Doctor Who: The Many Hands (14 page)

The effect as she pointed it at the grey hand was
startling: it starting to twitch and buck, losing control
over its own fingers and eventually dropping from
Monro's neck. The anatomist sat on the floor, gasping
for breath and clutching at his neck. The hand kept
twitching on the ground. As soon as Martha turned
the sonic screwdriver away from it, however, it righted
itself, looking as if it might attack again. The Doctor
hadn't been kidding when he said that the screwdriver
wouldn't do any permanent harm.

Martha turned the screwdriver back on the hand
and, whilst it twitched at her feet, she gave it a good
sharp kick. It flew into the air and landed on the
ground a good few feet away, bouncing down the
hill until it landed with a plop in the waters of the
Nor' Loch. Martha didn't even wait to see if it started
swimming out again. She gave Monro a quick look to
see he was still breathing, and then stepped up to the
Castle wall.

She pointed the screwdriver up at Kith and turned
it on.

The effect was instant.

The hands that had joined to make Kith's new body
all began to twitch as the screwdriver pointed at them,
shaking so much that they lost their hold on each
other and started raining down onto Martha. But as
soon as they were out of the line of fire, they regained
their senses and started to attack. She was getting
covered in the little creatures, but still she stood and
struggled to point the wand upwards.

The hands were vicious and furious, sharp little
nails clawing into every inch of exposed skin. She
screwed her eyes shut and tried to shake them from
her face, all the while keeping the screwdriver pointed
up into the air. She didn't even know if she was still
aiming at Kith. All she knew was that the Doctor
needed her to do this, and she would do it. Even if it
was the death of her.

'Martha!' came a shout from above.

She recognised the voice and opened her eyes.

The Doctor was there, leaning over the Castle
walls. How he'd managed to get to the Castle before
them, she couldn't imagine, but it was enough to
make her spirits rise, even as the murderous hands
continued to rain down on her. In his hand, the
Doctor was clutching the red, white and blue livery
of the Union Flag: he must have plucked if from a
flagpole somewhere around the Castle.

'Turn it off!' he shouted down. 'Turn it off!'

Martha hesitated only for a moment before
letting the sonic screwdriver die, and then she was
struggling and shaking the grey hands from her. With
the screwdriver disabled, they didn't seem interested
in attacking her any longer. Most of the hands were
climbing back up the wall to rejoin the rest of Kith's
flesh.

Kith resumed his climb up the Castle wall.

'Doctor!' Martha shouted.

But he had vanished from sight.

The Doctor stood and caught his breath while
he waited. Kith would be there soon, and then he
would find out whether his plan was suicidal, or
just dangerously foolish. The flag he held tugged in
the breeze, and he looked up briefly at the grey skies
above. Standing around in wet clothes and a cold wind
was starting to take the spring out of even his step. In
his pocket, he fingered the end of the reel of wire. He'd
only just had time to snatch it from the TARDIS and
get back outside, the freezing wind making his fingers
thick and numb as they tried to tie the knots.

Two massive grey hands appeared over the side of
the wall.

Kith pulled himself over and onto the ramparts.
Like the city it protected, the Castle was built on
several layers and, whilst the other side of the wall was
a sheer drop, on the inside it was only a few feet down
to the ground. St Margaret's Chapel was behind them,
but the hand-man wasn't interested in that. He was
interested in the large blue box that was resting on
the walkway, hidden from prying eyes by the chapel's
historic brickwork.

Kith growled, and flexed his hand-made muscles.
'No sonic devices,' the Doctor said, taking a step
forward to show that all he held was the Union Flag.
'Just talk. All right?'

Kith took a step closer, pulling himself up to his full
height. He was nearly half as tall again as the Doctor
and, if he wanted, those massive hands could probably
snap the Time Lord in two without much trouble. The
Doctor stepped forward again, keeping himself firmly
in the hand-man's path to the TARDIS.

'No more talk,' Kith said.

The Doctor held up his hands.

'You don't want to do this,' he said earnestly. 'She's
the last TARDIS in the whole universe. You have no
idea what she might do to protect herself.'

'
You
have no idea what
I
will do,' Kith countered.

'You just want to live,' the Doctor said. 'I can
understand that. Believe me.'

'Then move, or I will kill you.'

'Take me,' the Doctor said again. He was close
enough now to reach out and touch Kith's cold grey
skin, but he didn't. He just stared imploringly into his
empty eyes. 'You can use my DNA and repair yourself
– regenerate instead of just falling apart again. Nobody
will try and stop you, I'll make sure of that. Just leave
the TARDIS alone.'

For just a moment, the Doctor thought he might
agree.

'You are remarkable,' Kith said. 'But she is
immortal.'

The Doctor saw a handful of redcoats rushing
into the courtyard below, each taking a position to
cover Kith with a musket and waiting for McAllister
to give the order. Martha and Monro were with them,
further back, with Martha giving the older man an
examination before helping him to rest against a
wall. Kith saw them too, and pushed gruffly past the
Doctor as if he wasn't there, as he could have done at
any time.

'Hold on, Alexander,' the Doctor said as he fell to
the floor.

He rolled quickly and was on his feet again.

'Hold your fire!' he shouted to McAllister.

He didn't think it would work, but somehow he
seemed to have earned the Captain's trust. McAllister
didn't give the order, even as Kith paced steadily
towards the TARDIS. The Doctor took the flag in his
hands and twisted it, the sticks that he had inserted
into it locking together into a taut frame. The TARDIS
key bounced against the kite's spine, tied there by a
length of the thin metal wire. Kith didn't even glance
back, and the Doctor couldn't wait: he mentally
crossed his fingers and launched the kite into the air.

The cold Edinburgh wind took it, and suddenly it
soared upwards into the clouds, spinning a couple of
times before disappearing into the grey. But it wasn't
lost for ever: that thin metal filament stretched down
out of the sky, pulling tighter with every second that
passed. But it wasn't the Doctor holding onto the
kite-string. Kith took another step forward and felt
something tug, and as he looked down at his own leg,
he saw one of the hands that made it up was clinging
tightly onto the metal string. He looked up at the
Doctor with a look of surprise on his face.

'Keep holding on, Alexander,' the Doctor said.

The thing that most people didn't understand, the
Doctor thought in the second he had, was that it didn't
have to be the middle of a raging storm. They thought
that the kite had gone up and the lightning had struck
it, running down the string to the ground. But that
wasn't it. If it had been, anyone holding the string
would have been fried in an instant. No, the beauty
of it was the key: the key was tied to the kite and went
up into the clouds, and up there it soaked up the
electricity waiting in the storm clouds without it ever
earthing down the string. Once the kite was pulled
down, the electricity in the key could be transferred
to a chemical battery, and used to prove that lightning
and earthly electricity were one and the same.

Of course, Franklin probably wouldn't be very
happy with the Doctor's version of it: he had tied the
key directly to the kite-string, and that was just plain
dangerous. For whoever was holding the string. The
TARDIS key did its work, sucking the electricity out
of the clouds and subtly changing it before sending it
racing to the ground below. There was a flash of sparks
and an angry boom, and Kith let out a monstrous
roar. The Doctor stood for a moment, watching the
electricity playing all over his body.

'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,' he said. Then he turned
and shouted: 'Martha! Use the screwdriver!'

Martha ran forward from the courtyard below and
held the sonic screwdriver aloft. The Doctor winced
as its ultrasonic wail made his ears ache, but the effect
was even more dramatic on Kith. He roared again,
and each of the individual hands that made up his
body seemed to throw their fingers up and quiver.
He staggered this way and that, before hitting the low
wall that separated him from the long drop below.

The Doctor dashed forwards and grabbed at the
hand holding onto the kite-string. He winced as
he touched it. Most of the electricity had already
earthed into Kith, but enough still remained to be
uncomfortable. He gave the hand a sharp tug and
prayed that he'd tied the knot at the top correctly.
As he held tight to the hand, his fingers screaming at
the current flowing through them, the rest of Kith's
body toppled in slow motion over the edge of the
Castle walls. Kith fell away in a shower of unmoving
grey hands, and Alexander Monro appeared from the
mess to fall to the floor.

The Doctor spared a quick look over the ramparts,
seeing the smoking hands falling apart as they
bounced down into the murky waters of the Loch.
From somewhere behind him, there was a quiet tinkle
and the Doctor spun around to see the TARDIS key
lying on the stonework, the metal string still tightly
wrapped around it.

He'd tied the knot right after all.

***

Alexander could barely feel the cold stones at his back,
could only feel the fire in his lungs and in his hand. He
had vague, smoky memories of what had happened
and why he was here, but as he tried to reach for them
they blew between his fingers and drifted away. All he
could feel with any clarity was that electric dread in
the pit of his stomach that told him he was dying.

He blinked tears from his eyes, and saw a stranger
standing over him.

'Hello,' he said. 'I'm the Doctor.'

A doctor. So he
was
dying.

'It isn't fair,' he croaked pitifully. 'I just needed more
time. There is so much left that I haven't done!'

'I know,' the Doctor said gently. 'You're right: it isn't
fair. Life is too short, and there's always something
else you missed. It isn't right, and it isn't fair. But it is
how it is, and there's no escaping it. Life is precious,
and it's short. Everything has its time.'

As he said it, Alexander could feel his sadness.

Then the Doctor's eyes turned to steel as he looked
down.

'But how can you enjoy the ride,' he said, sternly, 'if
you're always worrying when it will be over?'

Alexander felt his consciousness slipping away,
perhaps for the last time. As it went, he considered
the Doctor's words. What kind of a life had he had?
He had made advancements, medical techniques that
might live on after him, but what else? A fear that had
always been with him, sapping him and making him a
frightened child again in the night. A life spent trying
to find a way, any way, to prevent the inevitable, and
only when it had finally found him did he realise that
that was no life at all.

'It's all right,' the Doctor was saying to somebody.
'It's just Alexander Monro. He's a lecturer at the
university. Like his father before him.'

'Is he dead?' asked a brisk soldier's voice.

A pause then.

'No,' the Doctor said softly. 'It's not his time.'

It was a beautiful bright day, the sky a fantastic shade
of blue that made Martha think of picnics and beer
gardens. Instead, they were standing at the top of what
the Doctor informed her was called Calton Hill, in the
centre of a triangle that was made by the row of Greeklooking
columns, a Roman-looking monument and
something that could easily have been a lighthouse.
They were anything but alone up here: the Festival
was in full swing, and the city was at its busiest. The
Doctor had promised that he'd take her to see a good
production of
Measure for Measure
later on, but for now
he was just watching over the city with a huge grin on
his face.

'Isn't it marvellous?' he said with a grin.

Martha looked out at the view. Most of what she
could see hadn't even been built the last time she was
here, the New Town sprawling out away from the
Old and racing down towards the Firth of Forth. The
houses looked grand and the streets wide, but Martha
couldn't quite forget the narrow rooms with the low
ceilings that the people in the Old Town had been
forced to live in, crammed on top of each other like
makeshift tower blocks.

'They're still there,' the Doctor said, doing his
mind-reading act. 'The Closes: underneath the Royal
Exchange. Well, the City Chambers now: they say the
merchants didn't want to leave the streets, but I think
they were more worried another monster was going
to come running out.'

Martha gave a little shudder. If she spoke to
anybody here about it, it would just be ancient history
to them.

But to her it was yesterday.

'What about the Loch?' she asked. 'What happened
to that?'

The Doctor's smile faltered.

'The hands were dead before they hit the water,' he
said sadly. Guiltily. 'But they didn't want to take any
chances: they had the Loch filled in. Later on, they
built the Princes Street Gardens on top. See that big
spiky tower over there? That's the Scott Monument.
That's where the Gardens are.'

Martha looked. She thought she could just see the
belt of greenery at the foot of Castle Hill. Strange to
think of all those little hands buried under there. She
remembered what it had felt like when they'd all been
raining down on her, scratching and choking her
as she'd stood and held on. She looked around the
hilltop: there were families there with little children,
old couples sitting holding hands on the benches; a
woman about Martha's age with bottle-blonde hair
jumped down from the base of the Greek columns
and went over on her ankle, laughing at her own
clumsiness. Martha couldn't imagine what it would
be like if the hands came back.

She remembered the walking dead, chasing the
stagecoach through the Grassmarket. If it happened
again now, the locals would probably think it was a
stunt for some show or other, and tut to themselves
about how much money the students had to waste.

'There's one thing I don't understand,' Martha said.
The Doctor looked at her questioningly. 'The hands
were broken, yes? They thought the dead bodies were
that Kith thing, and they were just joining the rest
of him? But they all still hung around together – the
zombies didn't just wander off on their own.'

'The mechanism that made them combine had
been damaged,' the Doctor said, a little guiltily. Martha
could guess how it had been undamaged. 'But the
psychic connection that made them group together
was still there. That's why any damage Monro did
with his electricity to the one hand managed to affect
all the others under the Loch. They still wanted to find
the other hands and join together. They just couldn't
remember how.'

'So why was that first one chasing Benjamin
Franklin?'

The Doctor nodded, looking back over the city.

'Only one reason I can think of,' he admitted
quietly.

'He had a hand,' Martha said. Her heart beat a little
harder.

'Probably the last one on Earth. They must have
given it to him just before they packed him onto that
stagecoach,' the Doctor said, still looking off into the
distance. Was he remembering watching those hands
fall into the Loch? He couldn't feel sorry for them,
surely? 'All the others would have been destroyed by
the lightning. Franklin's should have been safely on
the way to London.'

'So he could clone himself?' Martha asked.

'Franklin?' the Doctor shook his head. 'I doubt
it. The initial damage was a mistake. I don't think
anybody but Monro could recreate it, and even then
it would probably have taken him a good couple of
years experimenting.'

'But Monro could do it?'

The Doctor shrugged casually.

'So shouldn't we be trying to get it back?' Martha
suggested.

The Doctor spun around, his freshly laundered
coat spinning with him. The smile was back on
his face, the cheeky one that said he was going to
suggest something particularly naughty. The one that
Martha couldn't help but return, despite all her good
arguments to the contrary.

'Martha Jones, your lack of knowledge about
the history of medicine is truly shocking,' he
mocked gently. 'Haven't you ever studied Edinburgh
University's collection of Alexander Monros?'

She had to admit that she hadn't.

'Well, you can look it up next time we're near a
library,' he said, stepping off with authority. 'In the
meantime, why don't we go and try one of the local
delicacies?'

'Haggis?' Martha wrinkled her nose.

The Doctor smiled.

'Chips,' he said, waggling his eyebrows. 'With salt
and sauce.'

And they walked down Calton Hill arm in arm.