Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [102]
He’d run, but the things were still following him. He’d first glimpsed them on Burr Street, where he’d spotted their leering faces reflected in puddles and broken windows. More and more of them had appeared, until a whole legion had been pursuing him through the town, rattling their sticks and their jawbones.
And Tourette had recognized every one of them; the sorcerers, the mystics, the fish-headed monsters. They were the caillou, the ghosts of the ones that the Shadow Directory had hunted down and executed over the years. They had come for revenge. They had come to drag Tourette down into Hell.
He tugged the metal box out from under the floorboards and started tapping out a message to his superiors, but something was already beating at the door.
They weren’t there. THEY WEREN’T THERE.
He looked into every shadow, tried to see sense in every corner of the screen. He felt clockwork fingers picking through the angles of his head, but the fingers were his own, and the angles wouldn’t stay still, and sometimes he thought he could hear the voices of the Watchmakers HEAR THEIR
VOICES JUST LIKE ALWAYS even though the voices were just his own voice and they weren’t there because they had abandoned him ABANDONED HIM ABANDONED HIM
ABANDONED HIM.
‘Ahem,’ said the Doctor.
Catcher jumped. The Doctor – was that the creature’s name? – stood beside him, the end of his walking-cane pressed into the melted-cheese floor of the cellar.
‘Yes, yes, it’s me,’ said the Doctor hurriedly. ‘Agent of Cacophony, enemy of Reason, destroyer of worlds, poacher of eggs, et cetera et cetera. Really, you’re making a terrible mistake.’
Catcher felt his head jerk spastically to one side.
‘TheY have ABANdoneD mE,’ he said.
The Doctor frowned. ‘Oh dear. Has it reached that stage already? Tell me something, Mr Catcher. When you scuff your right shoe against a paving-stone, do you have an uncontrollable urge to turn around and scuff your left shoe against it as well, just for the sake of symmetry?’
Catcher nodded enthusiastically.
‘Thought so. You’re just the type.’ The Doctor shrugged and approached the dais, his cane remaining wedged into the floor. ‘Now. Let’s see if we can clean up some of the mess.’
CLEAN IT UP!
‘CleAN iT ALL up,’ intoned Catcher.
‘We’ll see.’ A piece of the ceiling plopped onto the man’s shoulder, and he brushed it off nonchalantly. ‘As I thought.
Modelled on the TARDIS console room. The amaranth has taste. The little gold ball, Mr Catcher. Where is it?’
Their eyes met, and Catcher thought he saw machinery turning inside the creature’s pupils. Surely, he couldn’t be a...
‘STO!len by CAcoPHony,’ Catcher told him.
‘Oh.’ The Doctor plunged his hands into the dais, feeling around for the pulpy remains of the powder-blue switches that had sunk into its surface. ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. In the real TARDIS, this would be the synchronic feedback circuit. Even in this deteriorated state, I should be able to achieve some kind of... ah.’
The dais made a tiny burping noise, then began to solidify.
The Doctor nodded. ‘There. The Stattenheim-Waldorf technique. They knew a thing or two about TARDIS
configuration, Stattenheim and Waldorf. Which some might think was odd, seeing as they came from sixteenth-century Berlin. Still, there are patterns...’
He looked around the room as he said it. Catcher followed suit, and felt himself jump again. The sticky walls of the cellar were folding in on themselves, revealing harder, sharper surfaces on the other side.
‘Do you know what they call this kind of procedure, where I come from?’ pondered the Doctor. ‘They call it "the flower that never dies".