'Perhaps just a little florid,' he murmured, as the line moved forward again towards the entrance to the rollercoaster.
Kevin flinched instinctively as the Inspector leaned forward to emphasise his next point.
'... and my colleagues in the Uniformed Branch tell me they've organised better than a dozen additional foot patrols over the past three months on the basis of your... information.' He stabbed the air with his forefinger and then seemed to pull himself back. 'Now, that's a helluva lot of extra Police time, and they found precisely... nothing.'
'There was nothing going on the nights those coppers were out,' protested Kevin, rather unnecessarily.
'Nothing at all,' agreed the Inspector. 'No flashing lights, no Mandarins, no jolly red giants. What d'you reckon they do? Snap their fingers and disappear the minute they see our boys, or look into a crystal ball and see us coming before we know ourselves?'
Kevin was about to guess which one, but the Inspector stopped him with a very hard look.
'You were warned off making any more reports of sighting your brother at that fair. We are not a missing persons bureau. Your brother is over sixteen years of age and has committed no crime of which we are aware —'
Again Kevin was about to protest, but the Inspector ploughed on like a battleship in heavy seas.
'You will stop wasting Police time, you will stop reporting flashing lights, Chinese Mandarins, little green men from Mars or great big red ones from anywhere else and if you find yourself even close to that amusement park one more time, I shall take it very personally indeed. So personally I will more than likely lose what remains of my professional detachment and throw the flaming book at you. Do I make myself clear?'
This last was delivered with such a force as to leave no need for clarification whatsoever. Kevin swallowed and rose from his chair. 'Can I go now?'
Truscott sighed and leaned back heavily. 'Aye, you can go. I hope you find your brother, son, I really do. And when you do find him, that's the next and last time I want to see you. All right?'
Kevin, reluctantly, could see that the policeman was not half as hard as he made himself out, and he nodded, tired. 'Aye, all right.' He turned to make towards the door. Truscott stopped him.
'But, lad,' he, offered, in a conversational tone of voice, 'you spot any more of them Red Giants, you send them along to Preston North End. They could do with all the help they can get..
This time he did not rebuke the constable's chortle, and Kevin angrily left to make his own way out, wondering which section of the Inspector's book was going to hit him first.
The blue lacquered fingernail, at least two inches longer than the parent finger, extended like a shiny fossilised snake to press an ivory button set into the desk. With a whisper, a door across the room swung open smoothly, revealing a well built man, bearded and dressed all in black, who strode purposefully towards the Mandarin. He stopped in front of the desk and bowed with practised ease from the waist, awaiting a barely perceptible gesture from the fingernail before speaking.
'My Lord, the spacecraft is like no other we have seen.' The voice was gravelly, dragged reluctantly from the depths of a broad chest, coloured with an accent definitely not British, but round and rich with much travelling. 'In truth, it seems hardly a spacecraft at all, but there is nothing else at the co-ordinates you gave us. I could detect no propulsion units, no aerofoils, no means of access. I have set the barrier around it, as you instructed. Of the occupants, there is no sign..
'We have them, Stefan,' assured the Mandarin softly. 'The bio-data will confirm his identity beyond any shadow of a doubt.'
The elegant hand moved once more to the crystal ball and the picture on the viewing screen swam into focus, the Doctor's face filling it corner to corner. Not one of the Doctor's best poses, it must he said; he was beaming tightly and manically, his eyes wide with anticipation and blinking quickly. The observing lens obeyed the Mandarin's fingers as they made tiny, delicate movements, moving down the Doctor's face, down his neck, across the shoulder and down the arm, to steady on the hands, which were gripping a safety bar tightly. The Mandarin's fingers moved again on the crystal ball and the part of the picture featuring the Doctor's hands started to turn negative, black fingers and black nails gripping a now white bar. The Mandarin leaned forward slightly and spoke in a soft but penetrating whisper.
'Doctor...'
'Yes?' responded the Doctor.
'Yes what?' asked Peri.
'You called me.'
'Called you? I'm sitting right next to you.'
'Excellent.'
Peri looked at him with more than usual puzzlement. Perhaps the strain of this particular stretch of his second, or third, or one-hundred-and-third childhood was getting to him. It was really very difficult coping with a supposedly mature man of very indeterminate age whose natural behaviour mimicked a seven-year-old more often than a seven-hundred-year-old. The train of thought, familiar and unproductive though it was, broke as the car gave a sharp jerk forward.
'Aaagh,' gurgled the Doctor in an ecstasy of anticipation. The rollercoaster ride settled into its smooth, noisy glide away from the platform and the first car immediately began the steep climb towards the sky. Peri settled into a taut, rigid posture as she prepared for the worst. The Doctor had not moved a muscle for the last five minutes, except to refer to a non-existent conversation, but the transfixed posture he had adopted as soon as he'd sat in the car was now, if anything, more pronounced. Perhaps it was something to do with the eyes... the wild, staring eyes...
A groan, starting somewhere near her navel, grew to a full size screech as the car reached its apogee and Peri saw for the first time the scale of the drop before them.
From here she could see the whole amusement park, the promenade, the electric trams trundling along and the cold sea stretching away past the famous Tower towards the far horizon.
At least, she would have seen them easily had she not slammed her eyes shut in the same split second as she saw the rails running down, suicide fashion, in the near-vertical descent.
As the car plummeted earthwards, the screech became a wail became a scream as it floated out far behind them, lost in a moment under the thundering wheels...
Chapter Two
Footsteps echoed mournfully down the empty, dimly lit corridor. Here and there the high-tech alloy construction gave way to bare rock, glistening wetly in the half-light as the corridor stretched away into the distance, with branches and junctions all but hidden in the gloom. The footsteps were halting, dragging, evidence of a limp before their owner even appeared around a corner, making his way slowly towards the airlock style door which terminated the corridor.
The owner of the footsteps looked older than just the years could make him, a heavy exhaustion seeming to make every step more painful than the limp could account for, the shoulder-length grey hair acting as a weight his neck could hardly bear, the deep, long lines in his face looking more like surgical scars than the product of time. He carried, with both hands, a small earthenware pitcher and perhaps it weighed a ton and perhaps it just seemed that way.
Set into the alloy wall of the corridor was an incongruous wood and iron door, standing shut on stout metal strap hinges. A window near the top of the door, covered with thick iron bars, gave viewing access to the room within. The old man stopped and made to open the door when the airlock sprang open with an almost silent 'whoosh' and Stefan stepped through. The old man averted his eyes and reached for the handle to the old wooden door.
'Shardlow,' snapped Stefan. The old man started as though the handle of the door was connected to the electricity supply. He froze. Stefan approached him. The old man seemed rigid with fear. As Stefan stopped by him, he spoke more softly, but in a somehow more threatening way.
'Shouldn't you be looking after dinner, Shardlow?'
'I was just preparing the guest room, sir,' replied Shardlow, in a quiet voice, full of fear.
'We do have other guests, Shardlow. I
imagine they're getting hungry...'
'Yes, sir,' Shardlow half-bowed abjectly and turned from the wooden door towards the airlock. Not quickly enough for Stefan, apparently, for he called, with a whipping edge to his voice:
'And hurry, man! You know how jealous our Lord is of his reputation for hospitality!'
'Yes, sir. Immediately, sir,' and, pathetically, the old man tried to hurry his pace as much as he could, water from the pitcher slopping onto his coarse linen trousers and splashing onto the floor. Stefan laughed, or at least that's how he would have described it. To the old man it was a vicious, evil cackle which he had known, for more time than seemed possible, to be a prelude to pain; or hunger, or humiliation, depending on the mood of the saturnine demon who called himself Stefan...
Kevin thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his windcheater as he hurried through the gigantic wooden arch which acted as the entrance to the amusement park. The place was hardly crowded at this time of year, unlike the high summer months when you could hardly move through the main concourse, and trying to get into any of the rides or booths was more a question of stamina and brute strength than anything else. A good half of the attractions were still boarded up from the winter break, and the litter swept along by the chilly breeze gave a greater feeling of desolation to the place than was strictly warranted. In all, a couple of dozen people were out strolling, most of them well wrapped up, a few rather determinedly eating toffee apples or even candy floss in what struck Kevin as defiant a gesture as he was making himself by simply being there. The warning from Inspector Truscott was still fresh in his mind as he hurried past the ghost train, which was just opening, and past the uniformed police constable chatting to the bored young lady in the ticket kiosk. Kevin had the sense not to pull the collar of the windcheater up around his ears, but it took a conscious effort to beat the instinct all the same.
Instead, he increased his pace and took on a more determined stride as he made towards the spot he had visited the previous night, an almost derelict eyesore patch of tarmac behind the video-game arcade, under the towering shadow of the rollercoaster.
Shardlow's eyes closed in silent relief as he rounded the corner and saw that Stefan was nowhere to be seen. The Mandarin's lieutenant must have better things — well anyway more urgent things — to do, thought the old man, with a murmured prayer of thanks to a deity whose name he had forgotten. Often it would be Stefan's idea of fun to join Shardlow in serving dinner, making barbs, taunts and threats which invariably left the old man a quivering wreck at the end of the experience.
He hefted the heavy pail he was carrying into the other hand and moved towards the first of the doors in the corridor. This too was wooden with a barred window in the top third and, like its companions which lined the sides of this corridor, it also had a metal flap set near the bottom, about a foot across and half as high. Below the flap and at right angles to it, was a metal shelf of about the same size. Shardlow dipped his hand into the bucket he was carrying and pulled out a reeking gobbet of bloody, raw meat, which he carefully placed on the shelf. He tried to take no notice of the hurrying, scuttling noise from behind the door. Carefully, he moved to the side of the door and pulled the peg holding the flap shut out of its retaining hasp. Gingerly he opened the flap upwards, still taking care to keep clear as he did so.
A giant blue-black claw which could only just move through the opening appeared and with a delicate but horrible finality the serrated, razor-sharp edges closed around the meat and drew it inside.
Shardlow waited patiently for a moment, ignoring now the slobbering, tearing sounds from behind the door, then he closed the flap gently, locked it with the peg, and moved on with his pail to the next door.
Nothing, thought Kevin, glumly. An absolute, total, magnificent unbroken record. Zilch. He had come inside the arcade to warm up a bit, his examination of the area outside having proved as fruitless as he thought it would. Why he'd bothered, he didn't know. The spot where he'd heard the screams and come running and seen the receding light was as bare as you'd expect a bare patch of tarmac behind a video arcade to be. Bare.
He looked around, almost curling his lip, settling eventually for a sniff at the dozens of machines crowded into the arcade. Everything, ranging from the original Space Invaders and one-armed bandits to the latest products of the fertile brains of half the best universities in the western hemisphere, was locked into the latest way of whamming and bamming and shooting 'em down. He'd never been able to understand why Geoff had been besotted with them ever since he was tall enough to reach up and feed the coins into the slot. Not that the boy wasn't good... quite the reverse, the boy was terrific. He hadn't been called the VideoKid for nothing. Well, everyone's got to be good at something.
The idle thought was interrupted as a small, middle-aged woman in a thick, and by the looks of it old, brown coat, bumped into him.
'Sorry, hen,' the woman muttered in a Glasgow accent, absently though, as she looked around with obvious concern, this way and that, trying to see around and over the machines blocking her view.
'You havenae seen my — ah, you wouldn't know, would you —' Distracted she carried on her way, with neither Kevin nor anyone else any the wiser as to who or what she was looking for. This issue at least was settled as she called out, very tentatively at first, then more urgently, 'Tyrone...? Are y'there, Tyrone? Tyrone...?'
Tyrone remained unmoved and unmoving as one of the men in the white coats moved away from his side, having fixed another contact disc with electrical wires dangling from it to a spot slightly off-centre on his bare abdomen. Discs were already in place on both his wrists, his forearms, his chest and at two places on his forehead. His unseeing eyes stared straight ahead as another man approached with an opthalmoscope and used it to examine first the eye, and then the blood vessels behind...
The noise from the video arcade could barely be heard as yet another man reached into the kidney dish on a trolley by the examination table and began to prepare a waiting hypodermic syrette...
The deceleration of the car threw the Doctor and Peri heavily against the safety bar in front of them. At least, it did Peri. The Doctor seemed to be cast in pre-stressed concrete, with the obvious exception of the mop of hair, looking as though it had been prepared for a long night at the disco with an inferior brand of gel.
The car drew level to the platform they had left several aeons ago and came to a surprisingly gentle stop. The other passengers, laughing, giggling or looking a paler shade of green dismounted and made their way to the exit. Peri brushed back her hair.
'Phew! That was fun! That was really fun! I'm amazed, I didn't expect to like it one little bit —'
By now she couldn't help noticing that the Doctor had been struck immobile, arms straight out in front, still riveted to the safety bar, eyes wide open, staring manically ahead, mouth firmly shut, teeth clamped together as if with superglue, the whole face set in a frantic, ecstatic beam normally seen only on the visages of winners on a television quiz show.
'Doctor? Doctor?' She placed a hand on his arm. The only response from him was a strangled gargle of a noise. 'Doctor?' she repeated, anxiously now. 'Are you all right?'
There was another of the strained, awful strangling noises, but at least this time the eyes moved, jerkily and only slightly, but they moved. Peri shook his arm gently. The trance, at last, broke. He took in a great breath, a giant breath and finally got the words out.
'I have never, not ever, not in any of my lives... I left at least one of my hearts at the bottom of that last dip — or it might still be at the top of the one before — I have shot through Black Holes, I have sailed through Supernovae, I have eaten Vanarian Sun Seed Cake, but I have never, never, never, never...' He shook his head, unbelieving, and, had Peri not known him better, she would have sworn he was at a loss for words.
'I really enjoyed it,' she announced again, happily.
'Enjoyed it? Enjoyed it?' He nearly exploded with indignation at the paucit
y of such a reaction. 'It was... MAGNIFICENT...'
'Shall we go round again?' asked Peri, in what could pass for an innocent sort of voice.
The Doctor looked at her wildly for a moment, the monumental scale of the suggestion taking him by surprise. 'Again? Yes, yes... again...' The wisdom of the ages came, unbidden to his rescue. 'In a while we will, yes.' And with that he nodded vigorously and started to climb out of the car.
As suddenly as it had started, the chattering of the high-speed printer ceased. Stefan carefully tore off the printed sheet and made his way towards the Mandarin, who was standing, listening attentively to a technician in a white coat who looked distinctly as though he had the better right to the eastern style wardrobe the Mandarin favoured.
Indeed, of the eight or ten technicians in the room, over half were Oriental in origin: Japanese, or Taiwanese, or Korean, it would be hard for the uneducated western eye to tell. They stood or sat or studied against banks of the most sophisticated electronic equipment currently available, and against some which would not yet be available to the public, or industry, or the government, for generations.
Tall cabinets of mainframe computers, squat cabinets of data-analysers, wide cabinets of surveillance monitors, stood in ranks around and across the brightly lit room, needles twitching, lights flashing, digital counters whirring up and down as if giving the cue to the white-coated men in silent dedication, unceasing industry, implacable purpose...
Stefan handed the short sheet of paper to the Mandarin, effecting another of his small, deferential bows as he did so. The Mandarin studied the paper for a moment and a smile broke the hard line of his mouth. Stefan could contain his puzzlement no longer.
'Two hearts, Lord?' he asked. 'Perhaps the equipment...' He looked around the room, unwilling, even unable to suggest that the busy silent monsters which surrounded him could be at fault.
DOCTOR WHO - THE NIGHTMARE FAIR Page 2
