Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [125]
Chris didn’t know how to respond to that. Was the Doctor just trying to change the subject? He did that a lot, whenever anyone made him feel uncomfortable. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why Chris didn’t trust him any more...
The thought made him start. Since when had he not trusted the Doctor?
‘Oh yes, her,’ said the Doctor, hurriedly. ‘Don’t worry about her, Chris. She doesn’t have any power over us now. It was never her place to force the irrational universe on us, you know. She could just offer the possibility...’
‘That’s what I wanted to ask about. The choice I made. I didn’t... I mean, it was the right choice, wasn’t it?’
Which is when the Doctor started staring. One of his long, dark, Paddington-Bear stares. ‘There wasn’t any right choice,’
he said, almost under his breath. ‘If it helps, you made the same choice we made.’
Chris blinked. ‘You mean... what she told me about the Watchmakers... it was true?’
Aeons seemed to pass.
‘Don’t be silly,’ the Doctor finally announced, brightly.
‘That wouldn’t make sense. Now. I thought we might pop back and have a word with Doctor Johnson, see if we can get him to include "derationalized" in his dictionary. I’m tired of not having the vocabulary to describe my enemies properly...’
Matheson Catcher hid in the undergrowth, too terrified to move, too terrified even to breathe, lest he breathe out of rhythm and bring the whole world crashing down around him.
The blue box remained in the glade, solid and unchanging, but Catcher wasn’t fooled for a minute. He didn’t know how long he’d been watching – hours, probably – but he thought it was probably about time he blinked. He couldn’t even recall why he was watching the box, or where he’d been before that.
Perhaps –
– there! It was happening! The box was shifting, shimmering, fading into thin air. Cacophony! The chaos was taking its creation back into its unholy bosom and slither went the plants and the shrubs and slither and slither and before he knew it, Catcher was running, because the undergrowth was alive, because the vines and the creepers were reaching out for him, grabbing at him and trying to pull him down into the filthy earth, and he tripped over a root, and it laughed, dancing to the wheezing, groaning sound of Cacophony’s engine...
But he was back on his feet in an instant, and hurtling through the woods, trampling the evil weeds underfoot and snapping off the branches as they tried to molest him. There.
There in front of him, in the shade between two of the taller trees, was the silhouette of a man. The thorns on the branches (were branches supposed to have thorns?) were drawing blood from his hands, but the man was mere yards away, and then Catcher wouldn’t be alone any more, he’d have another being of Reason with him, an ally against nature’s darkness.
The man stepped out from under the trees.
‘Cah... hurrr,’ the man groaned. ‘Catch... errr!’
Catcher stopped running. It wasn’t a man. IT WASN’T A MAN IT WASN’T A MAN IT WAS A IT WAS A IT WAS
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
‘Whyy... di’ you... do thisss?’ the appalling thing asked.
And Catcher felt the things of Hell reaching up out of the ground, wrapping their sticky shoots around his ankles. They were dragging him down, down into the abyss, down into the dark, and there was a flash of green as his head hit the ground, and then blackness, just blackness, nothing else.
There was a tree on Paris Street, newly planted in the dirt near the smoking corpse of the church. Marielle Duquesne regarded it suspiciously from the shelter of the alleyway. It was a fir tree, but its branches were decked with shiny baubles and silver stars. Was the tree part of the madness, or just some strange American custom? It was hard to tell. Without the Sight, she had no way of knowing what was normal and what was the spoor of a caillou.
‘I used to like alleys, too,’ said a voice. ‘Good places to hide. Don’t need them any more, though.’
Duquesne heard herself cry out. She turned, imagining the horror that might be standing behind her. A chirurgeon, no