Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [119]
Which was worse?
‘I...’ he began.
Like a coin on its edge. Ready to fall either way. His senses flooded out through his feet, into the desert, and into the universe outdoors. There; down in America. The last battlefield. Woodwicke? Was that what its name had been?
‘Chris...’
– Chris...
Warrior-monks were in close combat with the spawn of Baalzebub. Invisible monsters walked through dreams, and wolves walked like men. Balls of light with lips of flame, half-human automatons made from feathers and bones. Angels with rats’ features, villages that sighed as if alive and lonely, gods with the heads of cats, cats with the heads of gods... and it stretched out across the cosmos, an infinity of new worlds, none of which could exist until he let them, except as shadowy possibilities in the darkness of not-being-sure...
‘Christopher?’
– Christopher?
True darkness... monster darkness... not knowing whether to cover your eyes or open your arms and let it swallow you up. The thing that all children are terrified of. Watching EarthDoom XV from behind the sofa... when he’d been a kid...
just a kid .
The memory hit him like a warhead, a memory so large that it filled his head and leaked out into the world around him, writing itself on the shadows of the Carnival Queen’s domain until everybody could see it.
Whumf! went the frisbee as it thumped the first robber’s head, knocking him senseless. Fwang! it went as it rebounded off the man’s skull, spinning into the legs of the second thug.
Oopf! he went as he fell onto the mezzacrete, and his gun clattered harmlessly out of his reach.
‘Curses!’ exclaimed the robber. ‘Foiled again!’
– Oh, no, said the Carnival Queen. I think I’m going to be physically ill.
‘Yes, my boy, law and order is certainly in our blood,’ said Cwej Senior, and the walls of Young Christopher’s city began to cave in.
Daniel Tremayne looked up at a dark sky shot through with cold yellow light, and sang. The amaranth sang along with him. History turned in his grasp, and turned again, and turned again, and turned again.
Erskine Morris watched light and fire wash through the streets of Woodwicke, cauterizing the wounds in the world where the madness bled out onto the streets. By God, he thought, as the last of the phantoms turned to cinders. By God. By God.
The creature that had once been Isaac Penley saw the light crackle across the clouds, and in that one moment of illumination, he saw the future, and knew what it meant. For the first time in his adult life, there was a spark of understanding inside him. It was all so simple. So very very simple. What had he been so worried about?
Christopher Cwej didn’t know who to trust. He just knew this: that he wasn’t ready for the world of wonders, that he wasn’t ready for the chimeras and the moondust-eaters, the slithy toves and the faerie queens, the flying pigs and the magic apples and the imaginary friends. It was too big, too painful.
Too alien.
‘Law and order are in our blood...’
On the streets of Woodwicke, a hundred pairs of eyes were focusing on the heavens, a hundred mouths forming perfect O-shapes as the sky sealed itself up and the sheer darkness of Cacophony was replaced by the star-spangled darkness of just-past-one-o’clock-in-the-morning. The storm ended, and the streets began to dry.
The gynoids sank into the buildings, the buildings sank into the streets, the streets sank into the columns, and Christopher Cwej looked up. At some point, he saw the Carnival Queen’s endless eyes, and they were full of sadness and pity. At some point, he saw the Doctor’s eyes, and they were full of sadness and pity as well. He couldn’t remember which he’d seen first, or what they’d said to him as the un-city had collapsed back into the desert. He couldn’t even remember whether he’d been screaming or crying as he’d made the decision and answered the question.
The boy sat among the dunes, shivering. His eyes were wide open, as if the eyelids had been pinned against his skull.