Doctor Who: Lungbarrow

'Nonsense, child,' retorted the Doctor. 'Grandfather indeed! I've never seen you before in my life!'

All is not well on Gallifrey. Chris Cwej is having someone else's nightmares. Ace is talking to herself. So is K-9.

Leela has stumbled on a murderous family conspiracy. And the beleaguered Lord President, Romanadvoratrelundar, foresees one of the most tumultuous events in her planet's history.

At the root of it all is an ancient and terrible place, the House of Lungbarrow in the southern mountains of Gallifrey.

Something momentous is happening there. But the House has inexplicably gone missing.

673 years ago the Doctor left his family in that forgotten House. Abandoned, disgraced and resentful, they have waited. And now he's home at last.

In this, the seventh Doctor's final New Adventure, he faces a threat that could uncover the greatest secret of them all.

Marc Platt
wrote Ghost Light, the last Doctor Who story recorded by the BBC. He also wrote the New Adventure
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and the Missing Adventure Downtime. He is told that he lives in Islington, but would
not be surprised if that were Time Lord propaganda.

CONTENTS

· Author’s Preface/Introduction – Page 3

· LUNGBARROW – Page 5

· Author’s Notes – Page 224

Above: the original cover for
LUNGBARROW

Originally published by Doctor Who Books, a division of Virgin Publishing Pty Ltd Copyright © Marc Platt 1997, 2003

The moral right of the author has been asserted; this reproduction is made with grateful acknowledgement to the BBC website

– no infringement of copyright is intended, as this work is produced for private use only, and not for profit.

Original series broadcast on the BBC

Format © BBC 1963

DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

2

Roots

In 1996, when Rebecca Levene at Virgin asked me for another New Adventure, I hummed and ha-ed a bit, faffing round with various ideas, but Ben Aaronovitch insisted it had to be Lungbarrow - exactly what I really wanted to do, but hadn’t dared suggest. Then the BBC raked back the Virgin’s license because the McGann TV movie was in the offing, so Rebecca decided that Lungbarrow, with its revelations of the Doctor’s roots, was the story to finish the book series.

In fact, Lance Parkin sneaked in under the closing portcullis with The Dying Days as a parting shot, but Lungbarrow was the Seventh Doctor’s final Virgin. It’s a sort of Doctor Who equivalent of King’s Cross: the final stop for a whole load of storylines, not just from the Virgin books, but stretching back into the TV series as well.

Finding a family

The idea of the Doctor’s family had been knocking round my head for years before I ever got commissioned for the TV series in 1988. After a quarter of a century, we’d learned an awful lot about the Doctor. That was unavoidable. But there was now precious little Who left in him. We all want to know about him, but we also want him to remain a mystery too.

My idea was to start afresh. To clear the decks, I’d commit the cardinal sin of answering the fundamental questions, and then knock the explanations sideways with a whole barrel-load of new questions. You open the locked box only to find another locked box inside. Only this one’s bigger. The more layers of the Doctor you peel away, the stranger and darker he gets. And he stays the same. A mystery.

I’d been woken at 5am one morning by the idea of the family and the living house. The last thing the Doctor’s family could be was obvious. He comes from an alien planet, however terrestrial (and British) its inhabitants appear, so I was determined to get away from any Earth-style 2.4 children sort of family. It had to be strange, yet familiar too.

The idea I woke up with arrived in such detail that I got quite feverish, unable to get it written down fast enough.

One Loom, forty-five Cousins, two Drudges and one very grumpy House were all in place along with their hierarchy and their terrible fate. And then I sat on the story for a long time, not daring to submit the storyline. It was too outrageous. I was venturing into forbidden territory.

Lung Light

Only at the end of 1987, when I first met Andrew Cartmel and Ben at the production office, did I tell anyone about the story. Andrew and Ben had their own plans to darken the Doctor’s character. They already had the Time Lords’

founding triumvirate in place: Rassilon, Omega and the other one that history never remembers the name of. But they were unsure how all this linked up so many aeons later with the Doctor. Lungbarrow offered a solution.

I worked on the story with Andrew for about nine months, until JN-T decided that maybe this was a bit too radical too soon. In answer, Andrew produced Plan B: we relocated some of the elements to 19th century Perivale, changed the emphasis of the story from the Doctor to Ace, and called the new story Ghost Light. And apart from a tiny reference to the family in Ghost Light, a line which Sylvester changed in rehearsal, Lungbarrow went on the back burner.

The Shopping List

Of course when you got commissioned for a New Adventure, you not only got several lunches in the Virgin staff canteen (it knocked the socks off the BBC one), but you also got Rebecca’s shopping list of Things That Need Including.

In the case of Lungbarrow this meant:

1) Tie up the threads set up in the New Adventures.

2) Lead into the TV Movie.

3

Everyone else got to choose which bits of continuity to play with. I had to deal with the whole lot. And I also had a few strands of unfinished business lurking from the TV series that needed completing too. A load of sarsaparilla-drinking sessions in Andrew’s office had gone into them. There are hints of them scattered all through the New Adventures, but with the advent of Mr McGann, this would be their last chance for an airing before Who took off to Heaven knows where.

Here we are again

When BBCi suggested serialising Lungbarrow on the Doctor Who webpages, I jumped at the chance to take another look, which I hadn’t done for years. Some bits surprised me, some of those bits I liked enormously and a few bits made me absolutely cringe.

So I’ve taken the liberty of tinkering a bit, changing a few things around - things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but definitely don’t now. I’ve surgically removed one section early on, swapped over a couple of chapters and added an extra sequence at the start of the final chapter. The actual story hasn’t changed at all. It’s modified and augmented, not regenerated. But maybe it flows a little better.

Whether this reappearance means that the crazy price of the original book on Ebay will come down, I cannot say.

On publication in 1997, the book was a slow starter and never had time to pick up sales before it was taken off the shelves again. I regularly get royalty statements from Virgin to say that out of my advance, I technically still owe them £126.41. I wish I had a stash of copies under the bed.

Previously on the New Adventures

MESSENGER: Rassilon, the dying Pythia cursed Gallifrey. There will be no more children. The world is barren and doomed!

RASSILON: D’oh!

SHADOWY MAN: Told you so. Now about the shortage of housing...

CHRIS: Sorry, Roz. We shouldn’t have done that. But I love you.

ROZ: Tough! I’m leading an attack on that GTO station on top of that hill. (RUNS OFF

WAVING GUN)

THE DOCTOR: Chris, it’s Roz.

CHRIS: Is she...?

THE DOCTOR: She went up the hill into history.

CHRIS: (BITES HIS KNUCKLES) I’m trying to cope.

DOROTHEE (née ACE): These days I live in 19th century Paris. But I’ve got this time-travelling motor bike, so I do all my shopping at Marks and Spencers.

GOLD USHER: Do you swear by the Rod of Rassilon to uphold the holy office of President of the High Council of Gallifrey?

ROMANA: Hang on. (ADJUSTS MATRIX AT JAUNTY ANGLE) I swear.

(TIME LORDS LOOK SUITABLY UNCOMFORTABLE.)

THE DOCTOR: Chris, I have a presentiment of doom. I can’t see beyond my seventh self.

Eighth Man Bound.

CHRIS: I’m still trying to cope.

4

"How far, Doctor? How long have you lived? Your puny mind is powerless against the strength
of Morbius. Back, back to your beginning..." The Brain of Morbius

"But how is it that this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm
of time?" The Tempest, I , ii

Time's roses are scented with memory. There was a garden where they once grew. Cuttings from the past grafted on to the present. Perfumes that recalled things long gone or echoed memories yet to come. Thorns that could tear like carrion beaks. Stems that could strangle and bind like the constrictors in the fathomless pits of the Sepulchasm.

The garden grew on the tallest summit of the Citadel, high above the frosty streets, clear of that endless telepathic commentary of gossip and gibble-gabble that marked out the thoughts of the Gallifreyan people. Sometimes a morass of countless random ideas, sometimes a single chorus united by one urgent conviction. A hope or fear or death wish. But the days of the mob were numbered.

The great mother was gone. The Pythia was dead, overthrown by her children. And with her died her people's fruitfulness. The Gallifreyans became a barren race. In the long aftershock of matricide, the cursed people learnt to keep thoughts and secrets to themselves. They discovered privacy and furtiveness. They taught themselves loneliness. It made them angrier too.

A pall of smoke drifted across Pazithi Gallifreya. The moonlit garden on the tower was furled in darkness. A new, harsher light came from below. There were fires in the city.

From his place high on the crest of the Omega Memorial, a solitary figure watched the west district of the city go up in flames. The fire had started in the abandoned temple. He could hear the distant rattle of gunfire. Guards drafted in from the Chapterhouses were quelling the uprising.

No good would come of it. The fleeing dissenters (Rassilon already called them rebels) had taken refuge in the Pythia's temple. He had warned Rassilon a hundred times over. That once sacred place must not be violated. If violence was used against the dissenters, then he would up and leave Gallifrey to its own devices. He would never be party to a massacre.

Suddenly the box was back.

It hovered in the air just below his vantage point. A flying coffin. One side in darkness, the other catching the glare of the distant fire. It clicked, whirred, gave a little whine and tilted slightly to one side in a crude anthropomorphic approximation of affection.

'Shoo! Go away, you stupid...' He nearly called it 'brute', but that only reminded him of his long-running debate with Rassilon on the viability of artefactory life forms, and he was very weary of arguing.

The box was pining. It missed its creator. It was always breaking its bonds and escaping from its hangar, to skulk dejectedly around Omega's Memorial. For years it had done that. When they relocated the hangar, it only sat rumbling discontentedly on its servo-palette and then got out again. Rassilon worried about it, but it didn't really matter. For a quasi-aware remote stellar manipulator that could tear open the furnaces of stars and dissect the angles of reality, it was fairly harmless. It just wasn't house-trained.