Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [89]
'Indeed. What a fortuitous piece of luck,' Holmes said dryly, walking over and taking the paper from my hand. 'Indeed, these are the words as I remember them, with phonetic notes as well.'
'I remember him writing something just before the attack,' Bernice said, 'but why would he want to give it to us? Could it be a trap?'
'I think not,' said Holmes after a moment's thought. 'I am an irritant to the good Professor, and he has already tried to kill me on a number of occasions. How convenient for him if we died on this alien planet, and thus allowed him to continue extorting, blackmailing and terrorizing his way through England and ultimately the world?'
'So you trust him?'
'In this instance, his aims and ours coincide. Now, to business.'
Like members of a choir, we gathered around Holmes and the piece of paper.
'On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three!'
'I-ay, I-ay,' we managed before Bernice and I collapsed in fits of giggles.
Holmes and the Doctor stared at us with lips pursed.
'When you have quite recovered...' Holmes said.
'That's quite enough of that...' the Doctor barked.
Without daring to look at one another, Bernice and I clustered around them and tried again.
'I-ay, I-ay Naghaa, naghaighai! Shoggog fathaghn! I-ay, I-ay t - '
The phrasing was wrong and we stumbled over the unnatural words, but there was something there. We tried again, and again. Under Holmes's tutelage we must have spent a good hour rehearsing that damned chant.
Even now I can hear it echo in the labyrinthine passages of my mind: a dark, malevolent sound that has a life of its own and induces feelings of dread in me whenever it pops into my mind.
'I-ay, I-ay. Naghaa, naghaighai! Shoggog fathaghn! lay, I-ay tsa toggua tholoya! Tholoya fathaghn!'
After a while, we were confident enough that we could introduce a phasing in the chant, with Holmes coming in a beat after Bernice and myself, and the Doctor's fine baritone soaring high above on the descant. The nature of the chant altered in subtle ways: sometimes Holmes's voice was a powerful engine behind us, pushing us on, and sometimes it seemed to be dragging us backwards. Our voices seemed to be echoing in a deeper and larger space than the cavern.
And then, after what seemed like an eternity but must have been only half an hour, I thought I could detect other voices singing along with us: soft, sibilant voices pronouncing words in a subtly different way. A hallucination?
Perhaps, but we took our cue from them and tried to shape our palates to form the same sounds as they did. It was not easy. I suspect now, so many years later, that if they were real then they were not human in form. We must have produced a close enough approximation, however, for it was shortly after that when Bernice plucked at my sleeve and indicated that our shadows were being cast in front of us from a bright source of light behind.
Still singing, I turned to look.
Through the gates of delirium I saw an alien world blazing in all its glory. A wide plain spread before us, curling up in the distance to form tall mountains of knobbly purple rock. The sky was white and glowing, and seemed to cut the mountains off as if it were solid. A citrus-scented breeze ruffled my hair.
Still chanting, we walked into another world.
Interlude
GGJ235/57/3/82-PK3
V-ON, BRD-ABLE, WPU = 1.244
VERBAL INPUT,
COMPRESS AND SAVE
MILITARY LOG FILE EPSILON
CODE GREEN FIVE
ENABLE
They know I'm watching them now. I made too much noise getting down from that window the other day, and attracted a bit of unwelcome attention.
It ended up in a chase through the alleys. Since they can fly and I can't, I reckon it was a bit one-sided, so I brought one of them down with a sort of home-made bolas and another two with smart missiles.
I keep having to move my base camp. They're very good at searches: that's what flying does for you, it gives you a different perspective on where people might hide. For a while I hid out in nooks and crannies that couldn't