Falls the Shadow (16 page)

‘How are we Dorothy? Have we found the hidden treasure?’

Ace pulled her hands from her face and glared with a sharp intensity at the figures advancing towards her. They didn’t seem to be walking. Their legs went through the motions but their feet weren’t quite touching the ground. They were gliding. Two: a man and a woman. The bloke was sexy but there was something callous shining in his perfect blue irises.

She didn’t know who they were, but she found herself accepting their presence automatically. They were just there. They were who they were.

‘What do you know?’ she spat.

‘
Everything
,’ the woman replied. Ace shivered, believing her.

‘I’m afraid,’ said the man, voice smooth as an eggshell, malignant as cancer, ‘things have changed. The Doctor will not be rejoining you. He has quite literally shuffled off this mortal coil. He’ll miss the fun and games.’

‘Tomorrow,’ the woman’s mouth curled into a smile that bit into Ace’s soul, ‘we are going to have a great time. That’s a promise. Be good.’ With that the pair strolled away. Ace said nothing, watching their retreating backs as they slid into the darkness.

Well now Ace, there are two more names to add to the list of suspects.

Another figure detached from the shadows, hurtling down the tunnel towards her. A flustered and upset woman in a fluffy dressing‐
gown.

‘Oh thank God.’ Sandra collapsed against the wall beside Ace. ‘Thank God,’ she repeated, digging her fingers into the brickwork. ‘Thank God.

‘Harry is dead!’ she howled, her face turning red and gushing tears. ‘They killed him. They took him apart. He didn’t have a face. We were in love. He didn’t have a face, oh God, he didn’t have a face…’

Ace pulled her arms around the woman, smothering her in a comradely embrace. Sandra buried her face in Ace’s shoulder.

‘What did they mean?’ Ace whispered after a moment’s silence. ‘What have they done to the Doctor?’

‘They killed Truman.’ Sandra’s voice was terrible. ‘He was the gate, their link back to the real world. The Doctor, Dad, they’re trapped.’

Ace released Sandra and slammed herself against the wall. A dull pain cracked along her spine but it only made her more determined.

‘What do we do?’ It was Benny’s voice at her shoulder, a voice looking for a lead. Ace glanced at Sandra and realized that she too was waiting for someone to make a decision.

Well, it wasn’t as if the Doctor was going to turn up, handing out advice to anyone stupid enough to listen.

‘I’ll tell you,’ she told them. ‘We get out of here, out of this house, out of the way of these – who d’you say…’

‘Gabriel and Tanith,’ Sandra confirmed.

‘We get out of the way of Gabriel and Tanith. Then we think about what we’re going to do. Then we come back in force. And we blow them off the map. How does that sound?’

She glanced between Benny and Sandra. There was no dissent.

The rush for the door was a shambles, a mass of limbs and bodies all consumed with but a single thought.
Escape
. Ace didn’t try to impose any order. She was more worried about what would happen if Gabriel and Tanith tried to get in their way. Ace became obsessed by them – there was something about them that demanded obsession. They were enigmas. Ace remembered the sight of the TARDIS central column bleaching white with an alien power, and wondered just how much power these enigmas might have. Not too much, she hoped.

They didn’t appear. Ace was surprised. Maybe they weren’t as all‐
knowing as they claimed. The front door loomed up before the women like a grey altar slab, and Gabriel and Tanith were yet to appear. Sandra fell against the door and scrabbled at the locks and bolts that held it in place. With a desperate flourish she threw the door wide open.

The three women stared through the door – not at the quiet night‐
time countryside but into the heart of a swirling, buzzing void – a wall of static on the far side of the door. The void dared the women to approach it, certain that they couldn’t. It was a door to nowhere.

The Doctor had never realized how claustrophobic an infinity could feel. He travelled through the vast wildernesses of time and space dimly aware that there were limits to his world, too distant to lace his
wanderlust
with boredom. He would never see everything.

Here interstitial reality expanded into eternity in all conceivable directions. He and Winterdawn were nothing, less than beads of water in the ocean of reality. They were without depth or weight. But somehow infinity seemed to crush around them, tightening like the darkness in a prison. It was a cell of inconceivable magnitude perhaps – but still a cell.

He had seen Truman’s face. He only had himself to blame. He should have told Winterdawn, then none of this would have happened. No, that was pointless. The old man would have thought he was mad. Besides, he was certain that Truman hadn’t closed the gate deliberately.

‘How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?’

Winterdawn was slumped in his chair, stunned – almost paralysed – by the simultaneous closing of the gate and the Doctor’s deductions about Truman’s real nature. Or unreal nature. The jokes kept his mind off their predicament.

‘I don’t know, how many?’

‘Three. One to change the light bulb, one not to change the light bulb and one to neither change nor not change the light bulb.’

The Doctor smiled. It was all he could manage.

‘What about the one to neither change nor not change nor neither neither change nor not change the light bulb?’

‘I’d forgotten him. Sorry.’ The Professor’s voice was old, drained of vitality.

‘You don’t suppose someone else could re‐
open the gate?’ the Doctor asked, not hopefully.

‘I don’t think so. Truman and myself are trained. If anyone else tries, it’ll almost certainly wipe their minds,’ Winterdawn spoke calmly. ‘We are stuck here, my friend. And there’s no one to rescue us.’

‘That’s an assumption.’

‘A reasonable one,’ Winterdawn insisted. The Doctor found his cheery pessimism unnerving. ‘There’s one way out of here. One way, and even that may be barred to us. Here where the mundane facts of reality are locked away, can we age? Can we starve? Can we die?’

‘It makes no difference. This is death,’ the Doctor replied, darkening the atmosphere. Winterdawn looked at him quizzically.

‘Death being a concept‐
condition with no physical or geographical or meaningful existence. This being a concept‐
place with no physical or geographical or meaningful existence. A living death.’

‘You must be the life and soul of the party,’ Winterdawn replied sourly.

‘That’s what Oscar Wilde told me. I think he was being serious then. I knew I had to come here in the end. The ancient mariner beached at last, on the high tide in the coast of nowhere. How does it feel to be free?’

‘Hollow,’ Winterdawn replied. ‘There’s something I must tell you.’

‘Yes?’ The Doctor looked up, intrigued. He couldn’t understand how anything could be considered important in a place as uniform and levelling and empty as this. He was seeing things from the perspective of a Time Lord, with the resignation of a Time Lord and the despair of a Time Lord and the – Rassilon help us! – blunted imagination of a Time Lord. Winterdawn couldn’t cope with the enormity – he was too human, too subjective in his thinking.

How much simpler things must seem, through the eyes of a human being.

‘This place isn’t part of the real universe. I think it might adapt itself to us.’

‘Death is sentient. There’s a cheering thought.’ The Doctor smiled lopsidedly. And he meant it.

‘It may look calm,’ Winterdawn continued, ignoring the Doctor’s interruption, ‘but I doubt it will last. I believe the interstix is preparing to challenge us. I, uh, should have told you. Cranleigh was the first to enter the gap – of his own volition. He was… insane, for two years prior to that, but he’d built up his mental reserves, made something of a recovery.’

‘And five minutes in the gap demolished his mind?’ the Doctor asked, not expecting any answer other than a sincere ‘yes’. There didn’t seem to be another option.

‘He was in a confused state, and he was vulnerable. I imagine the interstitial forces latched onto that immediately. We’re better prepared, but we’re going to be here for much longer than Cranleigh. We may go mad.’

‘Look on the bright side. It’ll be something to do.’ The Doctor tried to smile. Winterdawn’s expression remained grim. He jerked his chair forward, closer to the Doctor.

‘I told you that I’m not entirely unobservant,’ he said, staring up into the Doctor’s eyes. It’s impossible for you to have duplicated and surpassed my work into transcendentalism without the aid of the tetrahedron. Even if you could, it seems unlikely that you would disguise the result as a phone box and hide it in my cellar. Your conclusions about Truman fit the facts but it’s what I’d think of immediately. There are things you’ve said that strike me as odd.’

‘What do you want to know?’ the Doctor replied guardedly.

‘Are you human?’

‘No.’

Winterdawn leant back in his chair, and raised a finger to rub his lower lip thoughtfully. Apart from that, he seemed almost unimpressed.

‘Extraterrestrial?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your two girlfriends?’

‘Ace was born in North London in 1970, Benny on an Earth colony in 2422. We travel in time and space in my police box.’

Winterdawn glanced down at his feet, then back up at the Doctor. He was laughing, tears guttering down his face like an overloaded storm‐
drain.

‘Doctor, we may be trapped here for eternity, but at least we’ll have something to talk about!’

The laughter broke off, cutting into a sharp yell. A thin red weal was cut into Winterdawn’s cheek. The Professor raised a hand to his cheek, tentatively pressing his fingertips against the blood.

There was a sharp pain on the back of the Doctor’s hand. He looked down and saw that a similar gash had appeared across his knuckles – blood rushing in a trail from a small incision.

In the heart of the wound was a tiny fragment of glass.

There was a gentle, rushing sound and tears erupted on the sleeve of his jacket. Something cut into his neck.

‘The attack,’ Winterdawn whispered.

A cloud was hurtling towards them from the unreal horizon, propelled by forces undefined by physics. The cloud glistened and sparkled with light. It was a cloud of fragments, a cloud of glass.

Suddenly they were in the heart of the cloud, in the middle of a maelstrom of glass shards. Pinprick pains erupted on the Doctor’s face and hands, his clothes shredded in the onslaught, glass buried itself into his flesh and his eyes, his sight misting red with congealing blood. Winterdawn was flailing in the storm, knocked from his chair and thrown aside, screaming in agony. The Doctor’s sight dulled into blackness. His senses were drowned by a chorus of nerves. They deafened him with their song of pain.

The Doctor opened his mouth to howl, only to find glass lodging in his throat. His pain escalated until he ceased even to feel it. There was just an agonizing nothing, wailing in the eye of the storm.

The chair was harsh against Ace’s back and there was a disturbing lightness on her chest. Horrible things danced in the darkness on the insides of her eyelids. Gabriel and Tanith had shaken her up more than she had believed. Still sleeplessness was security. Anything could get at her while she was asleep. She didn’t believe that anything was going to try. Everything would happen, Gabriel and Tanith had promised, in the morning. She believed them, Christ alone knew why.

They had taken refuge in Sandra’s bedroom. Ace had assumed leadership of the group, insisting they go somewhere safe and stay there
together
– safety in numbers, right? After they’d settled in Ace had realized they’d missed someone out. Cranleigh was loose in the house – easy prey for Gabriel and Tanith – and Sandra had mentioned someone called Wedderburn. Despite protests, Ace refused to let anyone go and find them, and the guilt was beginning to gnaw at her.

Ace was sitting on a chair propped up firmly against the door. She was grimly determined to stay awake. Benny was still messed up after her experiences in the cellar and Sandra was a wimp anyway. No one else was going to look out for them. Not the Doctor.

She stared across the room at Sandra, tucked safely in bed, sound asleep. She had cried her way into oblivion. For the past couple of hours she’d entertained Ace with a decent impersonation of a human‐
shaped rock.

Bernice was restless. She’d slumped quietly on the floor, slipping into a light and troubled sleep, constantly turning and twisting, kicking her blanket away from her. Ace was tempted to cover her up but found that she couldn’t budge from the chair. Benny was probably freezing, but Ace was loath to move. Jealously perhaps. Benny looked so much better than she ever had. Better body, figure, build.

Life, who needs it, eh?

Her eyes left Benny and latched onto the bullet hole clumsily punched into the ceiling. How the hell had that got there, she wondered? Whoever did it was using some bloody heavy artillery.

Ace wished she had a gun. Sod the Doctor and his stupid ‘guns are for the limp‐
brained’ moralizing. She needed the reassuring squareness pressed against her chest right now. There was something about Gabriel and Tanith that shitted her up. Something worse than evil, worse than death. She didn’t know what it was but she’d have felt better if she had the means to shoot it.

The next minute Benny was shaking her awake. She woke swearing.

‘Good morning.’ Benny sounded cheerful but hollow. ‘It’s wonderful to find you so keen and ready for action.’

‘Shitshitshitshit,’ Ace spat, wondering what had died in her mouth. Her eyes leapt from Benny’s lively but pale features to Sandra, who was hovering behind Benny’s shoulder. Everyone seemed okay.

‘Gabriel and Tanith have been,’ Sandra said coldly and things weren’t okay any more. Ace glanced round and saw that she was still jammed tightly against the door. No one could have got in, unless they could walk through walls, which was a possibility she hadn’t discounted. She had to force herself not to howl with laughter. No, this was hysteria. This was not good.

‘When? How? What?’ she snapped, focusing herself on the matter in hand.

‘They pushed this under the door.’ Benny was bland. ‘Ten minutes ago.’

She held a piece of card between finger and thumb. Ace stared at it.

‘It’s rather stylish,’ Benny chimed in suddenly. ‘Warped but logical.’ Ace stared at her in uncomprehending malice and she broke off. ‘It was only a thought.
I’m
not going.’

Bernice stared awkwardly at her feet, both planted firmly on the dining‐
room lino. Foremost in her mind was a sense of confusion. She looked away from her feet and stared coldly at Ace and Sandra, who shared the same bewildered facial expression. Benny was in doubt that her face was set similarly.

Sandra had left first, shuffling wordlessly out of the room. Ace immediately sprang after her – not to get her back in, as Benny had supposed – but to follow her downstairs. Then Benny felt herself shamble after them. There was no coercion – she knew exactly what she was doing and exactly why she
needed
to do it. Now she had stopped those motives seemed obscure.

Maybe it was mental control. Maybe it was a need. Maybe they
had
to see Gabriel and Tanith. Maybe the Doctor was going to land the TARDIS somewhere peaceful. Pigs would sprout wings and defy the laws of aerodynamics.

Maybe she’d just got a touch tipsy and would wake soon in her room in the TARDIS. But everything that had happened since Gabriel and Tanith seemed dreamlike. It felt so unreal that it had to be true.

She let her eyes pan down the length of the room, contemplating the present contents of the non‐
real paradigm that Sandra called her ‘dining‐
room’. The table, a hefty oak affair, was already laid neatly. Lace cloth buried beneath cruet, a jungle of flowers, cutlery tray, toast rack and butter dish. And plates. Five plates bearing piles of something greasy but appetizing. Benny decided that cholesterol poisoning was preferable to starvation. This particular strain of food didn’t seem familiar but since the Doctor had a peculiar inability to master the culinary arts she’d probably tasted something similar, incognito, aboard the TARDIS. Benny wanted to swoop down and consume everything on the table, up to and including the begonias, but she held back. She glanced at Ace again, seeing equal uncertainty in her companion. Ace wasn’t looking at the table but over it, her gaze fixed on their hosts.

Gabriel and Tanith stood with their backs to the window and the morning sun. Benny remembered little of last night and she hadn’t known what to expect from this pair. Ace had told her that they were attractive with a loathsome edge, but Benny wasn’t so certain. It was true, they were physical marvels. They were beautiful as angels, gods walking among their mortal followers. They were attractive and desirable and Gabriel was hunky enough to give her a hot and sticky thrill whenever she really thought about him, but – and this was a positively humungous ‘but’…

They were repulsive. There was not one aspect of their oh‐
so‐
beautiful appearance that didn’t make Benny want to retch with disgust. They were stunning corpses with rotting souls. When they smiled Benny felt her stomach trying to eat through her intestines.

They weren’t dressed as she remembered. Gabriel had changed into a dark green velvet suit with a thick collar and a neck clasp. A patterned smoking jacket tightened around his stomach like a miniature corset, and a ruffled shirt made the space up to his neck. There was an elaborate ring on his finger, inset with a jewel the colour of blood. Tanith wore a heavy white felt suit, a check‐
patterned necktie clutching at her throat. A formless white cap balanced on the top of her head, forever on the verge of collapsing. Their appearance carried with it a brooding elegance, which seemed to enhance their wretchedness.

‘You had to come in the end.’ Gabriel smiled lopsidedly, watching them through half‐
closed eyes. ‘Welcome little ladies, little dolls.’

‘Sit!’ Tanith declaimed, throwing her arms wide open in a too‐
expansive gesture of welcome. ‘Eat, drink and be merry!’

‘For tomorrow we die?’ Ace growled by Benny’s ear.

‘Oh, we have no intention of keeping you waiting.’ Gabriel’s voice was honey. ‘Now, your places are allotted, your breakfasts full and English.’

Sandra moved jerkily to the nearest chair and lowered herself onto it slowly. Benny noticed that she was shaking, manipulating her cutlery crudely, fumbling as if they were unfamiliar utensils.

Benny was next. She found her plate accompanied by a label bearing her name in a Gothic hand, alongside a scratchy caricature of her features. This was exaggerated and spiteful and it left her feeling wounded, in a small way. She kept silent, took her place and began to eat tentatively, prodding at the food trying to work out what it was and whether or not it was still alive before slashing at it with her knife. It tasted okay. Whatever else they might be, Gabriel and Tanith were good cooks.

Ace hovered defiantly in the doorway, watching with deep suspicion as the domestic scene unfolded before her. Only Benny seemed to notice her stance. Faced with a choice of giving in to pressure or being both ignored and hungry Ace chose the former. She sat warily between Sandra and Benny, glaring across the table and occasionally deigning to eat something.

There was a glass by Benny’s plate, filled almost the brim with milk.

‘You don’t have anything with a bit more body I suppose?’

‘A couple of things,’ Tanith replied. A faint smile crossed her face.

Silence ensued, punctuated by the sound of cutlery cracking, four jaws grinding, tension expanding across the table, minutes aching past.

‘We are,’ Gabriel broke the silence, ‘in residence in the now disused room of the late Jennifer Winterdawn. I hope no one has any objections.’

Silence.

‘Dad wouldn’t like that,’ Sandra said softly.

‘Your father has no objection,’ Tanith giggled. ‘He is beyond such mortal concerns.’

Benny’s body contracted, a protection against the sudden cold.

‘What have you done with them?’ Ace said with a clarity and a politeness that she only used when she was being really hostile.

‘They are gone, locked forever in limbo. It was simple, implanting suggestions in their minds, playing on their curiosity.’

‘They have been written out of the book of life,’ Tanith embellished the theme. ‘They were cluttering up the plot.’

‘You see,’ Gabriel added, ‘you three are superb, lovely human beings. The Doctor and the Professor are less so. We really wouldn’t get on with them, so we shunted them out of reality.’

‘My brother says that they are a couple of devious and untrustworthy types who, given time, could work out what makes us tick and then how to stop the pendulum. You three, on the other hand, are wonderful individuals but completely incapable of working together without the guidance of your patriarchs. A sad fact but true. The Doctor is a loner at heart. He believes that he can use friendship to build a shell against the cold and heartless world he is forced to confront. He doesn’t need you, but you need him.’

‘He’ll get back,’ Ace said, her hostility undiminished. ‘Be sure.’

‘He will not,’ Gabriel snapped. It seemed to be the end of the matter.

‘So what do you want with us?’ Benny chimed in.

‘Anything you can do,’ Tanith replied, ‘we want it.’

‘And what are you doing?’ Benny pressed her point home.

‘Taking on the universe,’ Gabriel replied. ‘We’ve already destroyed it, you understand. Things can never be the same again. There is a monumental battle between creator and creation which must inevitably lead to the destruction of one or the other. We’re going to have fun finding out.’

The pause was shattered by a low, melodic song emanating from Tanith’s lips. Benny didn’t believe that something so disgusting could be responsible for something so beautiful.

‘Spread a little happiness as you go by…’

Gabriel was on his feet, his arm a motion blurring across the table top. There was contact – a crunch of flesh against flesh. Benny whirled round to see Ace’s head lolling backwards, blood rippling from the corner of her mouth. For a horrible moment Benny was afraid that Gabriel had broken her neck. Then she straightened up, wiping the blood away. A smear remained.

Both Gabriel and Tanith were standing now. Tanith was passive, hands tucked into her jacket pockets, a mischievous smile on her lips. Gabriel was a brooding, aggressive hulk, licking spots of Ace’s blood from his fist.

‘Happiness,’ Ace snarled. ‘Yeah.’ She delivered an ocean of saliva into Gabriel’s face.

Benny felt a desperate thing trying to claw its way out of her stomach. She’d never believed there was really such a thing as evil. She’d never believed that such an absolute concept could have a tangible existence. But here it was now, standing in front of her.

Absolute physical Evil. With a big ‘E’. She said so.

‘Evil?’ Tanith’s voice was a cool hush, a missile‐
launching‐
sequence hush. She didn’t raise her voice and that made Benny feel worse. ‘You
dare
compare us to that trivial nonentity? Evil is a fashion victim! We go beyond evil and its pallid opponent.’

‘We are lovely, loathsome, wonderful, worthless, superlative and shit. The word made flesh!’

‘The universe in microcosm. The cosmos incarnate. The totality of all things incognito. And more. And less.’

‘We are mad love in an existential universe. We are nihilist messiahs.’

‘Not born, aborted into the universe. We have the light. We have the knowledge. We have the power and the glory forever and ever amen.’

‘We are freaked out. We are totally off our trolley. We are one coconut short of a fairground stall. In short…’

‘We are deranged. We are psychopaths, sociopaths, up the garden path.’

‘We are mad. And you are trapped with us.’

Delicious smiles played across their faces. Insane, ripe smiles.

‘But,’ Gabriel clapped his hands together, his voice gaining a strident, plummy quality, ‘you don’t want to hear about our problems.’

To one side of Benny, Sandra began to retch frantically.

‘Which one do you like?’ Gabriel asked his companion.

‘Oh, Dorothy.’ Tanith gazed lazily at Ace who squirmed aggressively. ‘The way she moves is thrilling. Then Sandra, a bedtime confection.’

‘You don’t rank Bernice. My favourite: the fake. The completely unqualified archaeologist who got away with it because she was
good
. What a wonderful world she must have lived in, not knowing how much was real and how much wasn’t. A beautiful twilight world.’

‘You’re talking about perception, my brother. I’m talking about sex.’

‘The same thing surely?’

‘Shut up!’ Benny screamed, surprising herself with her force and her venom. ‘I don’t want to listen to any of this!’