Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [39]
There was an embarrassingly long pause.
‘Erm, excuse me?’ murmured Isaac Penley.
All eyes turned on him Everyone had forgotten that he was there.
‘I have sort of heard of this kind of thing before,’ he said, blushing visibly. ‘I don’t think it’s, um, supernatural.’
‘I could’ve told you that,’ growled Mr Wolcott.
‘Yes. Yes. But what I thought was, well... there are quite a few good, solid minds in the neighbourhood. You know.
Scientists. Rationalists ‘
‘You mean the Renewal Society?’ asked Mrs Wilson. Isaac jumped at the mention of the name.
‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘I think they may have some experience with this sort of thing I’ve heard some of them sort of, erm, talking about it. The last few weeks. I thought perhaps... you know. Perhaps we could ask them what sort of steps we should be taking.’
And, with a sense of timing that even the greatest gods of the theatre couldn’t have matched, the grand double-doors of the hall were pushed open, accompanied by a pained and protracted grinding sound. All heads turned towards the outstandingly ordinary figure that stood in the doorway.
‘Good evening,’ said Matheson Catcher.
‘– stand away from it. Stand away from it –’
The church was ablaze, and even the rain wasn’t enough to put out the fire. Tourette wormed his way through the crowd that had gathered on Paris Street. They were like spectators at a carriage accident, he thought. Some kind of monster, the rumours said. Tourette hadn’t seen it himself, but the words
‘demon’, ‘glass’, and ‘electrical’ had all been used.
‘– is it dead? Someone said it was dying –’
From what Tourette could gather, the crowd was split into two factions. Some – notably the older witnesses – were claiming that the creature was a familiar of Satan, come to pass judgment on the sinners of Woodwicke. Others were more rational, and insisted that the beast was some form of scientific phenomenon run wild (the words ‘ball lightning’ had been muttered). Oddly enough, though, both camps seemed to have the same qualities of fear and suspicion in their voices, and when some of the more zealous traditionalists had elected to ‘sterilize’ the building with a flaming torch or two, not even the hardiest of rationalists had stopped them.
Well, what could you expect from peasants?
‘– there’s someone still in there, I’m sure I saw him –’
Then the shout went up from the front of the crowd. The monster had gone, they said, either driven back by the purifying flames or dissipated by heat-energy, depending on which faction you followed. Tourette nodded, made another mental note.
‘-– you can’t kill it! Of course you can’t kill it!’
Just as he was about to turn away, a man emerged from the archway, his peculiar cream suit blackened by soot, his face wrinkled and soured by the smoke. Tourette saw two of the larger locals grab the poor soul and drag him away from the building, a third man brutally clubbing him senseless with some kind of blunt instrument. Probably just an innocent bystander, Tourette thought, who knew nothing about the thing in the church. The man was obviously well-bred; peasants usually turned on their betters when they were confused and frightened.
Tourette decided to return to his boarding house and make his report to the Shadow Directory at once. He’d show that Duquesne bitch. Oh yes. Where was she now, eh? Where was she now things were starting to happen?
They’d taken shelter in a great wooden-panelled and dome-shaped hall, which Mr Christopher Cwej had referred to as
‘the planetarium’. The darkness was somewhere outside, Duquesne was sure of it, but everything seemed quiet enough in here. They sat in the shadow of an enormous brass mechanism, an intricate clockwork engine around which large representations of planets and moons revolved on thick stems of copper. It was like the solar system in miniature, thought Duquesne, though there were fourteen planets instead