Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [45]
They had a mission. And all of Woodwicke knew it.
Find the Negress. Find the witch-woman.
There was Hell to pay.
PART TWO
MADNESS, MADNESS,THEY CALL IT
MADNESS
‘ ... but when examining the early history of UNIT we still tend to focus on the "big two" invasion attempts; the now-famous London Underground episode, and the Cyberman landing of the following year. Those of us interested in UNIT’s media liaison may even note the importance of the so-called
"Wakefield Affair", while those who have studied the records a little more closely might know that UNIT had its roots in the Intrusion Counter Measures Group, which – as we shall see in chapter 3 – played a major part in the Shoreditch Incident of 1963... [but] we tend to forget that secret government departments are by no means a new phenomenon, and are not unique to our own age. Espionage agencies and military intelligence groups have thrived in Europe since the Elizabethan period, and if one wishes to understand the true origins of UNIT C19, the ICMG, or even wartime groups like LONGBOW one has to look to the eighteenth century, not the twentieth... ’
– K. S. Lethbridge-Stewart, The Zen Military – A History of
UNIT (2006, unpublished)
‘ I saw the cover of a pornographic magazine, a picture of a half-dressed woman and the caption, "I’M NAKED INSIDE".
And I thought, yes, aren’t we all?’
– Claire Tennant, A Practical Change of Perspectives (1987) 5
Directory Enquiries
The rumours began on Hazelrow Avenue.
They’d been talking about the ‘happenings’ in the church, they’d been talking about the menaces of witchcraft and necromancy and Satanic science (and in this day and age, too, someone had said), they’d been talking about the things that had been seen and the guesses that had been made. Somebody had started explaining the dark rites of the diabolists, describing a series of bizarre blood-rituals that they’d read about in a book somewhere. They drank the blood of babies, these witches, sacrificed infants on unholy altars.
And a passer-by had heard that, heard just a snippet of the conversation. He’d walked all the way up Hazelrow Avenue, telling everybody he met. Dead babies. Drinking blood. By the time the story arrived at the end of the street, most decent, right-minded people thought they understood the situation perfectly.
By half past ten, keys were turning in the locks of children’s rooms, bolts were being drawn across doors, and parents were anxiously standing guard at windows. And so the rumours spread.
The boarding-house was a grubby, tick-infested pit, but the average American brute would doubtless have called it luxurious. Tourette crouched by the side of his malodorous bed, tugging at the floor, ignoring the screeching protests of the ignorantlandladypeasantbitch from downstairs. The loose board by the card table came away easily – Tourette had done this enough times in the last few months – and the metal box slid smoothly out of its hidden nesting-place in the floor. The box opened at his touch, as ever. Diabolically clever technology, worthy of a top-ranking secret agent.
Tourette turned the crank on the device inside, keyed in a coded sequence of letters, then began to tap out his report. The machine turned the words into galvanistic impulses and dispatched them across the Atlantic at unimaginable speeds.
Tourette had no idea how it was done – the device had no wires or cables, and the replies usually arrived within minutes, sometimes seconds – but his superiors at the Directory claimed that the device had been salvaged from one of the
‘visitations’ of the monstrous caillou, which no doubt explained everything.
Not the Directory, he corrected himself. Napoleon was running the show now. The real Directory was gone, and only its Shadow remained. Tourette had heard his superiors mumble that Bonaparte had no idea