'If there were only one, Stefan, then I should be sadly disappointed.' He turned to one of the technicians with whom he had been talking. 'Match them now, please, Soonking. DNA and RNA profiles.'
The technician adjusted the controls on one of the banks of equipment and monitored its progress closely on a VDU. Around him the machines switched to a different pattern of activity as they moved together on a joint purpose. The left-hand side of the screen filled with the familiar double-helix pattern, over which another gradually took shape. The two moved together and merged into one. The right-hand side of the screen was filled with dozens of multi-digit numbers, whirring up and down faster than could be registered. Eventually they too slowed and came to an agreement.
'A little older, probably no wiser, but certainly the same Time Lord,' pronounced the Mandarin, the thin smile becoming more contented, more final. 'It's good to see you again,' he leaned forward slightly as he breathed in the same deep whisper as before, 'Doctor...'
'Yes?' asked the Doctor.
'Yes what?' replied Peri.
'You did it again!' protested the Doctor. 'Did what?'
'Called my name.'
'I did no such thing!'
A rip-snorter of an argument could have started between them there and then, but the Doctor spun his head round to another direction as he heard the call again. He searched through what passed for the crowd outside the entrance to the rollercoaster ride, looking for the person who was so obviously trying to engage his attention. The direction kept changing, though, and for several moments he was confused and disorientated, swinging this way and that. To anyone not privy to his private call-line, such as Peri, his behaviour was odd even by his own highly individual standards.
'What?' he asked out loud, to no one in particular, 'Who is it? Who's there?'
'Are you all right?' asked Peri, more because she thought someone should than in the hope of any positive answer. The Doctor was very obviously not all right at all. He spun round again, to face yet another direction. 'Perhaps that ride shook you up?' she asked, hopefully.
'It's a man's voice,' he announced with surprise and something approaching pleasure, as though the question of gender had been plaguing him for most of his life. 'Stupid of me, but it's clearer now.'
'What man?' asked Peri doubtfully, looking around at dozens of men in view, walking through the thin Springtime sunshine. But the Doctor either didn't hear her, or didn't know, for he was off and walking quickly as he cocked his head this way and that, trying to follow the Sirens' call that only he could hear.
Peri had no option but to follow him, which became more difficult than it seemed as his pace quickened. They half-walked, half-ran up the main concourse, past the dodgem ride, past the ghost train, past all the hoopla stalls and the hall of mirrors, the ever-laughing wooden drunken sailor swaying and cackling as they passed in such a positive and nasty fashion that Peri did a double-take at him — it was as if the sailor knew something they didn't... Until at last, the Doctor's pace slowed and he looked with anticipation tinged with suspicion at the low profile ahead of the video arcade...
'He was right by me!' protested the Scotswoman. 'I just went up to get some change from yon Jimmy up there.' She gestured rather wildly in the direction of a surly youth in the change booth, who looked distinctly uncomfortable at the thought of any attention whatsoever coming his way. 'And then when I turned round, he'd just gone!'
Kevin had by now managed to edge his way unobtrusively closer to the woman, through the small knot of people who had gathered. If the story wasn't the same as his own, it at least involved a boy who had gone missing in very close proximity to an area which he knew had more than one secret to hide.
'Look, love,' replied the manager in a heavy Liverpudlian accent, 'we get all kindsa kids in 'ere. If they're under sixteen and unaccompanied, out they go.' Kevin looked sceptically at the half-dozen or so kids under sixteen in the arcade at that moment, and saw no rush of adults to claim them. 'He could have said he was with his ma, couldn't he?' continued the manager in his thin whine.
'He wouldnae just go wanderin',' announced the woman positively. 'He's daft, but he's no' that daft.'
The Doctor apologised to Kevin as he bumped into him, edging closer to the woman and the manager. 'There's something wrong here,' he muttered to Peri in a fierce whisper. Kevin's face registered interest at the remark made immediately behind him.
'That poor lady's lost her child, that's what's wrong,' protested Peri vehemently.
'No, something else,' insisted the Doctor, 'the whole place... the whole feel of it...'
The Doctor certainly had Kevin's undivided attention.
'Are you turning psychic or something?' asked Peri, with approaching alarm. She didn't want to cope with the problems of a fifth dimension. She'd not really got used to the idea of a fourth.
'Psychic?' the Doctor was taken aback. 'You don't turn psychic. You either are or you aren't. Unfortunately, I aren't, not much anyway,' he finished, matter-of-factly.
The metaphysical dimension of the conversation was brought to an abrupt end by the piercing shriek of the Scottish woman, who pushed her way through the crowd towards the pasty-faced youth standing, or rather swaying, at the ehtrance to the arcade.
'Tyrone! Where have you been? I've been goin' nearly mental!'
Tyrone couldn't, or wouldn't, reply. He just shook his head slightly and had about him the distinct air of one who knows that in the very near future he's going to be violently and most thoroughly sick. Mum had leapt to the same conclusion, familiar as she undoubtedly was with her pale offspring.
'It's all them toffee apples,' she howled. 'That an' all them fizzy drinks... and this place...' She glared again at the manager, who shrugged as he must have shrugged a couple of million times before.
'Come on, son, let's get ye home. Och, yer dad's goin' tae be that mad.' This last seemed little to improve Tyrone's condition, and with a last baleful glare at the manager the woman ushered her son outside, presumably back to the vengeful clans mustering even now.
'Well that's all right, then,' pronounced Peri, happily certain that all was well with the world. The Doctor seemed to be of an entirely different opinion, for he was not listening, not to Peri at any rate. Again he was turning his head, this way and that. And again Peri was both concerned and exasperated. Kevin, on the other hand, seemed even more interested than before and as unobtrusively as he could, watched the Doctor intently.
The Doctor swung on Peri sharply. 'You didn't hear that?' he demanded, a very direct question, as though he was conducting an experiment in a laboratory.
'Hear what?' asked Peri, helplessly.
'Someone calling my name.'
'No, nothing.'
'Right, not a loudspeaker then,' he announced with quiet satisfaction. 'A psi broadcast?' he asked, in a reasonable tone of voice, and answered himself just as reasonably, 'No, impossibly narrow band... Old-fashioned telepathy then. But so clear, so direct, so... expert —' He might have continued this quite antisocial one-way conversation for hours had not he heard the voice again; for he was off at speed, calling out to Peri as he swept off. 'Come on!'
She had little choice but to follow him, and Kevin, who had all the choice in the world, hurried out after both of them.
If it had not been for the sense of purpose and the positive directions he was taking, the Doctor's dogged following of the audio scent would have looked distinctly odd. As it was, it looked only slightly odd. Again, he veered this way and that as he picked up a stronger whiff from one direction than another, sometimes spinning around to take a different tack altogether, stopping to verify a change of direction before pursuing it with even more vigour than before. By now the suspicious look on his face had deepened and passed, as he became more and more sure that he was being led. For the moment, until this particular mystery was solved, he was happy to fall in with whoever was directing his movements. The simple conundrum of how this effect was being achieved was eno
ugh to keep him reasonably interested. He had time to reflect, however, that if it went on for much longer he would become extremely irritated, which, as the whole Universe would witness, was wholly foreign to his even-tempered nature...
Peri was already irritated enough. Following the Doctor was, after all, more a way of life than a mere physical proximity, but this particular gadfly journey was making her dizzy. She stopped herself several times from calling out to him. What, after all, would she say? Not, 'Stop'. Not 'What are you doing?' She'd tried them all, and they none of them worked, not at times like this.
Kevin was following them both as he might have followed expert archaeologists if he were looking for a city he had lost. These two were the first characters he'd come across in months who behaved even more oddly than he did in the funfair. They were on to something, or they were part of something, which didn't fit in. And the only other thing that didn't fit in to this particular funfair was the disappearance of his brother. Put it together and there was a more than even chance that the two oddities were connected. He stopped short to avoid bumping into Peri, who had stopped short to avoid bumping into the Doctor, who had stopped short with an air of finality to look up at a looming, sinister shape before him.
Towering into the sky, in the shape of an almost life-size rocket was the latest ride at the fair — 'Space Mountain' was emblazoned across the hull, which was the front for the body of the ride behind. Giant tail-fins stretched twenty, thirty feet up, then the sleek needle shape carried on another hundred feet above that.
With a caution born of near certainty, the Doctor made his way slowly towards the entrance hatch, approached by a metal ramp up to the ticket office. As he disappeared into the hull of the spacecraft, Peri hurried after him, and Kevin after her.
The picture on the wall remained as Kevin went hesitantly inside the spaceship hull, and then faded as the Mandarin turned off the VDU. He turned to Stefan, a look of disappointment on his face.'This is almost too easy. Time has done nothing to sharpen his wits after all.'
'You know him, Lord?' asked Stefan, unsure he understood.
'Oh yes, Stefan,' smiled the Mandarin. 'The Doctor and I are old friends.'
'I shall prepare to greet him, Lord.'
The Mandarin turned to him and smiled broadly. 'Do that, Stefan. Make everything ready. I have waited centuries for this...'
Chapter Three
Inside the spacecraft was a steep ramp with guardrails, turning back on itself several times to provide a series of Z ramps up into the bowels of the ride. The lighting was bright and efficient, echoing the theme of the spaceship outside, grey-painted aluminum walls, shiny metal porthole fittings and simulated computer displays flashing like a manic fruit machine paying out jackpots only.
The Doctor stopped at the top of the first ramp, before it made its turn. 'Not very popular, is it?' he remarked idly. They were the only ones in view, neither of them having noticed Kevin hovering below.
'It's hardly the high season,' pointed out Peri.
'Still, you'd expect —'
He broke off as a couple of teenagers entered at a run and raced past them, giggling, up into the ride. The Doctor shrugged.
'I never did enjoy paranoia very much, anyway.' He continued up the ramp. 'Unlike most of my contemporaries, for whom it's a raison d'etre...' He stopped and cocked his head to one side.
'Can you still hear it?' asked Peri, in a whisper.
'Not now.' The Doctor shook his head and pursed
his lips, then slowly trudged his way up the next ramp. 'What sort of voice is it?' asked Peri.
'Siren song, I suppose. Male or female, I can't tell. Maybe I should lash myself to the mast, just to be on the safe side.' He smiled thinly at the thought.
'Where does it come from, this voice?'
'That is rather what I'm trying to discover,' he replied, not quite gritting his teeth.
'But where... I mean, exactly where was the last call coming from? Direction? Distance?'
They had rounded the last corner and the platform for the ride lay before them. It was rather like a mini version of an Underground Station platform, a tube tunnel with a single platform on one side and two sets of circular doors blocking off the rest of the line at each end. The platform was now quite crowded, thirty or forty people waiting for the next ride, a shiny set of guardrails keeping them back from the platform's edge.
'Just about where we're standing, I'd say,' the Doctor replied, casually. Too casually for Peri's taste, and she looked nervously around her.
'See anything?' she asked, somewhat unnecessarily.
'I'm not looking that hard,' confessed the Doctor, although he, like Peri, was looking around all the time. By now people were pushing past them from behind, and they were both feeling distinctly in the way.
'Nothing else for it, I suppose,' shrugged the Doctor, and they both made their way to the ticket booth at the barrier to the ride.
With a smash and a clatter, the doors at one end of the tunnel burst open and the train arrived, fitting the platform exactly and pulling up to a sharp halt. More alert now than ever, the Doctor looked around, examining the disembarking passengers carefully. They were exactly what might be expected from a fairground ride, indeed they could have been the same crowd who had shared the rollercoaster with him, and some of them were. None, however, looked sinister or even familiar, so the Doctor shrugged to Peri once more, then moved off to spend the last of Jamie's hardwon cash on a couple of tickets. There was no reason in the world for them to take any notice at all of Kevin, as he dug in his pocket to do the same...
'We're being followed,' muttered the Doctor as he and Peri moved off to join the waiting crowd, who were edging forward impatiently now as the train was being cleared of its previous passengers.
'Who by?' asked Peri, ungrammatically, but most succinctly.
'The young gentleman behind you,' replied the Doctor, softly, and then he squeezed her arm tightly in time to stop her looking round. 'Don't look round,' he told her, in case she'd missed the point. Kevin was forced to stand right next to her as the latecomers behind him pushed forward, then the Doctor's head snapped round to the tunnel entrance as he obviously heard the voice again. Involuntarily, he took a couple of strides forward, straining to identify the voice, or the direction, or both.
Peri was about to start after him when the ride attendant, seeing what he thought was a matched pair in Peri and Kevin, ushered them both into the waiting car, taking Peri's weak protest as a sign of typical feminine nerves. Women's Lib had not yet reached the inner fringes of Blackpool funfair society... Anyway, there was nothing much for Peri to protest at, just a mildly self-conscious move across the seat away from Kevin as the attendant pulled the safety bar across their laps.
The Doctor looked around, seemingly disorientated by the fierce concentration necessary for his audial search, and he made to join Peri — there was plenty of room on the seat with Kevin, but at that moment a harsh warning buzzer sounded and the train started to move off.
'But —' said the Doctor, helplessly, watching Peri turn desperately in her seat to look at him.
'Too late, mate,' said the attendant, laconically and almost prophetically and before the Doctor could frame a suitable reply, the voice came again.
'Doctor...'
He looked around wildly and then saw Peri looking at him just as wildly before she vanished through the double doors and into the black tunnel of the ride proper.
The ride boss, a more mature version of the laconic youth now approached the Doctor.
'Not to worry, sir,' he smiled, 'there's another car here.' And indeed, the next train had already come through the opposite doors and had pulled up at the platform. The boss even helped the Doctor down into his seat and pulled the safety bar across his lap. There was a loud click as the mechanism locked and, to the astonishment of the Doctor and, indeed, the other waiting passengers, the train moved off with the Doctor as the only passenger. He turned frantically in his
seat, unable to budge the so-called safety bar and looked furiously at the ride boss, who waved him an ironic bon voyage. The train, and the Doctor, vanished through the doors.
The boss turned to the protesting crowd still waiting for a ride. 'Just a routine inspection, folks; management, you know?' The crowd, who had some experience of 'management' understood in a thoroughly disgruntled way and, before they could query the wild appearance of the 'management' figure they had just seen take a whole train to himself, the boss had shrugged broadly and turned back to go through one of the doors marked 'Private Staff Only' and, as though he had never been there at all, disappeared from view.
The Doctor now sat philosophically in his seat, arms folded defiantly. The train trundled slowly up a steep gradient, giving him plenty of time to observe the winking lights depicting the heavens. Which part of the heavens, he had no idea. He was very familiar with all the astronomical maps of the skies visible from Earth with the naked eye, but this bore no relation to any of them. Either it was the usual designer's botch-up or... or it was part of an alien sky...
The thought progressed no further, for the Doctor realised that in a quite unastronomical way, the sky had come to an end, or rather, the stars had. He just had time to register that all that lay ahead was in the blackest Stygian gloom when the car gave a stomach-wrenching lurch and hurtled downwards into a darkness that was as absolute as any he had ever known...
The Mandarin observed the picture on the VDU with an air of detachment, almost of precognition. The Space Mountain train had pulled back into its station, and Peri had disembarked onto the platform, so preoccupied with her search for the Doctor that she failed to notice Kevin hovering conspicuously near her, more and more isolated as the rest of the crowd drifted away.
'Like pieces on a board, my Lord, you plot their every move exactly.' Stefan's voice was unpleasantly gloating, whilst the Mandarin's reply was very matter-of-fact.
DOCTOR WHO - THE NIGHTMARE FAIR Page 3
