Doctor Who BBCN16 - Forever Autumn (18 page)

‘What is it?’ whispered Rick.

Martha licked her lips. She was thinking of a scene from a movie she’d watched as a kid, where living skeletons had grown from the scattered teeth of a dead monster.

‘I might be wrong – I
hope
I’m wrong – but it sounds to me like bones,’ she said.

The rattle-click of movement came up the stairs, along the landing and stopped outside the door. In some ways the few seconds of silence that followed its arrival were even worse than the approaching sounds had been. Chris stepped back from the door, staring at it warily. Martha and Rick exchanged a glance. Amanda retreated to the back of the room, pressing her hands to her mouth as if to stifle a rising scream.

Then there was a crash, and a hairline crack appeared in one of the door’s upper wooden panels. Martha looked around desperately for something to defend herself with, but the best weapon available was the one she was already holding. She raised the Necris above her head, readying herself for action. Another crash, and the crack widened, slivers of wood falling inward.

There wasn’t much the four of them could do except watch the thing smash its way through the door. With each blow more of the panel splintered and collapsed. Finally a sizeable chunk of wood fell onto the bathroom floor. Immediately a hand and part of an arm thrust its way through the jagged hole it had created.

Just as Martha had feared, the hand was white, fleshless, skeletal.

She shuddered at the brittle scraping the twig-like fingers made as they scuttled across the wood towards the bolt. Swallowing her re-123

vulsion, she stepped forward and brought the Necris down as if to squash a bug, hoping to disconnect the hand from its spindly wrist, perhaps even to pulverise it. The creature, however, seemed to anticipate her attack and snatched its hand back through the hole just in time.

The momentum of Martha’s swing made her stumble forward and drop onto one knee, her face within reach of the hole in the door. The living skeleton on the other side suddenly bent and lunged forward, filling the gap with its chalk-white face, its empty eye-sockets level with Martha’s eyes. The skull’s lipless jaw creaked wide open, and –though it had no vocal cords – the creature hissed at her. Its breath (
How could it have breath? It had no lungs!
) smelled of grave-mould and the dank, sulphurous odour of the Hervoken’s lair. Martha re-coiled, sprawling on her back on the bathroom floor, coughing and spluttering.

Even as she was pushing herself back up to a sitting position, the creature was reaching through the hole in the door once again. ‘
Stop
it!
’ she yelled, but it was too late. The bony fingers wrapped themselves around the bolt and tugged it from its socket. A second later the door swung open and there stood the skeleton, bones clicking and creaking as it shifted its weight. Horribly, impossibly alive.

The Necris was lying on the floor, a few inches from Martha’s hand.

With frightening speed, the skeleton rushed forward, reached down and grabbed it.

‘
No!
’ Martha shouted and made a snatch for it herself, but her fingers closed on empty air. As the skeleton straightened up with its prize, Martha was half-aware of Chris stepping over her, his hands outstretched. She looked up, and saw that he was holding a toilet roll in one hand, a cigarette lighter in the other. She saw him light the toilet roll and then thrust it between two of the skeleton’s ribs, jamming it in place. The vertebrae in the skeleton’s neck clicked as it tilted its skull to regard the burning wad of paper.

Then, to Martha’s astonishment, the creature burst into flames.

It burned surprisingly quickly, fire racing along its network of bones, engulfing it within seconds. It opened its mouth in a soundless scream 124

as it shrivelled and blackened, collapsing in on itself. Its spine snapped and its burning skull tumbled between its charred collar bones and into the crumbling ribcage. The Necris dropped from its lifeless hands and into Martha’s arms. Rick and Chris ran forward with wet towels and doused the flames before they could spread and set fire to the house. They smothered the heap of bones and trampled them into burning ash. Seconds later all that was left of the skeleton was black mush and a hazy pall of greenish smoke.

Chris turned to face Martha as she rose to her feet. He had a smudge of soot on his nose and was looking pleased with himself. ‘I remembered the bats,’ he said.

‘Er. . . good,’ replied Martha, who didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

‘I remembered they were made of rubber, even when they were alive,’ he said, ‘and it suddenly made me realise what the skeleton was made of.’

‘Ah,’ she said. Now she understood. She looked at the wet towels and the black gunk dribbling out from underneath. ‘Paper?’ she said.

‘Yeah. . .

well, cardboard. Though I’m not sure how something made of cardboard can smash its way through a door.’

‘Hervoken magic,’ Martha said, then thought of how the Doctor would frown if he heard her say that. ‘Science, I mean.’

‘What I want to know, Christopher,’ Amanda said, stepping forward,

‘is why you had a cigarette lighter in your pocket?’

Suddenly Chris looked like a little boy who’d been caught raiding the cookie jar in the dead of night. ‘Er. . . ’ he said.

Etta was getting worried. The Doctor should have returned by now.

‘If I’m not back by three,’ he had told her earlier, ‘it means. . . or it
probably
means. . . though then again, it
could
just be that. . . ’

‘In plain English, if you please, Doctor,’ she had said imperiously.

‘Well, it will
almost certainly
mean that the Hervoken are not. . .

what’s the phrase? Open to negotiation.’

‘And what should I do then?’ she asked. ‘Call the police?’

125

‘Nah, they’d be about as much use as a sherbet umbrella. Your best bet would be to pack up and get out of town as quickly as you can.

No, no, hang on. . . first cancel the Halloween Carnival, initiate some sort of evacuation procedure, and then pack up and get out of town as quickly as you can. See ya.’

Three o’clock, he had said. She looked at the big metal clock on her kitchen wall, which had been chopping off the seconds of her life for the past twenty-five years. It read five past three, though, even as she glanced at it, it clunked on another minute. How long should she wait? Perhaps the ‘negotiations’, as he had called them, were more involved than he had anticipated?

‘Come on, Doctor,’ she muttered, desperate to hear the sound of his footfalls on the basement steps, willing him to appear like a manic jack-in-the-box in her kitchen. She had no doubt he was the spaceman he had claimed himself to be. He was simultaneously the most unsettling and reassuring man she had ever met, a mesmerising com-bination of boyish charm and ancient wisdom.

Ten minutes later she stood up. ‘Right then,’ she said. She had come to a decision. It was the only possible decision she
could
come to. Etta didn’t think she was a particularly brave soul, but neither was she the kind of person who would leave a friend in the lurch. She wouldn’t flee, as the Doctor had advised, and there wasn’t time to fetch help.

Which meant there was only one course of action open to her – she would launch a rescue mission. She would get the Doctor back, or die in the attempt.

Arming herself with a torch, she descended the basement steps and lowered herself gingerly into the storage space beneath the floor. The metal door in the side wall was still ajar. She tugged it open and shone her torch into a cramped black tunnel.

Rotting timbers, irregularly spaced, looked to be the only things preventing the tunnel from collapsing in on itself. Etta shuddered, took a deep breath and thought briefly of how this would play havoc with her arthritis. Then she got down on her hands and knees and crawled inside.

∗ ∗ ∗

126

‘Ow,’ said the Doctor. Every time he moved, even just a little bit, the vines securing him flashed green and gave him a zap of energy. It was like being continually jabbed with a cattle prod. ‘Can’t you turn the juice down on this thing?’ he called. ‘It tickles.’

The Hervoken ignored him. They had been ignoring him for the past twenty minutes. They were drifting about their central chamber, describing symbols in the air, occasionally chanting or muttering in their breathy, childlike voices. Their movements seemed arbitrary, but the Doctor knew they were conjuring something, that their actions were far more purposeful than they appeared. He hoped Martha was safe. He’d had no choice but to entrust her with the Necris, but he still knew that if anything happened to her because of it, he’d never forgive himself.

He had tried various methods to get the Hervoken to listen to him, but they were having none of it. Perhaps now was the time to take a gamble, therefore, to mix a few home truths in with a dose of good old-fashioned bluffing.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘cards on the table. Your lot don’t exist any more.

Your people were banished to the deep darkness by the Eternals when your endless, stupid war with the Carrionites threatened to bring this universe and countless others crashing about your. . . well, I would say ears if you had any.

‘Point is you didn’t know when to stop, did you? And so the Eternals kicked you out. The only reason they didn’t find your little group was because you were already under the earth, dormant. You’ve been there for thousands of years, that tiny speck of consciousness that kept you alive waiting and waiting for humankind to get clever enough to kick-start your resurrection. You’ve become legends on this planet, part of folklore. You’ve seeped into the nightmares of a thousand generations of children.’

He took a deep breath: here came the bluffing part.

‘But the irony is, if you get this creaky old ship of yours working again, it’ll be like a beacon to the Eternals. They’ll find you and they’ll stamp you out. You’re nothing but a stray bit of dirt to them. A lone germ. A last surviving cockroach. Is that what you really want? A final 127

glorious ascent into the heavens, and then – splat! Bye bye, Hervoken.

‘Cos that’s what’ll happen unless you listen to me.

‘I can take you somewhere in my TARDIS where the Eternals’ll leave you alone, where they’ll let you live out your lives in peace. So come on, boys, whaddya say? Do this thing my way and everyone’s a winner.’

Still they ignored him. And then they ignored him some more. The Doctor sighed, scowled. ‘All right,’ he muttered, ‘please yourselves.’

Even while he had been talking, his mind had been working constantly, furiously, trying to think of a way out. He knew there had to be one. There always was. It was just a case of working it out before it was too late.

Something to his left caught his eye: a glimmer of light, different to the swamp-like iridescence that pulsed and flickered and bubbled in the Hervoken’s lair. As surreptitiously as he could, the Doctor glanced in that direction. He didn’t know whether to feel heartened or dis-mayed to see Etta appear in the cavernous entrance to the central chamber. He was about to mouth at her to turn off her torch when she noticed the Hervoken for the first time and dropped the torch out of sheer fright. It landed on the ground and broke. A black vine immediately snaked from the wall and snatched it up. Green sparks flew as the vine tightened on the torch, crunching it into mangled pieces of plastic and metal. A nearby Hervoken, apparently alerted by the sound, drifted across. Etta could only stand there, transfixed with shock, as the alien loomed over her.

The Doctor clenched his teeth, waiting for the inevitable. But then, to his astonishment, the Hervoken drifted away, as if the old lady wasn’t worth its attention. Why had it simply ignored her? Was it something to do with her age? Her lack of physical threat? And then it came to him.

‘Pssst,’ he said. Etta hadn’t spotted him yet. She was too overawed by the crawling walls and the Hervoken themselves.

She turned her head and blinked in his direction. Back-lit by pulsing green light, the walls writhing around her, she looked endearingly out of place. She dithered a moment, glanced at the Hervoken again. The 128

Doctor flicked his head in a ‘c’mere’ gesture, and received another painful zap for his troubles.

Her eyes and mouth wide in terrified awe, moving almost as if she was shell-shocked, Etta plodded across to him. The Hervoken paid her no attention whatsoever. The Doctor almost laughed out loud.

‘As you can see, I got a bit tied up,’ he whispered.

Etta stared at him. ‘Are those things really aliens? I feel as if I’m dreaming.’

‘Yep, they’re aliens,’ said the Doctor casually. ‘And so am I. And so are you, come to that. We’re all aliens together.’

‘Why are they ignoring me?’ she asked.

The Doctor grinned. ‘They don’t see you as human,’ he said. ‘You and your ancestors have absorbed so much Hervoken energy over the past couple of hundred years that they see you as part of themselves, part of their ship. I reckon when they turned the cats on us yesterday, you could have just stood there and they’d have run straight past you.’

‘Now he tells me,’ said Etta drily, making the Doctor grin again. ‘So what do I do to get you out of here?’

‘Well, if I’m right,’ said the Doctor, ‘you should be able to make these things release me just by thinking about it. Put your hands on the vines, close your eyes and command them to let go with your mind. Believe you can do it. Think like a Hervoken.’

‘All right, I’ll give it a try,’ said Etta dubiously. After a moment’s hesitation she placed her hands on a couple of the vines entwined around the Doctor and squeezed her eyes closed. For a minute or more she stood motionless, holding her breath, and then she blurted,

‘Nothing’s happening.’

‘Try harder,’ urged the Doctor. ‘Imagine the vines loosening, going limp and floppy. You’re the boss, Etta, not them. You’re the one in control. Just be your natural stroppy self and you’ll be laughing.’

‘Hmph,’ she said, but she squeezed her eyes closed again and scrunched up her face, redoubling her efforts. The Doctor cheered her on silently, and after a few seconds he felt the vines beginning to loosen. He pulled one arm free, then the other. Seconds later the vines simply sagged from him, slumping to the floor and crawling sluggishly 129