Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [34]
The wall burst open, vomiting madness into the cellar. He tried not to cry out.
And inside the house, it was even worse. Wall-hangings that made no sense, painted faces leering at him from behind glassy prisons. Porcelain likenesses of dead and irrational gods, sculpted by foreign primitives. He was running into the house, dead grass-stems still clinging to his knees, but the house was just like the jungle, a wilderness of dirt and wood.
Break everything. Tear everything. Leave the clocks and the mirrors – you can see the faces of the Watchmakers in those –
get rid of the rest. There were looks of horror on the faces of his family. Stop it, please, stop it. CLEAN IT UP someone was screeching, CLEAN IT ALL UP Pinning him to the ground –
– but he would not WOULD NOT let the chaos take him, and he was already forcing his will into the corner of the cellar, catching the madness in one hand, holding the spinning sphere in the other, pushing the nightmares back into the darkness.
The walls were made solid again. Matheson Catcher opened his eyes, and all was right with the world.
Chris moved in the general direction of the console room, slowly making his way through whichever corridors looked safest. The aliens were everywhere now, but not once did he get a good look at one; either they lurked in the shadows, stayed on the edges of his vision, or just crouched behind (or inside) parts of the architecture.
He could imagine them pretty well, though. He pictured them lounging around in his quarters, scratching alien graffiti into the walls. Occasionally, a beam of light would glint off a half-seen face or a sinister talon – his imagination should have won awards for lighting effects – maybe falling across a set of razor-like clockwork jaws...
Chris decided that this kind of thinking probably wasn’t getting him very far. Then again, neither was his attempt to reach the console room.
‘Right,’ he hissed, crouching in the corner of a junction that seemed mercifully free of alien interference. ‘Let’s figure this out. Disturbances. Interface said disturbances. What can do strange stuff to the insides of a TARDIS?’
He looked around, but no one was there to give him any hints. ‘Uh. Gravity? The Doctor said extreme gravitational conditions could make bits of the TARDIS break up. Or something. Hang on.’
He tried jumping up and down, but nothing seemed unusual. ‘OK, not that. What else? Er, maybe we’ve skipped a time-track.’
He looked around again. Well, time seemed normal. Could you see a skipped time-track? ‘Maybe not. Come on, come on, think OK. Suppose there was some kind of dimensional glitch.
Suppose the TARDIS doors had opened in mid-flight or something, and the resulting dimensional imbalance –’
He was just getting to grips with this remarkable new theory when something walked along an adjoining corridor and turned down a side-passage. Chris hopped to his feet and flattened himself against a wall, waiting for the thing to pass.
The shape was human. A woman, in her late twenties or early thirties, with a shapeless dress that trailed down to the floor. Dark hair, matted by rainwater and sticking to her shoulders. She was looking around with a dazed expression on her face, and Chris got the feeling that she didn’t know whether to be shocked or impressed.
Then she vanished along the passage. Chris relaxed.
‘This is getting too much,’ he said, and went in pursuit.
The Doctor was sitting on the dust-spattered floor at the far end of the nave, his back to the lectern. Breathing heavily, Roz slumped down onto one of the pews. The church was empty, but the atmosphere still managed to seem tense, somehow.
Perhaps the building’s just excited, she thought. Perhaps