Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [30]
The rain beat at the broken timbers of the roof, slid down onto the muddied floor. Erskine Morris watched spontaneous and mystical shapes form in the puddles in front of him. They reminded him that he needed a drink. Everything reminded him that he needed a drink.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Monroe. His voice was gruff and laced with phlegm, giving Erskine the impression that, over the years, whole sentences must have got themselves lodged in the sticky web of mucus at the back of his throat.
‘Mr Catcher knows what he’s doing. Menace of Cacophony and all that. Only thing that makes sense.’
Erskine didn’t reply. An hour ago – less – he would have got up and screamed at the ridiculous little man: what do you mean, makes sense? For the Great Non-Existent Entity’s Sake, none of it makes sense.
But now –
‘Responsibility to history,’ Monroe continued. ‘Obvious, really. Don’t know why it never struck me before. Three cheers for Mr Catcher, mmm?’
– but now, the words wouldn’t come. As if, after everything he’d seen in the labyrinth, any rational argument he could come up with would just sound hollow.
He let himself glance around the ruins The Renewal Society had broken up for the night, leaving the building as an empty shell once more, littered with broken bottles and the corpses of various tobacco products. There were just four men in the place now, Erskine and those of the ‘inner circle’ who’d accompanied him from Catcher’s own little pocket of Hell.
‘Funny thing,’ Monroe mused. ‘You could say the Catholics had the right idea all along. Witch-burnings and all that, hmmm?’
Erskine met Monroe’s gaze. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the man looked wrong somehow, changed in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Then he looked down, and examined his own body. For some reason, he wasn’t at all surprised to find that it looked exactly the same.
‘Yeah, but what is an amaranth? What’s it supposed to do?’
Another damp hike had taken them to the top of Paris Street, where the thoroughfare met Eastern Walk and the roadsides were littered with medicine-booths. A few of the
‘attractions’ were still open, small crowds gathering around them, made up of those townspeople who were determined to spend Christmas Eve as far away from their families as possible. Nobody was taking much notice of Roz or the Doctor. There was no reason why they should, Roz remembered. The world doesn’t know I tried to kill Samuel Lincoln. It just feels that way.
‘Do you know any of these people?’ the Doctor asked.
Roz shrugged. ‘Some. A couple are customers of mine.’
A look of absolute horror briefly crossed his face, but he hid it well. ‘Customers?’
‘I’m in the fortune-telling business.’
He seemed to relax. ‘Ah. There’s no future in it, you know.’ A half-smile played across his face. ‘Hackney Empire, 1956.’
‘What about the amaranth?’ Roz insisted.
‘Time Lord technology. The first amaranth was designed by the maintenance engineers who tended to the Eye of Harmony.’
‘Remind me.’
‘The Eye of Harmony. The power source around which all of Time-Lord civilization revolves.’ The Doctor sounded almost proud when he said that, throwing his arms wide and rolling his R’s. Or maybe he’s just taking the piss, Roz thought.
‘It’s our pet black hole,’ he continued. ‘No TARDIS could ever have got off the ground without it. But the thing about black holes is that they do tend to have unfortunate effects on the continuum around them. All sorts of things start happening when you mess about with that kind of energy. Ancient legend holds that when the Eye was first used, Rassilon himself was very nearly killed by a free-falling rhinoceros.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Yes. But you get the idea. The continuum becomes warped, frayed, ambiguous. The amaranth is designed to stop unpleasant things happening. It looks for parts of the universe that have become unstable in some way or other, and rebuilds them according to more... rational patterns.