Doctor Who BBCN08 - The Feast of the Drowned

by Doctor Who

  ‘I remember you saying something like that.’

  ‘Brain – 70 per cent water. Lungs – almost 90 per cent water. Blood

  – 83 per cent. Your cells are full of the stuff.’

  94

  ‘H2Omigod,’ said Rose, a tingle running through her. ‘Those soldiers, Mickey, the newsagent – all just dehydrating whenever a “ghost”

  comes near. That’s how these things project themselves.’

  ‘I’m going to ignore the “you humans” bit,’ Vida announced, as she passed the Doctor the promised phial and syringes. ‘And I’d like to ignore that stuff about hydrogen fusion you spouted. But with two atoms of hydrogen available in every water molecule, that’s a lot of potential for “anti-cellularisation”.’

  ‘You’re right there.’

  ‘Incredible to think that an alien life form can adapt to take such advantage of its environment. . . ’ Vida buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Oh, God, listen to me. I’m starting to swallow this whole mad story.’

  ‘Well, water’s generally easy to swallow,’ said the Doctor, breaking the syringe from its plastic wrapper. ‘Must be why they say drowning’s a good way to go.’

  ‘Could that tie in with this stuff about the feast of the drowned, then?’ Rose ventured. They’ve swallowed this stuff in the water?’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘Hang on, though, how come you think it might have got into Keisha?’

  The Doctor raised one shoulder. ‘Just a hunch. It’s probably in your blood too, of course. Come on, roll up your sleeve. Let’s have a splash of the old red stuff.’

  ‘Oh, nice.’ Rose felt a buzz against her hip. ‘Saved by the SMS.

  Hang on.’ She pulled out her phone. ‘Mickey’s outside with Keisha.

  Waiting to be let in.’

  The Doctor turned to his beaker of water. ‘I wonder how long this force has been waiting in the North Sea. . . and what decided it to let itself in now.’ He looked up at her. ‘Just what does it want?’

  Rose nodded slowly. ‘And how long have we got to stop it?’

  95

  Mickey sat spinning himself round in a swivel chair in the boss’s office, half a mug of cold coffee in his hands. Rose had perched herself on the edge of a desk, and was looking out of the window at the dark street below.

  ‘Listen to those sirens,’ she said, as the sound carried distantly.

  ‘They’ve been going all night.’ Mickey rubbed his eyes. ‘And so have we. You look knackered.’

  ‘Thanks!’ Rose retorted with a smile.

  ‘It’s a shame, though, isn’t it?’ He stopped swivelling long enough to look at her. ‘We only ever get to spend a bit of time together when weird stuff is going on.’

  She got up from the desk, changed the subject. ‘I feel useless, just sitting here.’

  ‘How d’you think I feel? All I’m good for is playing chauffeur for your mate!’

  As soon as they had turned up, the Doctor had whisked Keisha off for ‘tests’. He’d already taken a bit of blood from Rose. Now he cracked open a new syringe with an apologetic smile. ‘There’s a sugar cube in it for you, Keisha.’

  97

  ‘What’re you gonna do?’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m a Doctor.’

  Mickey had made a quick getaway at that point. Found his way to the staff kitchen and the coffee supplies, and a quiet office where he could drink a cup. And happily, Rose had decided to join him.

  ‘Maybe we should go out looking for Anne,’ Mickey suggested.

  ‘I don’t think we stand a big chance of finding her.’

  ‘We don’t know that, do we?’

  She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I feel bad about it too, you know.’

  Mickey looked away. ‘Wasn’t you who let her go, was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. You were sick.’ She pointed to his coffee. ‘And you shouldn’t be drinking that. It makes you wee more, and you’re trying to put water back.’

  ‘Can’t do anything right tonight, can I?’

  ‘Cheer up.’ She crossed back to the window. ‘Long way to go till this night’s over.’

  Just then the door opened and in came Vida Swann. Mickey had met her briefly on his way in. She was proper fit for an older woman, though right now she was looking as worn and crumpled as the lab coat she wore. One sleeve was rolled up, and she was dabbing at her arm with a piece of cotton wool.

  ‘Spiked you too, did he?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘I’m the control, apparently.’ She yawned. ‘The Doctor says you’re good with computers, Mickey.’

  He brightened a little. ‘I’m not bad.’

  ‘Says you have experience of military websites.’

  He couldn’t help a small smile. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Why are you asking about computers?’ Rose wondered. ‘The Doctor wants me to trawl through naval personnel records for the crew of the Ascendant,’ Vida explained. ‘To see if they had anything in com-mon, some link that might mark them out.’

  ‘That could take ages,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Which is why the Doctor said you’d help me.’ Vida sat at the next desk, in front of a flash-looking computer. It chimed loudly as it was 98

  stirred into start-up. ‘I’ve got limited access to certain areas of the site, but we need to get into the service files.’

  He nodded, started up the computer in front of him. ‘Yeah, OK.

  Should be cool.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice for you two,’ said Rose, heading towards the door.

  ‘You could give us a hand,’ Mickey suggested.

  She turned and smiled at him sweetly. ‘Make some more coffee for you, maybe?’

  He grinned.’ If you’re offering. . . ’

  ‘I’ll see ya.’ Rose waved goodbye and out she went.

  Mickey watched her go, sighed, and got to work, Rose found the Doctor was shining a torch thing into Keisha’s eyes.

  Keisha was sat on a stool looking nervous; the small mountain of chemistry equipment on the bench beside her couldn’t be helping.

  ‘Dr Frankenstein, is it?’ Rose said.

  ‘Nah, just a talented amateur,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Though you should see what I’ve been doing with that water sample.’ He put on a spooky, mad-scientist voice. ‘It’s alive!’

  ‘Am I gonna live, then?’ Keisha asked, reminding him of her existence through a forced smile.

  The Doctor looked over at Rose. ‘You know, it’s just as I thought.

  Like you, she’s got alien matter in her blood.’

  Keisha frowned. ‘ What?’

  ‘Shh,’ the Doctor told her, and turned back to Rose. ‘She’s got little specks of white in her eyes, too. Very odd.’

  ‘ She has a name, you know.’ Rose rushed over and crouched beside Keisha, held her hand. ‘Your bedside manner stinks.’

  Keisha looked anxiously at her friend. ‘What’s he on about, aliens?

  He’s saying there’s stuff inside me, even in my eyes!’

  The Doctor pouted. ‘And you know, I’ve seen something like it before.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In oysters.’

  ‘He’s barking!’ Keisha complained.

  99

  ‘Shhh,’ the Doctor said again. ‘An oyster doesn’t make a pearl for fun, you know. It happens when it’s in pain. It sometimes gets a bit of dirt or whatever stuck between its mantle and its shell, like you might get a splinter in your finger. But because oysters aren’t so good with tweezers, they try to bury it, stop it hurting. Secrete this stuff that hardens over the splinter, layer after layer.’ He nodded. ‘We’re starting to see something similar here.’

  ‘You saying my eyes are turning into pearls?’

  ‘Only that there’s been some trauma in the area of the optic nerve and your body – tanked up with the weird alien proteins in your blood

  – is trying to soothe it, to cover it up.’ He gave her a steady look. ‘But if given the chance, the effect can get
out of control. So you have to stop believing in that vision of Jay.’

  Keisha reacted as if she’d been slapped. ‘What are you on about? I must get to him.’

  He took both of her hands, tenderly. ‘No, Keisha, you mustn’t. Because it’s not Jay.’

  ‘It is!’ She snatched her hands away, looked imploringly at Rose.

  ‘What’s he on about?’

  ‘I imagine it’s gone to work on your brain cells too, making you more susceptible to suggestion,’ the Doctor concluded. ‘Hard to tell for sure without taking a sample from the brain stem.’

  ‘Get off me!’ Keish jumped up, and her chair went clattering across the shiny floor.

  ‘Go easy on her, Doctor.’

  So the Doctor marched up to Rose instead, and shone his torch in her eye. ‘Hmm, thought so. We’ve got the same process going on here. . . though the damage is less advanced.’ He patted her on the shoulder, consolingly. ‘The alien cells are loads more concentrated in Keisha. She’s awash with the stuff.’

  ‘Are you trying to scare me on purpose?’ said Keisha.

  ‘I imagine it’s because her feelings for Jay run so much deeper than yours, Rose. Must make it easier for the stuff to get into her body chemistry.’ He smiled, a blown-away sort of smile. ‘They say you can’t measure emotions with science. Well, this stuff makes it easy! Your 100

  two samples give us a chemical measure of the difference between heartbreak and mild regret. Isn’t that amazing? It’s wonderful!’

  Rose felt Keisha’s eyes on her and blushed. ‘I don’t just feel mild regret about Jay, Doctor!’

  ‘The proof’s in your blood,’ he said, oblivious to her embarrassment.

  ‘What worries me is the way it got there. Airborne infection? Mental projection? And then there’s the other big question. Those soldiers on the bridge got drunk dry when there was a whole river underneath them going begging. Why?’ He gasped. Then sucked in his cheeks.

  Then blew out a deep breath and clicked his fingers. ‘Mental and airborne! This is about pheromones. Pheromones taken to the max!’

  ‘We bunked off science, OK?’

  ‘Pheromones – a kind of communication through chemicals,’ he explained. ‘Little airborne signals just waiting for the right receivers.

  Did you know a male moth can detect the spray of a ripe lady moth up to a mile away. He gets the signal, drops whatever he’s doing and goes off to chat her up.’

  ‘I’m so happy for Mr and Mrs Moth. What are you on about?’

  ‘These water-based life forms can dip into the human body and brain, right? You two are living proof of that.’ He glanced at Keisha.

  ‘And when Jay appeared to you, you saw him just as he used to be.

  You believed absolutely it was him, despite all the evidence screaming that it couldn’t be.’

  ‘It was him,’ Keisha insisted, her voice wavering.

  ‘And yet Mickey, who’s never met Jay, couldn’t see him at all.’ He looked at Rose. ‘Just as we couldn’t see Anne’s son on the bridge, when to her he was clear as day.’

  Rose sighed. ‘Go on, then, Sherlock. What’s this got to do with pheromones?’

  ‘What if these water-creatures collected sensory information from Jay, about himself and the people that lived In his memory, and exported it?’

  ‘What, you mean like opening a computer file and saving it as something else so another program can read it?’

  ‘Exactly.

  They exported it as a bundle of alien pheromones –101

  Essence of Jay, from Calvin Klein – and transmitted it through human cell-water.’ He laughed, shook his head in wonderment. ‘Alien pheromones that can pass through aquatic molecules like nobody’s business. Water in the body, in the breath, in the air. . . Passing at the speed of thought from person to person to person, through villages, towns and cities. . . ’

  ‘Like those filaments in Vida’s chemical tracers,’ Rose realised,

  ‘spreading and circulating through the ocean. . . ’

  ‘An ocean of humanity,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Carrying information you can trace – or weapons you can trigger. And these creatures trigger their weapon when they finally find someone they recognise from Jay’s memory, someone who responds to the pheromones. With a chemical push, they help the victim make sense of the signals to create the apparition and – wallop! You’re a believer. You’re caught. Easy when you know how.’

  Rose struggled to take it in. ‘Doesn’t sound the easiest way to catch someone.’

  ‘Spinning a web looks complicated to anyone other than the spider,’

  he retorted. ‘A spider just gets on with it, because it’s what a spider does.’

  ‘But the power they’d need to do that. . . ’

  ‘Makes them very, very dangerous.’ The Doctor clicked his tongue.

  ‘Cheer up. It’s all guesswork, I could be totally wrong. Who cares?

  Doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. What does matter is –why? Why reel in the crew’s loved ones like this?’

  ‘Will you just shut up?’ Keisha stared at him, her eyes big and shiny with tears. ‘You make it all sound like. . . like it’s just a stupid cross-word clue or something! Jay’s in trouble, he needs me. My mum’s seen him too, and when she gets here. . . ’

  ‘Your mum’s coming?’ The Doctor rounded on her. ‘You said back at your flat that she wouldn’t care if he was dead, that she’d abandoned you.’

  ‘Well, I was wrong! She’s coming over tomorrow. She told me.’

  ‘Must have been a bit of a shock, hearing from her after so long.’ He glanced back at Rose. ‘Probably saved her life, a jolt to the conscious-102

  ness like that. Her natural emotions overcame the exaggerated ones stirred up by the pheromones. But even now they’re starting to take control again.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Keisha shouted. ‘We’re gonna be a family again. Me, Jay, Mum. All of us.’ Her face twisting with tears, she turned and stormed out of the lab.

  Rose began to follow her, but the Doctor grabbed hold of her arm.

  ‘You see? She can’t think straight. That alien stuff won’t let her. She’ll go on believing what it wants her to until it’s too late.’

  ‘She’s still my mate. I’d better see if she’s all right.’ She paused.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to keep testing that water. . . I’m going to see if Vida and Mickey dig up something on the crew. . . ’ He unrolled a large sheet of paper on one of the lab benches. ‘And I think I’d better take a look at Vida’s plans of the underground citadel.’

  Rose raised her eyebrows. ‘What are you looking for?’

  He gave her his craftiest, most feline grin. ‘A back door.’

  ‘Happy hunting, then.’ She waved and went off after Keisha. But on her way out she noticed a small puddle on the tiled floor. For a moment her heart skipped. Then she looked up and saw a discoloured patch on a ceiling tile. A little bead of water dripped down from it.

  She blew out a shaky breath. What was she like? It was just a leaky pipe or something.

  As she went off after Keisha, she didn’t see the puddle swell and bubble out from the tiles and start to flow inside the lab.

  The screen was blurring in front of Vida’s eyes, and she forced herself to concentrate. It was late, and the day seemed to have gone on for ever. She wished she was somewhere else, far away and sunny, doing the things it was fun to stay up all night doing. But not sleeping.

  She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to fall asleep again, now she knew what waited in the dark.

  The bottom had fallen out of her life. She had told the Doctor just about every secret she knew, even shown him the new transmitting tracers which only a handful of people were supposed to know about.

  103

  The Doctor had grinned and called them quaint. Vida felt like calling him one or two words too.

  She was hanging out for a hug right now. Where the he
ll was Andrew?

  ‘Found anything weird yet?’ asked Mickey through a yawn.

  ‘Apart from the way I’m sitting here with a complete stranger riffling through confidential files for clues as to why an alien intelligence might have sunk a frigate? No.’

  ‘Only asking,’ he muttered.

  ‘A vice admiral is showing up in a few hours. If Andrew doesn’t put in an appearance soon – he’s my boss – I’ll have to go solo and. . . ’

  She slumped forwards, pushing her head against the cool glass of the monitor screen. ‘What do I tell him? What the hell do I tell him? He’s been putting all the secrecy around the wreck down to some internal cover-up, trying to stop high-up heads rolling.’

  ‘Tell him the truth – that it’s down to aliens.’

  ‘It’s one thing finding unidentified organisms in sea water. It’s another finding them in the bodies of senior naval personnel.’ She raised her head wearily. ‘Besides, Crayshaw would rip a story like that into pieces, and I’d soon follow.’

  ‘Crayshaw.’ Mickey flung his arms out in a big stretch. ‘He’s the big man, calling the shots, yeah?’

  ‘Skinny little man, more like.’ Vida clicked on her fiftieth file – soon to be, she was sure, her fiftieth dead-end. ‘Rear Admiral John Anthony Crayshaw. What about him?’

  ‘Bit past it, don’t you reckon? Who put him in charge?’

  ‘Good question.’ Vida shrugged. ‘We made some inquiries, trying to go above his head. But no one seemed quite sure how he was selected. We were referred to a Commodore Powers, who was meant to be handling the inquiry into the Ascendant, but he never got back to us. Suppose he deferred to the higher rank.’

  Mickey sat up straighter in his seat. ‘That’s Commodore James Powers, age forty-five, on the Directorate of Navy Plans at Whitehall, yeah?’

  104

  ‘Yeah. He’s responsible for deploying those soldiers around Stanchion House, securing the area around the wreck.’ Vida looked over to his desk. ‘Why have you brought his file up?’

  ‘Why not? We’re getting nowhere with the small fry, may as well check out the big geezers.’ His lips moved a little as he read. Then he frowned. ‘Wonder if this is why they chose Powers for the job. He was on a tub that went down in the North Sea too.’