Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [123]
France, of course, wasn’t the only country with a Shadow Directory.
The old woman on the ground floor – the landlady, Duquesne guessed – was huddled by the fire, nodding to herself. That was all she did. Nod. When Duquesne had introduced herself, the woman had nodded. When Duquesne had asked after Tourette, the woman had nodded. Duquesne imagined that someone could probably loot the whole boarding house without the woman even noticing. She’d seen the horror, and she’d lost her mind to it.
And was she the only one? Duquesne recalled the ‘magic box’, the magician – the Doctor – the lightning god – standing at the ship’s helm, carrying her home. Vague memories.
Nothing more.
She made her way up the creaking stairs, and began searching the rooms on the upper floor. It didn’t take her long to find the place where Tourette had been staying; the door had been broken off its hinges, and a solid metal box lay among the furnishings that littered the room, housing one of the Shadow Directory’s miraculous communications machines. There was no sign of Tourette himself.
A strip of paper was hanging from the device, presumably a message from the Directory. If Tourette had been taken from this place by force – and it seemed likely – then he might not even have seen it before he’d been dragged away. Duquesne knelt down to read it.
SSM14GTOU AGENT TOURETTE PROTOCOL
CODING LOVELIES-BLEEDING VERIFY LOVELIES-BLEEDING VERIFY LOVELIES-BLEEDING
LoveLies-Bleeding. A Directory code, meaning that a situation had got out of hand, that the system had broken down. Usually it was an order for an agent to leave the site immediately, cleaning up... destroying... any loose ends they could find. The message went on:
END ASSIGNMENT WITH DISCRETION NO
FURTHER AGENTS TO ENTER NEW YORK SSMMDUQ
AGENT DUQUESNE RETIRED SSM14EN
And then Marielle Duquesne was standing, spinning around, falling over a broken card table, stumbling against the door-frame. Retired. Retired. The sign that an agent was no longer effective, that she might have been contaminated by a caillou. Such things happened. Of course they happened. Why, if the Directory learned that a whole town had been poisoned by a caillou’s madness, the first thing it would do was make sure that any field agents in the area were retired, so that their
‘abilities’ couldn’t be compromised, so that their secrets were kept safe. Retired. Retired. Retired by chirurgeon.
Marielle Duquesne ran out of the room, ran down the stairs, and ran out into the streets. She kept running, well aware that she’d probably never be able to stop.
Christmas. One of those little superstitions...
Erskine Morris was out on one of his long walks. Every Sunday and every holy holiday, he did the same thing, strutting through the town and making sure that the world could see how far away he was from the church. Of course, this was a walk like no other. There was broken glass under his boots, for one thing, and many of the familiar roads had been declared out-of-bounds by the militia. Still, he tried not to let it change anything. It was Christmas Day. A day for walking.
But he stopped when he reached Eastern Walk. Most of the debris had already been cleared away there, and the more courageous locals were beginning to return to their homes.
Erskine’s eye was caught by a single tent, erected at the side of the road, the only survivor of the ‘attractions’ that he and the other Renewalists had –
Ho hum, ho hum. Think about something else. The weather. The birds and the bees. The mating habits of the average Catholic. Ho hum, ho hum.
He approached the tent hesitantly, but it wasn’t until he reached the flap that he really recognized it. It had been pulled down the night before, but someone had knotted the torn fabrics together and put it back up again. The tent was made from a grubby scarlet material, painted with stars and moon-signs. Erskine took a