Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [14]
‘ Io Ordo Ordo ... ’
And in the middle of it all was Catcher, the only one whose face wasn’t hidden, standing next to the platform in his dull grey shirt and his high-collared jacket; and now Daniel looked at the thing in the middle of the floor, didn’t it remind him of an altar? He thought of the stories he’d heard around New York, about the warlocks and the diabolists who got together in old crypts and graveyards, summoning up the children of Hell itself, spilling unholy blood on Christian altars and defecating in churches (whatever ‘defecating’ meant)...
Hah. But these weren’t witches, were they? In Dill Village, someone had once told Daniel that there were people in the world who did even stranger things than the Satanists.
Freethinkers and scientists, not witch-doctors and mad monks.
‘Like Freemasons,’ he’d been told, but he hadn’t understood the word. He’d even heard that the ones who ran the world, the Presidents and the Prime Ministers and the mad Englishmen, belonged to groups like that. The news hadn’t surprised him at all.
That was it, then. Catcher and his friends weren’t talking to bug-a-boos and hobgoblins. They were doing something else, something more modern, something scientific. Like what?
And what are you doing here, Daniel Tremayne, down in the belly of the beast? Coming out of the cracks and getting yourself noticed. Just like the soft Revolutionaries, sticking their heads up so that the English could blow their brains out.
‘Listen,’ said Catcher. And the men fell silent, and there was a moment’s quiet –
– no there wasn’t. Daniel could hear a kind of echo in the room, like parts of their words had stopped dead in mid-air, like they’d got stuck in the muddy light. ‘ Ordo Io. Ordo Io Ordo Ordo. ’
‘O,’ said the echo. ‘O.’
‘ Io Ordo Io Io Ordo,’ said Catcher.
‘I O I I O,’ said the echo.
One. Nought. One. One. Nought.
Daniel Tremayne wanted to cover his ears, but couldn’t.
Was this what he’d heard outside, the call, the thing that had dragged him here by the scruff of the neck? Was it just calling to him, or to Catcher, or to all of them?
‘ Ordo Io. Ordo Io Io.’
Nought one. Nought one one. Daniel Tremayne looked up, and saw that everything – colours, shapes, everything – was turning into the bastard numbers, blinking from nought to one and back again, Catcher’s words reshaping the world, giving the whole of creation a new program, chanted in ‘O’s and ‘I’s and noughts and ones. And somehow Daniel knew exactly what was going to happen, and in that brief moment of revelation he understood what had been calling him, and why he was here, and what it was he had to do, but a second passed and the thought was gone, pushed out of his head by ‘Io’s and
‘Ordo’s.
I-SAID-WHAT-ARE-YOU-DOING-HERE-DANIEL
TREMAYNE?
‘ Ordo Io,’ said Catcher, and the words became the world, the world became the words, the air spasmed like it was giving birth and something arrived.
It was a dead end. Erskine Morris uttered the second most obscene word he knew – he was keeping the worst until he was face-to-face with Catcher – and turned around, trying not to notice that his legs were trembling like Englishmen in a whorehouse. He could still hear words being hissed into his ear, and still had no idea where they were coming from. He was sure they were being spoken by human tongues – thunder and fornication, what other kind could speak? He was letting this charade get to him, by Christ – but it was hard to say where the whispers ended and the low humming of the corridor began.
‘Catcher!’ he called out, stumbling back along the passage.
‘It’s no use hiding there, man, I can see you! Come out and show yourself!’
That was a lie, of course.