faces from the heat with our arms. It seemed impossible that anyone – or anything – could possibly have survived that terrible carnage, but we had to know.'

  'And something had survived, hadn't it?' said the Doctor. 'Something alien.'

  Morton met the Doctor's gaze. 'Alien and terrible. We were all straining to see into the crater when it appeared, rising up out of the flames. Huge, unimaginably powerful. It was screaming in pain, flames over every part of it, its body torn almost to pieces in the crash. The noise it made overwhelmed us. It was in our ears and in our heads, enveloping us, consuming us with its pain, its anger, its will to survive.'

  Morton wiped a trembling hand across his brow.

  'I staggered back from the crater, desperate to get away. My head felt as though it would burst. I could hear things, see things in my mind, terrible alien things. Ancient things from the depths of space. I could hear my cousin and the others screaming too. We were... connected somehow, sharing the death of this creature. It tried to claw its way from the crater, but the flames and its wounds were too much for it. It fell back into the wreck of its burning ship, its death throes sending me to my knees. I could feel it burning me, burning my soul. And then it stopped.'

  Morton took a deep breath. 'That was the start of it, Doctor. With the death of that creature, the start of a life of torment. We hurried away from that place. Already we could hear the jangle of bells from the fire engines and people were hurrying over to see what had happened. We made a pact that night, the seven of us, never to tell of what we had seen, never to speak of it outside our group. But we left that place with more than we had arrived with. The echo of that creature was still inside our heads.'

  The Doctor leaned close to Morton, peering into his eyes, his brow furrowed. 'And it's still in there, isn't it? Trapped inside you, struggling to survive, to get back out.'

  'Not all of it.' Peyne stepped closer to Morton's side, running her gloved hand almost tenderly over the old man's head. 'Just a fraction, a portion of the whole.'

  'Those people in the ward downstairs!' the Doctor exclaimed. 'They are the other children that witnessed the crash!'

  'Each of them holding part of the mind of Balor.'

  'And you've promised to remove those pieces. Well, you've been taking your time! Seventy years or more to track down seven children. Not exactly rushing things, are you?'

  Peyne hissed angrily. 'We traversed sixteen star systems looking for Balor. The Brintepi had laid a trap for him on their home world, bound him with their technology and cast his ship out into space and time.'

  Ah yes, the great battle of Monson Daar. Not your finest hour.'

  'The cowards made a pre-emptive strike. Massacred our defences.'

  'So now you intend to bring Balor back to life.'

  'Balor is the god of our people! It is written that we must free him and he will lead us to victory.'

  'Careless of you to lose him, then.' The Doctor cocked his head to one side. 'So, come on. How did you find him? Doesn't sound as though he had much of a chance to send you a postcard after he crashed. And I'm assuming that everything was covered up here fairly quickly. Spacecraft crashes do tend to stir things up a little.'

  Morton gave a spluttering laugh. 'Indeed. But governments had secret departments even in the 1930s, and it's extraordinary how a few threats and a lot of bribes can silence a community. The remains of the saucer vanished almost overnight, the crater was filled in and the entire incident forgotten...'

  'And you and your friends?'

  'Things were different back then, Doctor. Children were to be seen and not heard. No one knew what we had witnessed, no one bothered to ask beyond a cursory interview with the local policeman. We were persuaded to believe that the crash was a military aircraft, patted on the head and sent on our way. Forgotten, unimportant.'

  'But with a fragment of creature still within each of you. That must have been hard.' There was sympathy in the Doctor's voice.

  'Some of us coped better than others, Doctor. My cousin spent fifteen years in an asylum; his sister was imprisoned for the attempted murder of her mother; one became a monk and never uttered a word in the rest of his life. Each of us carried a different aspect of the creature, each of us reacted to it differently, was controlled by it differently.'

  'And no one realised that anything was wrong? No one tried to help you?'

  'The world had other concerns, Doctor. War was looming. What were the problems of a handful of schizophrenic children when the Nazi hordes were poised to sweep across Europe? By the time I was old enough to realise the danger I was in, my mind was already being swamped by the creature within me. Balor kept me from harming myself, tried to keep all of us from succumbing to anything that could endanger the fragment of him in our minds. Even so, I doubt I would have survived the war if it had not been for the Cynrog.'

  He glanced up at Peyne. 'They came for me during the Blitz. I was living in London at the time, working for a patent office, invalided out of the armed services because of my supposed "mental aberration". I thought that a bomb had landed on the house, but they had used the bombing to conceal their landing.'

  Peyne gave a thin smile. 'An exhilarating flight. I had forgotten the pleasures of a simple, old-fashioned world war.'

  'How did you find him?'

  Through meditation and patience. The Synod sent operatives to every corner of the universe, scanning the ether, looking for signs, scouring the psychic planes with our minds. The conflict on this planet attracted our curiosity, and it led us to discover Morton.'

  'Who led you in turn to the others.' The Doctor nodded slowly. The long, sad history was now dropping into place.

  'Eventually.' Peyne sighed. 'It took a long time to piece Morton's mind back together until he was of use to us. He was closest to the crash, so he holds the greatest part of Balor.'

  'A lifetime's work, Doctor.' Morton sounded tired now. 'Year upon year tracking down the others, stealing them one by one from under the noses of the authorities, taking them against their will if necessary. Bringing them back here. Preparing them for this moment. Bringing them home.'

  'To the rectory.'

  'Yes. The crash site area holds a residual psychic trace that is beneficial to the Balor entity.'

  'And keeping them in a vegetative state, that was beneficial too?'

  'For the protection of Balor, yes,' snapped Peyne. 'Their primitive minds struggle with the fragments they contain. One of the females had attempted suicide. We cannot risk losing a single part of his essence before we have renewed him.'

  'And that's what all this is about!' The Doctor waved expansively around the library. 'Renewal. Removing all the pieces of Balor back out of the minds of the children that witnessed him crash all those years ago and putting those pieces... in here!' He spun, staring up at the monster that hung before him. 'Putting them back in a great big specially constructed body. A body constructed from psychic projections, from the nightmares.'

  He turned back to Peyne. 'Why? Why go to all the trouble of using the children, eh? Why not just use the memories of Morton and his friends to reconstruct the bod
y of Balor as he was?'

  'We're too old, Doctor, too weak.' Morton sighed. 'I still have some strength, but the others...'

  'Besides,' Peyne said, circling the Doctor slowly, 'why stick to his old form when we could create something so much better? The children of this planet were perfect for our needs. It surprises me that the planet has survived so long. Do you know that they actively encourage their young to make war a game? Their culture is riddled with it. Toy pistols, toy rifles, toy grenades, war comics, action figures that hold knives and swords. Even when they avoid war, the young of this planet are exposed to horror comics, monsters under the bed, bogeymen, vampires and werewolves. Their nursery stories are full of demons and goblins and witches and kidnapped children. They enter the world screaming, and as soon as they can read or listen or learn they are made to scream again and again and again, before they finally realise that they have been lied to all their young lives. We didn't need to influence the minds of these children at all, Doctor, we just needed to harvest their boundless imagination.'

  'Take them young, before they become tainted, is that it?' The Doctor spat the words.

  'Exactly! Have you listened to the adults of this planet, listened to the endless trivia they spout? Mindless, pointless, endless conversations about nothing. They lose everything that they have as children, ground down by the reality of the world they have created. But catch them young –' Peyne turned to the creature, arms stretched wide – 'and see what they are capable of creating.'

  'So you scour their dreams, sifting through their nightmares and taking the parts that suit your purpose. To create this. The ultimate body.'

  'Precisely. In a few hours we will have attained full solidity, a fully functioning creature. And when it is filled with the mind of Balor...' Peyne stopped, her eyes shining with anticipation, before concluding triumphantly, 'then you will see what nightmares are really about.'

  The Doctor grasped the arms of Morton's chair. 'Nathaniel, you must stop this. The Cynrog are using you. If they extract the creature from you and the others and put it inside this abomination, then nothing will stand in their way. They will be unstoppable.'

  'But I want to be free of this, Doctor. Don't you see! I don't want this thing inside my head any more. I want my life back.'

  'What life?' The Doctor shook his head. 'I'm sorry for you, Nathaniel, I really am, but your life has gone by. That's unfair, that's cruel, but it's the truth. You and the others have suffered more than you should have done, but you must end this, for all of you, before it's too late. You're eighty years old. You can't get your life back.'

  'But I can, Doctor, that's the point...'

  The Doctor stepped back from the wheelchair, eyes narrowing. 'What has she promised you, Nathaniel?'

  'Renewal, Doctor. Not just for Balor, but for seven children whose lives he took. The life that was taken from us. That we deserve to have.'

  'Impossible.'

  'Not impossible, Doctor.' Peyne was smiling unpleasantly. 'Our machinery is capable of extracting more than just unconscious mental energy.'

  'Your machinery is capable of doing lots of unpleasant things. You might be able to create an artificial life form with your psychomorphic generators, but you can't renew living tissue with it.'

  'Very true.'

  'That can only be done by extracting the life force.'

  Peyne merely smiled.

  The Doctor turned back to Morton in disgust. 'You can't condone this. Killing all those children just to save your own life?'

  Morton stared, his jaw working silently, horror in his eyes. 'Peyne...'

  'You didn't tell him, did you, Peyne?' The Doctor was shaking with rage. 'You didn't bother to fill him in on that particular little detail, did you? The body you are creating for Balor can be constructed from the children's imaginations, but renewing Morton and his friends, that can only be done by extracting the life force from the very same children. You can give him back his youth all right, but at the cost of the life of every child in this village!'

  Morton slumped back in his chair. 'Dear God, no . . .'

  The Doctor lunged forward at Peyne, but the gun in her hand swung up, pointing straight at the Doctor's face.

  'You think I care for the lives of a few primitive children? Yes, it amuses me to give Morton his pitiful life back. He will have precious little time to come to terms with the cost of that new life before Balor destroys his world.'

  A masked Cynrog technician appeared at the doorway of the library.

  'Priest Commander, Technician Hadron reports that the machine is recalibrated and ready to activate on your command.'

  'Excellent!' Peyne's smile widened. 'Now, Doctor, we shall finish this. The nightmares of a Time Lord will be added to those of the children and our creature will be complete. Balor has lain dormant for too long in the minds of these ungrateful savages. Our holy war still rages, and with Balor the Destroyer at our head once more victory is certain. Tonight Balor will awaken and the Cynrog will be triumphant!'

  THIRTEEN

  Rose pushed open the door of the ramshackle beach hut and looked cautiously around the dark and cluttered room.

  'Miss Ceredig? Bronwyn?'

  There was a sniff from the gloom.

  'What is it? What do you want?'

  'The Doctor sent me. We need your help.'

  A dim light snapped on and Bronwyn's dishevelled head poked out from behind a battered old armchair. It looked to Rose as though she had been crying.

  Ali peered from around the back of Rose's legs.

  'Is that a duck?'

  Before Rose could stop her, Ali had crossed to the sofa, perched herself on the arm and reached out a tentative hand to the imperious-looking mallard that sat there.

  Bronwyn's face softened. 'His name is Butch.'

  'Butch?' Ali gave her a curious look. 'That's a funny name for a duck.'

  'He's a guard duck. Looks after my house when I'm out feeding the seals.'

  Rose crossed to her side. 'I'm sorry to barge in, but the Doctor said you'd be able to help us.'

  Bronwyn shuffled uncomfortably. 'Don't know what help I can be. Old woman like me...'

  'We've been seeing things, me and the Doctor. Not just creatures, but a little boy.'

  'Please, I don't know.

  'This little boy –' Rose took the picture from her pocket – 'is his name Jimmy?'

  As Bronwyn took the picture, tears started to roll down her cheeks. 'Yes. My Jimmy...'

  'Your son?'

  Bronwyn nodded.

  Rose squeezed the old woman's arm. 'It's all right. You can trust me. We want to help.'

  'It was my fault. I didn't want them to take him. But they made me give him up. I couldn't stop them...'

  'Who took him? Where?'

  'The child protection people. They thought I was no good for him.' Bronwyn was shaking with anger and fear. 'They took him away from me once and now he's come back.' She looked at Rose with despair in her eyes. 'Nathaniel is making him come back.'

  'Ow!'

  The Doctor winced as the Cynrog technician pulled the straps tight around his arms.

  'Careful. I'm delicate, you know.'

  The technician snarled at him and scurried away. The Doctor slumped back on to the hard bed. All around him the Cynrog were in a flurry of activity. They had abandoned their human disguises now, leaving a pile of human faces on a table. Peyne had been whipping them into a frenzy and they knew that their mission was nearly over. It was making them excitable and it was making them vicious.

  They had dragged the Doctor and Morton from the library, carrying the old man bodily down the stairs and strapping him to one of the empty beds in the ward. The Doctor had had his coat and jacket removed and had been put in the bed next to him. Cynrog medical devices were strapped to both their foreheads and an intravenous drip had been thrust cruelly into the Doctor's arm. Two technicians were fussing with the connections from Morton's headset, while the old man struggled weakly.
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br />   The Doctor felt a pang of sorrow for the man. He had been strung along for years by Peyne and her colleagues, promised a new life for him and his friends, and now he was just a commodity, his use to the Cynrog nearly over.

  The Doctor took a deep breath, preparing himself for the ordeal that was about to come. He hoped that his reasoning was correct with regard to the nature of the Cynrog machines. If he was wrong...

  Priest Commander Peyne strode across to his bedside. She was now dressed in battle fatigues, her disrupter slung at her side.

  'Ah, Miss Peyne!' The Doctor raised his head from the pillow. 'Slipped into something a bit more uncomfortable, I see. Eager to rejoin the war, I suppose.'

  'The fleet is awaiting our signal. As soon as Balor has taken control of his body, we shall conduct our first battlefield test...'

  'You can't unleash him on this planet, Peyne.'

  She shrugged. An unworthy target, I agree, but it will have to serve.'

  'That's not what I meant. There are billions of people here...'

  'Then billions will die! The last of the Time Lords among them.' She leaned close, teeth bared. 'I hope that thought gives you nightmares, Doctor.' Then she straightened up and crossed to her technicians.

  Activate the transmitters. Full power.'

  Cynrog hunched over their consoles, hands dancing over the controls. A low hum of power started to build in pitch. The Doctor felt the bands around his head crackle with power.

  'Peyne, it's not too late,' he said through gritted teeth.

  'But it is, Doctor. Far too late.'

  Her hand slammed down on the controls.

  The Doctor felt himself lift from the body strapped to the bed. Images from his past threatened to overwhelm him, memories he had fought to keep buried, memories of the time war, of the peoples he had sworn to protect. He struggled to maintain control over his thoughts and dreams, focusing his mind. The Cynrog machinery was operating on a similar frequency to the TARDIS telepathic circuits; the fact that Rose's dreams had been affected while they were still in flight proved that. His own link to the TARDIS meant that he should be able to use that power, channel it, turn it back on itself...