• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Of course,’ Erskine heard himself say.

Monroe nodded, his jowls quivering comically. ‘Good, good. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to offer the world. You know.

In the struggle.’

‘Struggle,’ Erskine repeated. ‘By Christ, yes. The struggle.’

‘Good to have you with us,’ Monroe said.

Erskine opened his mouth to say something. He didn’t know what. He just decided to say the first thing that came into his head

He was interrupted by a shout from up the street.

‘The church!’ It was one of the other Renewalists, one of Catcher’s arse-kissers, running from the corner where Eastern Walk met Paris Street. ‘Something’s happening at the church!’

‘The church?’ Monroe frowned, the corners of his mouth disappearing behind large sacks of cheek-flesh. ‘Why should we care about...?’

‘Cacophony! At the church!’

Monroe turned to face Erskine, and said something which –

recalling the incident later – Erskine could never quite remember. But the next thing he knew, he was running towards Paris Street with the rest of them.

The screen was another of the Watchmakers’ great achievements. It was set into one of the walls at eye-level, a grey slab two feet across, and Catcher had found that – if he commanded the sphere in a correct and reasonable fashion –

the screen would become illuminated, displaying images of objects in the near vicinity. Evidently a device of great scientific merit, Catcher had decided, probably something to do with mirrors.

This time, the screen had activated itself. Catcher regarded the new image. A woodland; he instinctively scratched his arm, reminded of the terrible crawling things of the wilderness. The view was vaguely familiar, and he deduced that it was the woodland on the outskirts of Woodwicke, but –

– but there was something there. Catcher squinted, trying to make out its shape. A box. A blue box? It was hard to tell; the box quivered and shifted, rearranging itself illogically, seemingly at whim. Catcher suddenly realized that he’d stopped breathing.

‘Engine of Cacophony,’ he croaked.

He felt his hands touch the dais in front of him, felt the vibration as the sphere began to rotate inside the crystal column. He tried to ignore the fact that his knuckles were sinking into the surface of the hexagon.

‘Who brought it here?’ he demanded. ‘Who is responsible?’

There was a pause, as if the room itself were thinking Then the picture on the screen changed. There was the church, the damnable DAMNABLE IS NOT A RATIONAL WORD

deplorable church on Paris Street. There were two figures there, staring up at the stained-glass window.

‘I know you,’ hissed Catcher. ‘I know who you are.’

From somewhere deep within the labyrinth, there was an ugly grating sound, machine parts stirring in ancient metal sockets. The Watchmakers were nodding in agreement.

Roz yelped, and instinctively raised her hands to shield her face from the rain of shards. The yelp was surprisingly satisfying, so she did it again. Good. That was much better.

Slowly, she opened her eyes and lowered her arms.

The first thing she saw was the Doctor, still standing in front of the lectern, his back turned to her. The second thing she saw was absolutely everything.

The everything hovered above the lectern, and its heart was where the window had been. Whether the shape had absorbed the glass or the glass had absorbed the shape, she wasn’t entirely sure, but the splinters were floating inside its body, forming glittering pathways that twisted and rearranged themselves as she watched. There was a whole new world trapped inside every little piece of glass, and whenever the pieces locked together to form a ‘circuit’, an entire alien universe was born inside its body, the shape becoming something totally new and unfamiliar, sculpted by different laws of physics. Roz felt she was just looking at a fragment of the thing, if ‘thing’ was a big enough word, one face of something that had a million faces. And was that all the gynoids really were? Walking windows, that you could look through