Doctor Who: Lungbarrow (46 page)

Encounters and Exits

It was de rigeur on TV Who that theology and religious belief got couched in the most simplistic of forms. Black hats versus white hats, especially fetching when worn as fashion statements by the Black and White Guardians.

But every seesaw needs a fulcrum on which to balance; a catalyst to inspire them; a pin to pop their overblown balloons.

The New Adventures suggest that between the Black and White Guardians, there is a Red Guardian of Justice to balance the scales and referee the perpetual battle. And on Gallifrey, between the imagination of Omega and the rationality of Rassilon, sits the balance of that other one, the one in the shadows, what's he called, you know... the one no-one ever remembers the name of. Somebody to blame. This archetypal figure, by turns mocking clown or judgmental whistle-blower, turns up in all manner of myths and legends, and here he is in the creation sagas of the Tharils too. It does suggest that on the flowing river of time, there's one person who can never resist sticking his oar in...

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While I would be messing about trying to avoid having to face Satthralope, the Doctor just marches into the lion's den to confront her. Do unto those what they would do unto you before they get the chance to do it. One of the reasons I like the Seventh Doctor is that because he appears so unassuming, his defiance and even foolhardiness appear much more dynamic and brave.

The House portrait - the Lungbarrovian version of the dreaded annual school photo. At Eastbourne College in the late sixties, this meant five hundred boys with beautifully brushed hair, V-signs behind the headmaster's head and one wag dashing round the back to appear at both ends simultaneously (just like the cover to Happy Endings.) But in Lungbarrow, it means forty-four suspects and one victim for Chris, and one suspect and forty four victims for Innocet.

The walls of the House of Lungbarrow are thronged with portraits of the Doctor's ancestral Cousins. Years ago, many were bought as a job lot by the Arts Council and distributed throughout the galleries, castles and stately homes of England. They're usual y disguised with labels attributing them to one Old Master or another. But don't be fooled, these are really the Doctor's relations. Innocet by Hans Holbein or Satthralope by Rembrandt. So go on, join the National Trust and see how many you can spot! And don't forget that every Cousin can have thirteen faces. So there are plenty to choose from!

The "Quences disinheriting the Doctor" scene made a much edited reappearance in the script of Auld Mortality.

Derren Nesbitt recorded it too, but due to time constraints, it was the only major cut from the final CD version. It languishes metaphorically on Alistair Lock's cutting room floor.

Having bad dreams is bad enough. There are times when I've had dreams that make me afraid of going back to sleep (often involving crocodiles in the weirdest locations.) Dreams are uncontrollable. But having someone else's bad dreams is even worse, particularly when you're not even asleep.

Terrapin-Maiden from Chris's FreakWarrior mags is a close relative of Rosa Caiman's Jaguar Maiden in Loups-Garoux.

Chris is realising how little he real y knows about his friend, the Doctor. It's as if the Doctor that we see, or are allowed to see, is just the tip of the most monumental iceberg ever. What lurks in the murky depths below the surface is anyone's guess. Even the Doctor isn't sure.

The living Houses of Gallifrey are as much a part of the Families as the Cousins who inhabit them. Satthralope's task as Lungbarrow's Housekeeper is not unlike a lone sea captain, trying to steer a grumpy ocean liner that gets in a strop if it's woken up too quickly. The House has been drowsing uneasily on automatic pilot for centuries, but now a very large iceberg has just changed course and is heading in the its direction.

The catafalque, the funeral carriage that guards Quences's glass coffin, is another of Lungbarrow's fairy tale references - the dragon that guards the treasure hoard. Anyway, it was time for a big rampaging monster. Like all the furniture in the House, the catafalque has basic instincts and reflexes of its own. It protects its master. I imagined it as an elaborate bier in a vaguely oriental style, its black lacquered flanks adorned by the writhing statues of legendary beasts. Gal ifreyan Chinoiserie/Japanesery. It's also really an excuse for Badger to make a dramatic entrance.

Not so much a chapter, more a couple of important moments which move on events outside the aegis of either Chris or the Doctor. Battle lines are being drawn. Knives are being sharpened. Defences are being reinforced. But like the fragmented railway network after privatisation, no one is talking to each other. All the protagonists have their own private grudges to settle.

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For years, I've had a theory that the Doctor's capacious pockets are as dimensional y transcendental as the TARDIS, a bit like Mary Poppins' carpet bag. Hence his impossible fetching out of the umbrella in the previous chapter. They might even be portals to another universe or something called Props Direct, a place that supplies just what the Doctor needs, but not always in the most useful form. Maybe we could have an entire adventure set in the Doctor's pockets, although A Universe in my Pocket sounds like a gooey celebrity autobiography best avoided.

So Chris is being treated to the Doctor's diverted nightmares. I'd wondered how the Doctor's head could cope with all that information, memory, manipulation, lateral thinking etc, once things started getting too busy in there. If he gets what the technical y-minded call a right brainful, does a little window pop up saying Out Of Memory? The Doctor's symbiotic empathy with the TARDIS supplies the drastic solution. The ship starts franchising out the data to other local repositories -
i.e.
Chris's head. I suppose it isn't programmed to ask permission first.

The Doctor's little speech about his uncomfortable feelings over coming home is the sole survivor of the sequence that I cut from the end of Chapter Eight in the original book. It works a lot better here on an emotional level, as well as in purely story-tel ing terms. But the Doctor is being deeply insensitive by saying it in front of Innocet. There are things that you do at home that you'd never do in public. But at least he has started to apologise.

There wasn't really room for Benny in this book. But in the tying-up of the New Adventures, it was important that she put in an appearance, however brief, in the final walkdown of companions. "Well Doctor, I'm afraid your old friend Bernice Summerfield can't be with us in person this evening. But she is on the line now, live from an archaeological dig somewhere in your head."

The image of the wel is borrowed from Maeterlinck's play Pelleas and Melisande, another huge influence on Lungbarrow with its stifling gothic castle, doom-laden family and tragic lovers. As one character says "there are parts of the garden that have never seen the sunlight." The play also contains one of the most frightening lines I've ever come across in anything: in answer to the child Yniold's questions "Why are the sheep so quiet? Why don't they talk any more?", the shepherd replies "Because this is not the way to the sheepfold." Pelleas is all shifting moods and dark colours. It shows you one thing, but means another. Little is defined, everything is symbolic or by implication. Debussy's setting of the play is arguably the greatest of 20th century operas. I'd certainly vote for it. I first heard it thirty years ago and I'm still always moved to tears by its melancholic beauty. The sunlit music for Act Two, Scene One goes with what Innocet saw by the wel .

I first came across astral travel, the out of body experience, in The Ka of Gifford Hil ary, one of those occult novels by Denis Wheatley. He seems to have gone way out of fashion now. Maybe his works would seem a bit lurid or tawdry these days, but in the late sixties when I couldn't get enough of them, they felt like an adults-only branch of the wild monstrous fantasy of which Doctor Who was the main stream family branch. But those were the days when Eastbourne Col ege boys had to get written leave to go into town (maybe they still do), and I used to sneak out to the cinema with a friend to see The Devil Rides Out or Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, probably at the risk of detention if we'd been caught.

In a fit of venomous pique, the First Doctor takes sneaky revenge on Glospin and the rest of his Family. A bit like children reporting their parents for drug abuse or sueing them for maltreatment. I didn't anticipate this bit in the initial storyline. But when I got to the chapter in the text, the Doctor decided to go in a different direction. I love it when the characters take charge and override my projected storyline. In one fell swoop, the Doctor added a whole extra dimension as to how and why the House had been struck from the Gallifreyan records. And that dimension is called Spite.

The owl statue outside the Chapterhouse echoes Paul Cornell's fondness for the birds. This particular Prydonian owl draws parallels with the carved face on a wall of the Doge's Palace in Venice. Into its mouth, citizens could slip anonymous accusations about their neighbours. The accused would then be tried by the city's fearsome inquisitors, the Council of Ten. So let's face it, Glospin may be The Villain, but the Doctor is just as capable of giving as good as he gets.

In the multi-possibility universes of Doctor Who - Unbound, there must be numerous versions of how the Doctor left Gallifrey. Almost as many as there are long-term fans, in fact. So where the hel , I hear you ask, is Susan?

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The chapter title is the first of several al usions in this section to Hamlet's encounter with the ghost of his father, also murdered horribly, also seeking revenge.

When Innocet reels off the various versions of Rassilon's consolidation of his power, it's clear that history is rarely factual. It depends far more on who's writing it. A bit like whether you read The Guardian or, heaven forfend, the Daily Mail. But whichever version you read, the poor old Other gets a pretty bad press.

Omens (which the Doctor doesn't believe in): When I was at school, there were afternoons when we were required to watch the 1st XV rugby team. During one match, everything suddenly went very quiet. The breeze dropped and the birds stopped singing. The match continued, but the hush in the air was heavy and palpable. After at least a minute or so, we heard a distant car, a screech of brakes and a horrible thud. At the next corner along the road, a man had been hit and killed by the vehicle. The silence beforehand had not been my fantasy, because several people commented on it. It's not explicable by any law I know, but I am certain that particular event was anticipated on a far deeper level than I can understand.

On the appearance of Quences's ghost, the Doctor invokes protection from angels and ministers of grace. It's another Hamlet line, but the Ministers of Grace also turned up briefly in a short story The Duke Of Dominoes in the first Decalog collection. And in a Dalek story I planned that never really got off the ground. The MIGs are a faction of self-appointed guardians of our morals, galactic Mary Whitehouses, determined to make the cosmos a better place. They are probably Daily Mail readers, are in a permanent state of shock over the moral decline of universe and would like to hang nice net curtains around absolutely everything.

It was standard practice for pictures of Adam and Eve, neither of whom had a 'natural' birth, to show the naked couple without belly buttons. So the children of Gallifrey, born fully grown from genetic looms in which their DNA is woven, don't have navels either. The looms are allocated one to each House, and have controlled the numbers of Gallifrey's otherwise doomed population for aeons, ever since the Pythia's curse rendered the people sterile.

Consequently there has been no natural evolution in the Gallifreyan form either. The looms are just a people factory. There are no real children. Random physical features are in place to preserve individuality and some semblance of gender. But nothing fluxes or changes. Or to quote an old Mid-Gallifreyan nursery verse:
Isn't it dark

Isn't it cold

Seek out the future

Before you get old

Once there were children

This is their doom

Now all the people

Are born from the loom

This first appeared in Cat's Cradle: Times Crucible. Strangely it goes (more or less) to the tune of Send in the Clowns. Only the Doctor is different. His deformity, an old-style placental navel, apparently suggests some slight hiccup or other interference in Lungbarrow's loom processing system.

Glospin continues his rounds of the House, stirring it up and putting in a bad word for the Doctor to anyone he chances across.

Leela gets her kit off, but this is not a gratuitous "Nyssa gets her kit off" moment, just our noble savage getting back to basics.

The ghostly guard captain caught in the transmat chamber is the forerunner of Inspector MacKenzie of Scotland Yard, trapped like a display specimen in a drawer in Ghost Light. The captain's name is pronounced Re-dred. He's an ancestral cousin to those other Chancel ery commanders Hilred and Andred, al three from the House of Redlooms, which obviously has militaristic blood programmed in its loom.

I love the idea of an alien housekeeper sifting through the contents of a bag from Marks and Spencer's food hal .

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Cousin Luton is a name in the spirit of Robert Holmes, whose own track record for silly names is justly legendary.

Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. Holmes was truly great at bringing his locations and characters to life with bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of humour. Hence Cousin Luton's suitably gruesome and Holmesian (I hope) offstage death.