Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [65]
Daniel Tremayne, getting himself mixed up in someone else’s fight. Getting himself involved, in the most violent way imaginable.
Now the crowd was closing in, shouts turning to war cries.
This time, it was Roz who pulled at Daniel’s sleeve, tugging him away down the first side-street she saw.
‘I’m damned,’ she heard him say as they ran. ‘I’ll never get out now. I’m damned.’
7
The Edge of Distraction
A man in a grey mask was standing on the corner of Burr Street, demanding answers from Beth-Ann Wolcott, the councillor’s daughter. The man was determined to find out why she’d never married. There was something deeply suspicious about that, apparently, especially at her age. The door of the Wolcott house was open, and there were other masked men inside, peering under the beds and pulling up the floorboards.
None of the men were members of the Renewal Society.
They were just ‘concerned citizens’. Half an hour earlier, the sackcloth of their masks had been used for storing potatoes.
As the rationalists moved from street to street in search of
‘evidence’, the rumours spread in a manner that was almost viral. More children had been butchered, it was said, though no one seemed to be able to name the children that had died. A shrine to Baalzebub had been located in the ramshackle home of a Spanish family, but nobody was sure how the place had been identified as a shrine to Baalzebub. A woman living in Eastern Walk had been unmasked as an anarchist witch –
again, the method of detection seemed unclear – and was now awaiting trial by the Renewalists.
Twenty-five minutes after the church bell had tolled eleven, a man named Samuel Lincoln took shelter in the doorway of a grocery store in Paris Street and, seeing the smoke rising from the ‘African quarter’ of town, made disparaging comments about the behaviour of his fellow townspeople. A local priest, a wiry and wide-eyed man by the name of Hatchard, took him to task and insisted that ‘the flock of Satan must be purged’.
An argument ensued, with Samuel Lincoln calling the priest a
‘fanatical buffoon’ and the priest calling Samuel Lincoln a
‘mollycoddler of the Beast’. The dispute ended when Hatchard hit his opponent in the face with an empty whiskey bottle.
Within minutes the grocery store was surrounded by other citizens, including masked representatives of the Renewal Society. The dispute escalated.
Evidently, the Age of Reason was in full swing.
The night was full of crawling, blasphemous things. They hid behind the trees and the bushes all along Hazelrow Avenue, watching Catcher walk back towards the house, ticking in the greenery, reminding him of his mistakes. He’d let the man in the irrational white suit trick him. The Watchmakers resented that. If they hadn’t been such Reasonable beings, Catcher would have thought they were jealous.
FOR ARE WE NOT THE WATCHMAKERS? they were saying. ARE WE NOT THE GREAT ARCHITECTS? DID
WE NOT MAP OUT EVERY INCH OF THE COSMOS,
AEONS BEFORE MAN EVEN CHARTERED HIS OWN
DOMAIN? TO US, ALL OF SPACE – ALL OF TIME – IS
NOTHING MORE THAN A CLOCKWORK, AND WE ARE
THE ONES THAT HOLD THE WATCH-HANDLE.
REMEMBER WHAT WE TAUGHT YOU, BOY.
Yes. Catcher remembered tearing through the halls of the family home, being pinned to the floor by his parents, being carried away on the back of a cart. His family had paid the surgeons to lock him in a little grey room, where they’d watched him and fed him and scrubbed him and stuck instruments into him. It had been meant as a punishment, he’d been sure, but it had felt more like a BE VERY CAREFUL
AS ‘REVELATION’ IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC TERM more like something he couldn’t really name.
Because the little grey room had been perfect in every way.
Eight corners, four walls, straight lines, hardly any furnishings. The room only changed its nature when the sun rose or fell, but even the shadows had a mechanical precision to them. Catcher remembered staring at a blank grey ceiling, hour after hour and day